Lilly Launches LillyDirect, Delivering Both Telehealth and Pharmacy Solutions for Zepbound

First off, there aren’t capital letters big enough to express the CONGRATS I’d like to pass along to Adam Fein, whose Drug Channels Institute has been acquired by HMP Global. That means that Adam’s take on the health care industry is going to get a much larger platform, and I — for one — am here for it.

Lilly launched this morning LillyDirect, a program that will link Zepbound patients to health care providers (on the front end) and handle the distribution of the medicine through online pharmacies (on the back end). NBC had the exclusive. 

I’m most interested in how the new program will help ensure that patients can maximize the coupons and other assistance available. This is going to be a germinal moment in building some alternative drug supply chains.

I wrote a yesterday about the 2023 Launch Price Communication Report, which will focus on company actions — and media reaction — around launch prices last year. It’s all pulled from a Reid Strategic database that track key elements of every launch-price announcement from the past 24 months. 

While I don’t want to scoop the results for the 2023 report, I’ve pulled together some information, as a teaser, on the 2022 dataset. 

One of the biggest questions that overhangs a lot of communications decisions is “who is going to cover price?” And here, we have some data. Reid Strategic looked at 37 different 2022 approvals to see how a group of 14 different media outlets — from national newspapers to key trades — covered price. 

And there were clear trends there. Pricing discussion were most likely to be seen in industry trades — Formulary Watch and Biopharma Dive led the way in 2022 — with less impact from clinical trades and national consumer outlets. Here’s how it looked. 

As with so much in life, there are confounders. It turns out that big national outlets don’t cover that many approvals in any way, so it’s not fair to say that those publications don’t “care” about price. Indeed, the New York Times only covered three approvals in our sample … and they talked about price in two of them. On the flip side, MedPage ran approval stories on 27 different meds and talked about price only once. (Weirdly, there was no overlap between the one MedPage story mentioning price and the two NYT pieces.)

And trends aren’t consistent over time. Formulary Watch covered price for four of the first 24 approvals in 2022 … and nine of the final 13 approvals tracked. So each outlet’s preferences can be a moving target. 

The 2023 analysis should prove to be even richer, giving an even more precise sense of who is paying attention to pricing disclosure — and why they’re interested. 

I’ll make information about discounted pre-orders for LPC and an overview webinar available later in January. 

If you’d like more information about communicating around value and pricing ahead of launch, please drop me a line.

I think LillyDirect is a big deal, but — on any other day — I would have written up CVS’ decision to prefer Humira biosimilars over the brand-name version. That’s a key in continuing to drive down prices in the market, and it explains why there’s been broad coverage of the announcement (Reuters, Bloomberg, etc.)

But buried in the CVS release is a potentially bigger deal: the company is going to sell, under its Cordavis unit, a co-branded version of Humira. Details there are very sketchy, though Bloomberg said that the Cordavis Humira won’t be preferred over biosimilars. There’s already speculation of what this means — is it a play to work around rebate controversies? — and my guess is this is something that will be well worth watching. 

Elsewhere: 

If you’re interested in Jan. 1 price changes, you owe it to yourself to spend a few moments today with 46Brooklyn’s boxscore, which puts meat on the bones of all of the coverage over the past couple of weeks. Antonio has the good when it comes to which drugs took which increases. But play very close attention to Stat Box #4, which shows that — when adjusting for use — drug prices have fallen overall, largely as a result of the insulin and inhaler price cuts. 

There’s going to a lot of JPM talk here over the next week, and here are STAT’s “burning questions” around the meeting. Other than a mention of FTC attention, STAT didn’t flag muck in the way of policy issues at the meeting, but that’s what I’ll be listening for, because even if there is silence on some of those items (IRA, in particular), that will be telling in its own way.