IMAP Lunch Seminar Pharmaceutical Industry Reporting on Access

The pharmaceutical industry plays an important role in the global effort to achieve universal health coverage (UHC). Accessing essential medicines and related health products remains a challenge in many parts of the world. Companies have made substantial investments over the last decade in access partnerships in low- and middle-income countries. Furthermore, companies are increasingly integrating access strategies into their core business and developing sustainable models to do so.

Access efforts by companies draw interest from a diverse set of stakeholders, each with their own perspective on the purpose of those efforts and how success should be defined. Two sets of stakeholders are particularly influential: global institutions representing the public interest, including country governments and multilaterals such as the World Health Organization; and investors, who are increasingly engaging with the industry on access issues through an ESG lens. Companies are currently being presented with an uncoordinated set of requests from stakeholders for information and data related to access activities and performance, often with ambiguous expectations around what good performance looks like. This has served as a barrier to effective action and has held back progress in achieving UHC.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, together with industry partners, recently established a deliberative process involving open dialogue among key stakeholders to strengthen and harmonize industry reporting on access. A team from Boston University is supporting this work and will directly engage stakeholders in the process and organize a set of workshops, the first of which will be held in Spring 2024. The overall goal of this effort is to align on a small set of simple, pragmatic metrics and clearer expectations.

Join us as Peter Rockers, BU Associate Professor of Global Health, presents on this work.