Access to Healthcare Strategy: Sustainable Access Models

Creating medicines for those who need them is why Boehringer Ingelheim exists. However, many people in developing countries still lack universal health coverage and, for poorer patients forced to pay for medicines out of pocket, illness can mean destitution. Some governments are meanwhile better equipped to pay than others, and in countries where infrastructure is weak, regulatory and supply chain hurdles and mark ups can inflate the usual prices of medicines.

Through our Access to Healthcare Strategy, we want to make health solutions available by developing innovative and differentiated philanthropic and commercial strategies to ensure their affordability, principally:

• Inter and Intra-Country Tiered Pricing: Wealth inequality means that different countries and different income groups within those countries vary in their ability to pay for drugs. Inter- and intra-country tiered pricing strategies, based on established means-based criteria, help to redress these disparities.  
• Patient Assistance Programs: Novel partnerships between governments, NGOs and the private sector can provide low-income, uninsured patients with discounted or free innovative medicines. Such patient assistance programs have a particular relevance in emerging markets. 
• Microfinancing: In some of the very poorest communities worldwide, microfinancing initiatives provide financial services to people who would otherwise have no access to traditional banking services. They can be used to help patients in such communities save and spend on medical services. 

Some examples of what we are currently doing:

• OASIS and WYAK pilots: Patient assistance programs delivered in partnership with Axios International, a global healthcare research firm to increase affordability of medicines for patients in Asia and North Africa.
• Akiba Ya Roho: A non-communicable diseases management program that provides a mobile savings scheme to low-income communities across Kenya in collaboration with Making More Health/Ashoka partnership.