Lipitor Patient Retention Plan

 As of this morning, there are three sources of atorvastatin approved for the US market - Pfizer's brand name drug Lipitor and generics from Watson Pharmaceuticals and Ranbaxy Laboratories. Pfizer has a strategy for maintaining its market share for the next six months that includes a patient co-payment card. See my earlier post on the rising popularity of this strategy, The Life Cycle of a Drug: Patient Retention. The card Pfizer is offering can be ordered at LipitorForYou.com, and allows its customers to pay only $4 of any co-payment up to a maximum of $50. Here is the link to Pfizer's FAQ for the co-payment card, including details of the terms and conditions of their offer. Pfizer's overall goal is to sell Lipitor at or below generic prices until May 2012.

Pfizer is also using a new strategy involving contracts with UnitedHealthcare, Coventry Health Care, Express Scripts, Medco Health Solutions, CVS/Caremark and Catalyst Rx, which substitute Pfizer's brand name Lipitor for generic atorvastatin. It is clear that these contracts contain discounts that allow the profitable sale of Lipitor at reduced prices. The other terms of the contracts are unavailable to the public. Since it is unclear whether private and public insurers will be charged the discounted price or some other, higher price, the Federal Trade Commission has begun an investigation and Senator Herb Kohl, Chair of the US Senate Special Committee on Aging, has requested information on the contracts in letters cosigned by Senators Max Baucus and Charles Grassley.

The Life Cycle of a Drug: Patient Retention

Returning to a series I started earlier this year, I refer you to Patient Retention Plan in the bar graph found in the first post of the series. For a brand name drug, an increasingly popular patient retention plan consists of financial assistance, communications, and data analysis. Prescription abandonment becomes evident at a co-payment of about $30, and a $50+ co-pay roughly doubles the rate. This means that the pharmaceutical company is not receiving money from either patients or their insurers. A Cutting Edge Information report from 2006 estimated these losses at $30 billion for the industry and $8 billion for pharmacies. Industry financial assistance via co-pay card programs has since been the fastest-growing method to combat these losses, from 31% in 2008 to 54% in 2009, as per this Cegedim white paper. (See all of Figure 8, PDF p. 10, for other methods.)

Brand loyalty is very important to a company when alternative brand name drugs or generic drugs are available at a lower cost, so once a patient is enrolled the pharmaceutical company makes the most of their opportunity to build loyalty to their brand by direct, two-way communication. Patients are encouraged to report side effects and ask questions and will also be the recipients of information and refill reminders. All this information becomes part of a pharmaceutical company's database, which is used to calculate how many dollars the company receives for every dollar spent on the program.

The Life Cycle of a Drug: Pediatric Exclusivity

The Life Cycle of a Drug: Pediatric Exclusivity - Update

The Life Cycle of a Drug: New Indication

The Life Cycle of a Drug: New Formulation

Prescription Abandonment by People with Private Health Insurance