Applying AI to Pricing and Market Access

Pharm Exec talks to Rasim Shah, director at OKRA Technologies, about how the application of AI to Pricing and Reimbursement work can dramatically free up time spent on crunching datasets, modeling scenarios, and building price predictions, and allow more energy to be directed into submission and creation of agreements.

PharmExec: Broadly, what can AI offer to those working in pharma pricing and market access?

Rasim Shah: AI provides an outlook into the future. This technology helps market access and pricing professionals assess the performance of any new molecule years in advance, having a better understanding of each driving factor thatinfluences the final outcome. Additionally, it provides an opportunity to proactively build a strong data-driven case, going into negotiations having all the facts and potential outcomes of different scenarios at hand.

How does OKRA’s ValueScope solution differ from other AI pricing platforms?

Rasim Shah

Our solution has a proven and validated accuracy that no other solution is able to offer. ValueScope is powered bythe OKRA Explainability Engine: this means that every AI-driven prediction is supported with a suite of reasons, empowering market access/pricing professionals to build and assess custom profiles. It is regularly tested for robustness and reliability, and in accordance to our “glass box” promise, we provide full transparency in the data used to make each prediction.

ValueScope is co-developed with market access/pricing professionals from the industry, the result of close collaboration between data scientists, engineers and domain-experts. It is designed to give life sciences professionals control, confidence and reassurance in order to generate a competitive advantage.

What kind of client feedback have you had re: the product so far?

Our users see huge value and potential to have huge amounts of information at their fingertips. We have proven that ValueScope can perform well on drug profiles that are custom-built, emphasizing the value it can bring into the drug development pipeline. We have received many requests for enhancements to the features we currently offer, which is encouraging and are expanding our coverage to more EU countries as well as the US.

How much do you see the industry currently leaning to AI for pricing/market access solutions?

We currently live in a digital world, and therefore it is more critical than ever to leverage AI to inform the future and to empower our decision making process. At the moment, pharma is looking into leveraging AI across commercial, drug discovery, medical, market access, and pharmacovigilance functions. We believe that to bring the right drug to the right patient at speed, we need to improve our current decision-making approach and focus on the outcomes that truly matter. It’s a significant investment and a minimum of 10 years of drug development and clinical trials to bring a new drug to the market. Experts need to be informed about the outcomes ahead of time, and have an opportunity to optimize this costly, time-consuming process.