Covering State Level Legislation and Regulations Impacting Patient Services, Access, and Affordability

When it comes to budgets that cover state level legislation and regulations impacting patient services, access, and affordability—only 31% of respondents said they HAVE a specific budget for this. Interestingly enough, of the about 70% of those who said no, over 90% of those feel there would be value in gaining those insights. What’s stopping companies from investing in this area?
Jon Rawlson: I don't think that there is anything stopping them at this point. I think in some ways it was a ‘we don't know what we don't know’ kind of a situation where we're tracking some things, but we're not tracking other issues related to patient affordability and these factors that we wanted to spotlight. And you find that there isn't a lot of there not a lot of organizations that are actually tracking data like this at a state level. And then they're not looking at it in terms of the parameters that we were looking at it. And so, it was interesting to get feedback to try and determine okay, we think this is an issue. We want to know, does everybody else agree with us? And certainly, we think that, and we hope that yes, since we had such a resounding number percentage that said, Yeah, we agree with you. Yeah, I want to see, okay. Will they be adding these companies be adding to their budgets to look for this information? And who's going to be the best entity to provide them that data?

Jon Hamrick: Yeah, it's interesting, because, you know, when we asked, in general, the organization's if there, they adequately monitor or keep abreast of policy and regulatory parameters that affect patient access and affordability at the state level, it was like 20%, strongly agreed and almost 60% Agreed. So somewhere around, you know, just about 78 79% of the folks strongly agreed or agreed that they keep a good eye on these issues. But then when we dug deeper, we found that there was actually a lack of consensus at all on how adequately they are monitoring this specific, as I say, patient access, and affordability and coverage issues. And then we also found that there was a lot of assumptions and finger pointing around. We said, Who what departments actually responsible for monitoring this? It was a mixed bag of 41 or 2% of the respondents said it's patient access or market access that's responsible for this versus government affairs or legal. But then when you ask, for example, the patient access and market access people, they said, oh, well, the government affairs illegal people are doing. So, it was sort of like there's a little bit of who's on first that we were getting about who's really responsible. And then when you really dug in and identify that only about 30% of the organizations responding said that they have specific budget for monitoring this, and that of the 70% that don't have a budget 90% of them said Yeah, we really think this would be important. So, there's really an opportunity there for sure. At We also found that the approach that these organizations are taking today is through this myriad of sources that they're going out and trying to keep pace with what's going on across, certainly the major 25 or 30 most populated states. But it's everybody's got a different approach to how they're trying to keep up to speed on this. And that was one of the key items that we really found is that there's really no clear aggregating entity or service or offering that people are uniquely and consistently going to, to just stay on top of this. It's somebody with an organization has been tasked with, with the responsibility of trying to keep pace with this. And it's really a serendipitous process right now it feels like yeah,

Jon Rawlson: So, there's there are organizations in and around Washington and other state capitals, which are designed to help companies track legislation and regulation as it's developed and proposed in all the different states and NMDC. But nothing is built with the parameters around the patient access patient affordability issues. So, when we were talking to the state government affairs folks and other folks in the legal industry, you know, we have found this wide agreement. Yep. We agree with you these issues are important. It's just how are we best going to track it? How we best are going to keep our finger on it. And so, it was just an interesting process. It seemed like as we were sifting through the findings, and all became curiouser and curiouser.