Paying for Cures

MedImpact sponsors MIT initiative to help make high-cost curative therapies more accessible

MedImpact will collaborate with healthcare leaders and policy makers across the nation to help address the challenges of making cures accessible to patients and sustainable by the healthcare system at Paying for Cures: Ensuring Patient Access and System Sustainability on Feb. 12 in Washington, D.C.

The conference showcases the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Financing and Reimbursement of Cures in the U.S (FoCUS) project, which advances research and recommendations compiled over nearly three years in the NEWDIGS Consortium at MIT.

Groundbreaking Cures, Blockbuster Costs
The sequencing of the human genome and the technological advancing of genetic sequencing has revolutionized disease research and drug development. The knowledge gained from the development of genetically based therapies fuels solutions for other diseases with genetic components. The result: A robust pipeline of rare genetic disease therapies that can stop disease progression — and even cure — disease.

Based upon current drug development activity in the FDA pipeline, 40 genetically based therapies are expected to launch by 2022¹. However, the cost of access to these therapies will be high due to the small number of patients per condition. While occurrence of any one treatment may be infrequent, the overall impact to healthcare costs is anticipated to be between 1%-5% of total healthcare costs².

Solutions to the challenges surrounding high-cost curative therapies require innovative financing mechanisms, performance-based contracting, regulatory and policy changes and potentially payer-to-payer coordination. Answers to sustainable financing of access to care require all stakeholders to work together.

To help make paying for high-cost curative therapies more sustainable for plan sponsors, MedImpact is focusing on the differences between payer segments of Medicaid, Medicare, employers and commercial health plan coverage, as well as issues like member coverage migration while under a performance contract.

By collaborating with MIT’s FoCUS project, MedImpact helps vet real-world considerations against financing models, such as annuities, performance-based contracts and risk pools, to help improve member access to groundbreaking curative therapies.

Go to  Paying for Cures to learn more.

^1. MIT NEWDIGS Research Brief 2017F211.v011
^2. http://www.pharmexec.com/improving-management-gene-and-cell-therapies