How Policy Pressures Are Driving DTP Adoption

At this year’s Access USA conference, Pharmaceutical Commerce sat down with Brok Vandersteen, VP of Business Development at AssistRX, to discuss the forces shaping direct-to-patient (DTP) model adoption in the life sciences space. Vandersteen shared his perspective on how policy pressures, pricing scrutiny, and transparency mandates are reshaping commercialization strategies, alongside the growing emphasis on patient access, affordability, and streamlined delivery models. As the industry evolves toward more patient-centric approaches, he also explored the operational challenges across providers and pharmacies—and how manufacturers can better navigate these dynamics to ensure patients get the therapies they need.

A transcript of his conversation with PC can be found below.

PC: Executive-level policy pressures — things like drug pricing scrutiny and transparency mandates — are market forces driving DTP adoption. How are those pressures actually reshaping conversations you're having with life sciences clients right now?

Vandersteen: I mean, every client is feeling it in every capacity, right? So they're really considering those factors into their decisions. When you think about, Medicare price negotiations, when you think about Most Favored Nation, when you think about, a lot of the push around price transparency, there's so much scrutiny being put into those decisions currently. A lot of it is around price transparency and enabling a patient to really choose the best, best path to affordability. We think about, you know, enabling a patient to determine their route to treatment, whether it's through cash pay, whether it's through free drug, whether it's through commercial. I think a big push around this is removing those intermediaries, and whether you're a large pharmaceutical company or a small one, they're all feeling it in different ways. We see a lot of restructuring taking place as a result of these factors, and so it's all about efficiency and getting the patient to product the most affordable way possible, and it's quite a discussion taking place at the moment.