Improving Drug Development and Patient Access With the Right People, Processes, and Culture: What Needs to Happen Right Now to Bring Better Medicines to the Patients Who Need Them

Abstract

In a global environment where health care costs are soaring, R&D efforts are flatlining. Meanwhile, payers are demanding more value for their money. In this environment, the traditional siloed drug development model is not sustainable. Yet innovations such as adaptive trial designs, real-world data collection, precision medicine, and patient-centric trials that have been proven to streamline clinical trials, enrich the data they produce, and facilitate reimbursement have not been widely adopted. Why? Because the medicines ecosystem currently lacks 3 key prerequisites for innovative and sustainable change: (1) a highly trained workforce that can handle and interpret high volumes of fragmented data; (2) a dependable process for judging what constitutes value in medical innovation; and (3) corporate cultures that learn fast from failure and mine the competitive riches offered by a diverse workforce. Cultivating the right people, processes, and culture will require a concerted effort by industry, academia, governments, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to devise efficient, effective solutions.