How Paysign Assists Manufacturers Making the Connection from Copay Program Investment to Downstream Adherence

Matt Turner, President of Patient Affordability, Paysign discusses the evolving financial threats to pharmaceutical manufacturers, such as accumulators, maximizers, and alternative funding programs. In a conversation with Pharmaceutical Executive, Turner emphasized the importance of next-generation copay assistance programs, which involve strategic partnerships across various ecosystem components.

A transcript of Turner’s conversation with Pharmaceutical Executive can be found below.

Pharmaceutical Executive: How is Paysign helping manufacturers make the connection from copay program investment to downstream adherence and outcomes more explicit?

Matthew Turner: So I think there's two large buckets to look at that. The first is retail. In a retail setting, it's not uncommon to get eight, ten, or tweleve redemptions on a copay card so the adherence view is really great. Those drugs have a lower cost, the offer values tend to be lower, so you're able to see a patient throughout the entire year within a copay card without them hitting their out of pocket max or deductible. The other things that would push people into kind of, what we jokingly call a copay black hole.

On the specialty side, it's a little different. You've got a $10,000 drug. We may see a patient for two or three redemptions during the course of that year. So we'll look at that adherence right there and adherence is one part of the challenge.

The next piece we look at, we call persistency, and that's if we have a patient come in in June, July and August and use copay then we don't see them again. To a brand, and initially in the adherence models, it may look like that patient fell off of therapy. So we're looking to see, did that patient come back to the program in January and begin, you know, and start using the copay card again.

So we look at adherence as kind of a shorter timeframe when using copay data and persistency is the year to year pullover of a patient, you know, coming through the half year and then into the next year. I think the data shows especially we're very heavy in the oncology space. We see tremendous persistency in our oncology products that we work with, and so I think that's really what we're looking at.

I think our clients and their patients see the benefit of this long term, because we don't see them abandoning therapy. We continue to see persistency year over year, even with the utilization of maximizer or accumulator tools that are out there, we're continuing to see the consistency and adherence that we were with, before those tools.