ICYMI: Highlights From Asembia 2024

The 2024 Asembia Specialty Pharmacy Summit (AXS24) took place in Las Vegas, Nevada, from April 28 to May 2, with presentations that focused on reshaping specialty pharmacy while keeping patients front and center. Innovations in care, revolutionizing value-based care in this space, and drug prices were top of mind, as the industry works to build on experience, learns from its mistakes, and looks to the future by addressing critical issues to optimize patient care.

This is our top AXS24 coverage, and you can also catch up on all of our conference coverage on our dedicated Asembia page.

5. Forging a Patient-Centric Path to Revolutionize and Redefine Value-Based Care

A partnership between Optum Life Sciences and Takeda Pharmaceuticals was at the center of the discussion titled “Challenging the Quo: The Road to Value-Based Healthcare,” which examined best practices to transform data utilization to improve the patient journey for those who have inflammatory bowel diseases. Experts from Optum and Takeda came together to address how to advance high-quality care and reduce care costs by raising the bar for data utilization, real-world evidence generation, communication, and clinical decision-making to elevate value-based care. Collaboration is proactive, they emphasized, and can help to maximize the potential of value-based health care.

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4. AXS24 Highlights: Key Insights Reshaping Specialty Pharmacy

Drug costs, the specialty drug pipeline, collaboration, health care policy, teamwork, glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1) medications, women’s health, biosimilars, and pulmonary arterial hypertension were just a few of the hot topics covered by reporters across the brands of MJH Life Sciences^®. Tied into these topics is the reality that the specialty drug space is continuously evolving and there are obstacles to care that must be overcome, including high drug prices, disparities in care access, biosimilar adoption hesitancy, and pharmacy benefit manager opacity. This collection of expert interviews and insightful coverage represents a wide breadth of knowledge and experience from the pharmacy, managed care, and health technology stakeholders who descended on Las Vegas.

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Image credit: © Asembia Specialty Pharmacy Summit

3. Bringing Connectivity to the Specialty Pharmacy Workflow

Having a positive impact on patient safety, driving more informed decision-making, and increasing speed to therapy were the goals of the partnership between CVS Health and Surescripts at the center of the discussion titled “How e-Prescribing, ePA, and EHR Connectivity Improves Specialty Pharmacy Workflow.” They explained how the prescribing workflow has a downstream effect on specialty pharmacy—and starts at the provider’s office before a prescription even arrives at a specialty pharmacy—because so many steps are involved, including verifying patient eligibility, performing a medication history review, and checking for prior authorization (PA) requirements. It’s crucial to speed up the electronic PA process, concurred the experts from CVS and Surescripts, because patients often need to get on therapy as quickly as possible.

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2. OptumRx’s Jon Mahrt Discusses “Irresponsible” Drug Pricing for Products With Multiple Indications

In this interview, Jon Mahrt, MBA, then the chief operating officer of Optum Rx and president of Optum Rx's pharmacy benefit manager, speaks to the importance of understanding how the high cost of novel therapies add to patients’ treatment-related financial burdens. In this clip he also touches on the Inflation Reduction Act and the different price points that accompany different indications for the same medication, such as the GLP-1s originally approved to treat diabetes that are now also used for weight loss.

“In theory, volume should translate [to lower costs],” Mahrt explained. “If this were purely about manufacturing cost, volume should translate to lower cost. But it's not. There's irresponsible or irrational pricing behavior.”

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1. Diving Deep Into Specialty Pharmacy: Insights and Forecasts From IQVIA’s Doug Long

Doug Long, MBA, who is vice president of industry relations at IQVIA, touched on a wide range of topics in this annual AXS24 presentation, ultimately delivering a comprehensive overview of industry trends and their impact on the current specialty pharmaceutical industry. Insights on GLP-1s, biosimilars, generic medications, drug shortages—just 26 in 2017 vs 538 at year-end 2023—and product launches were just a few of the stakeholder investment–related interests he addressed. He also highlighted the top 5 growth areas over the past 5 years: oncology, gastrointestinal, neurology, infectious disease, and immunology/allergy.

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