Improving access to medicine, on the golf course!

August 2015—Some 145 pharmacy stakeholders gathered in Milton, ON, this past June for the Canadian Foundation for Pharmacy’s 20^th annual Charity Golf Classic.

In addition to practising their golf swing, attendees heard from Neil Corner, GM Health Access and Outcomes at IMS Brogan, on how pharmaceutical companies could be improving patients’ access to medicine in Canada using “real-world” evidence.

According to a recent report conducted by IMS Brogan for Rx&D, access to medicine in Canada compared to other countries is “seriously lagging” in terms of public drug plan reimbursement. However, Corner noted that several organizations in Europe openly encourage the gathering of evidence on the utilization and outcomes of medications in the real world to support insights traditionally delivered through clinical trials—and that this idea is gaining traction in Canada as well.

“IMS Brogan supports the evidence generation for many pharmaceutical companies in Canada for these purposes, with a focus on generating burden of illness insights, listing status improvement, productivity analyses and patient sub-group analyses to name a few,” said Corner, adding that his company has recently launched the Health Access and Outcomes team to support these initiatives.

Corner says the difference today is the availability of such evidence to demonstrate to payers that innovative medicines can reduce costs in other areas, such as hospitalizations and re-admissions. “The availability of home-grown Canadian real world evidence is already delivering a competitive edge through robust evidence in this challenging environment,” he says.