Interesting Data Points From Specialty Pharmaceuticals Report

One my flights over the holiday, I had a chance to read the 2010 Specialty Pharmaceuticals Facts, Figures and Trends. This is a publication put out by the Center For Healthcare Supply Chain Research. The data represents survey data from manufacturers and distributors from surveys sent out in March 2010. I pulled a handful of things that caught my eye into this post, but there is a lot more in the report that manufacturers and distributors would be interested in.

Overall Market:

• Global market for specialty pharmaceuticals is $144B (7.5% growth).
• US specialty pharmaceuticals market is $64B (4.9% growth).

Survey Data:

• Anticipated 2010 growth rate is 8.4%.
• Half of distributors specialize in specific disease states.
• All distributors claim to specialize in oncology and 2/3rds in RA. The next big focus areas are Autoimmune (including HIV/AIDS) / Immune, CNS (including MS), and Hematology.
• The biotech drugs in development by disease area (from PhRMA 2008 Report):
  • Cancer                     254
  • Infectious Disease            162
  • Respiratory                27
  • Cardiovascular                25
  • Blood Disorders            20
  • Diabetes and metabolic        19
• Nearly 60% of distributor’s product sales are distributed to independent clinics owned or operated by physicians. Only just over 20% are distributed to specialty pharmacies. (This was a shocker to me.)
  
• From a storage perspective (based on SKUs not volume):
  • 41% require refrigeration
  • 2% require a freezer
  • 6% have to be stored in a cage
  • 4% have to be stored in a vault
• From the distributors:
  • Avg # of orders per day = 2,153
  • Avg dollar amount per order = $10,503
• ¾ of distributors with revenue streams below $1B use refrigerated boxes while none of those with revenues > $1B do…but all of them regularly use ice packs and insulated boxes.
  • A temperature monitor is used on 47% of the shipments
  • A humidity monitor is used on 17% of shipments
• Manufacturers buy insurance always in 38% of the responses and 13% of the distributor responses. 50% of the time, in both cases, insurance is never bought.
• One question which I found very interesting was what services they provide (by % of manufacturers):
  • 38% offer disease management programs
  • 75% offer drug and disease education programs
  • 25% offer compliance management programs
  • 75% offer patient assistance / copay subsidy programs
  • 25% offer an Internet community
• Now, from a distributor perspective, what services they offer:
  • 75% offer call centers (I thought this would be 100%)
  • 14% offer disease management
  • 50% offer loyalty / incentive programs (this seems high to me)
  • 38% offer MTM
  • 38% offer refill reminders (why wouldn’t this be 100%)
• Distributors reported an average of 1.4% of specialty units returned.
• Manufacturers reported an average of 1.6% of specialty unites returned.
  • 73% outdated
  • 22% short dated
  • 4% damaged
• 38% of distributors collect HIPAA information and share it in a de-identified and aggregated manner with manufacturers (with 60% of that information being at the dispensing location level).
  • Adherence
  • Disease
  • Filling location
  • Dosing
  • Physician information
  • Treatment plan
  • Treatment facility
• Oncology makes up 60% of the sales volume for the distributors.
  • 1.5M new cancer diagnoses will be made in 2010 (American Cancer Society)
  • New cancer incidence rates are higher in men than women
  • 1/3^rd of women and ½ of men will be diagnosed with cancer (National Cancer Institute)
  • Nearly 8% of cancer survivors admit to putting off medical care and 11% skip taking their medications due to cost
• One very interesting insight was that some physicians prescribe an IV-administered agent rather than an oral medication to allow the patient to be monitored. (I wonder what the cost / value tradeoff is here.)