Healthcare industry executives around the world understand the need to collaborate but lack of trust among the sectors and unaligned incentives for stakeholders create hurdles.
Over the next three to five years, organizations that aggressively adapt their processes to participate in an integrated healthcare model will be better positioned in the marketplace, but efforts for better alignment between payers, providers and the biopharmaceuticals sector have been cursory to date, said a report released last week by Quintiles, a provider of biopharmaceutical development and commercial outsourcing services.
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“The Collaboration Mandate,” the first in a series of three reports gauging the impact of changes occurring in the drug development landscape, is based on a survey conducted in May of 300 providers, payers and biopharmaceutical executives in the United States, Italy, France, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom.
According to the survey findings, only 16 to 19 percent of responding U.S. and European Union payers, providers and biopharma executives said they were “mostly aligned” with other stakeholders, while one-fourth said they were “not very” or “not at all” aligned.
Financial incentives that are not in line across sectors or are lacking was cited by 44 percent of EU payers and 40 percent of providers as a barrier, while 35 percent of EU payers and 28 percent of U.S. payers pointed to a lack of trust among healthcare sectors.
More than 70 percent of those surveyed believed that transparency around data sources and information sharing across healthcare stakeholder groups is “very important” or “critically important” to the success of an interoperable healthcare system, but they willingness to be transparent varies greatly, with 54 percent of U.S. payers and 51 percent of U.S. providers saying they were willing to be transparent to 37 percent of biopharmaceuticals and 18 percent of European Union payers being willing.
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Providers, payers and biopharma agreed that improved health outcomes were among the greatest benefits of cross-industry initiatives. Providers and biopharma also saw collaboration as an opportunity to increase innovation. Beyond that, their reasons for collaboration take separate paths. Payers view collaboration as a method to reduce costs of care; providers see improved care experience; and biopharma on getting more drugs to market faster and to underserved disease states, the report noted.
Among the recommendations that the report outlined for improving collaboration are:
• Identify integrated partnerships to drive innovation. Leaders must seek out opportunities to partner with diverse stakeholders from across healthcare. Ideally, these opportunities will stretch comfort zones beyond the traditional regulatory-mandated partnerships.
• Build the roadmap together. Healthcare stakeholders must work together to align goals to replace competing incentives with process efficiencies.
• Ask for and use feedback. Leaders must communicate results and feedback regularly across collaborative partners to foster a commitment to continuous learning and ongoing design improvements and to build trust.
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