Pfizer and Humana have entered into a five-year partnership to use the insurer's medical claims database to study ways to improve the quality, outcomes and costs of health care for senior citizens, but the results also could help Pfizer make future drug development decisions.

Announced Oct. 13, the collaboration will focus initially on the pain management, cardiovascular disease and Alzheimer's disease in seniors. The companies are bringing together researchers and health care decision makers from both sides to identify a research agenda and will use data available through Humana's research affiliate, Competitive Health Analytics. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Over the course of the partnership, the research focus will expand into other conditions and populations, Pfizer Senior Director of U.S. Health Economics and Outcomes Research Jim Harnett said.

Research Agenda Will Give Actionable Results

In an interview, Harnett and Humana Pharmacy Solutions VP William Fleming noted that the companies have worked together for several years on researching questions about unmet needs for different populations and disease states, with much of the activity focused on releasing results in publications.

What is important about the new partnership, Harnett explained, is that "previously we had not had the decision-makers as part of identifying what the needs were for defining a research agenda, and...the specific design elements that need to be incorporated in our research."

While very little of the previous findings were incorporated into company decisions, future research results can be translated into actions aimed at reducing costs and improving health outcomes.

Fleming added that the partnership "allows us to create a body of work over time, as opposed to answering questions by the one, so that at the end of the next five years ... we'll be able to look back and say, 'We have learned about how people choose drugs, how they use drugs, about how they help them avoid medical events'" and then "apply that into our respective industries."

The five-year collaboration will allow the partners time to identify potential problems, develop interventions and evaluate the interventions.

As an example of the type of research that might be carried out, Harnett said that in the area of chronic pain, a goal would be to identify the drivers of cost and find where inefficiencies lie in the treatment pathway for Medicare members served by Humana. This would involve looking at things like delay in treatment, misdiagnosis and finding the appropriate treatment. After defining the inefficiencies, the partners could then target interventions, which could include such things as changes in benefit design, patient and physician education and new models of care delivery.

Fleming hopes the collaboration will help find methods of improving patient adherence to prescribed drug treatments and demonstrate drugs' impact on overall health outcomes. Both executives said that such research evaluating the outcomes of interventions is how they will approach comparative effectiveness research, as opposed to conducting direct drug-to-drug comparisons.

Assisting Drug Development

Seeing the inefficiencies in the system could lead Pfizer to look for ways to address them through its drug pipeline.

"In terms of helping with development," Harnett said, "I think there's a number of ways in which this collaboration will further some of the objective, primarily around making sure we're bringing products that address unmet needs and that the evidence that we're bringing to the table also meets the needs of folks that have to make very important decisions with limited resources," such as providers and payers.

With real-world data, the companies can make sure "we have products that are truly valued" and in many cases figure out what sub-populations are going to benefit most and get the most value from certain products, he added.

Pfizer also could supplement CHA's data with "prospective pragmatic studies with primary data collection." Fleming said if Pfizer is able to take data showing adverse events related to drug treatment and "create a drug or molecule that's able to solve that problem, that would be an incredible value to the health care system and to people's lives, because we've solved a nasty adverse event that's created by the typical drugs in the market today."

The agreement between Pfizer and Humana is part of a growing trend. Other drug manufacturers that have entered into similar arrangements with payers' research units include AstraZeneca, which has partnered with WellPoint's HealthCore (Also see "AstraZeneca, HealthCore Launch Outcomes Data Project, Seek Multi-Stakeholder Consortium" - Pink Sheet, 3 February, 2011.) and Sanofi, which is collaborating with Medco's United BioSource unit (Also see "Sanofi's Deal With Medco/UBC Seeks Payer Perspective To Inform Drug R&D, Marketing" - Pink Sheet, 22 June, 2011.).

-Scott Steinke (s.steinke@elsevier.com)

Pfizer Research Partnership With Humana Could Inform Drug Development Decisions

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