Daniel J. Klein on the PAN Challenge's Search for Long-Term Solutions

The PAN Challenge is seeking long-term sustainable strategies to expand affordable access to care, which will benefit seriously ill patients the most, according to Daniel J. Klein, president and CEO of the Patient Access Network (PAN) Foundation. These solutions must address cost sharing and high out-of-pocket costs, which can deter some patients from receiving the most effective treatment for their life-threatening illnesses.

Transcript (slightly modified)

What is the focus of the second year of the PAN Challenge?

The PAN Challenge this coming year is really focused on sustainable strategies for helping people get affordable access to the treatment that they need. And when we say sustainable, we’re sort of saying that the current situation is perhaps not sustainable, and so we’re really asking for papers from universities and other research organizations that will think outside sort of the current model and come up with suggestions or proposed solutions for addressing cost sharing, out-of-pocket costs, access issues, over the long term, so that we’re not creating these sort of temporary patches to deal with the problem on a temporary basis. And right now the way things have evolved it seems that every year, there are adjustments and reactions to increases in cost sharing. We think that longer term solutions are really necessary.

What segment of the population will benefit from the proposals requested for the PAN Challenge?

Primarily, people with life-threatening, chronic, and rare diseases are likely to benefit from the types of solutions that we’re hoping people will bring forward. Those patients are the most heavily affected by high out-of-pocket costs, and we’ve seen consistently that people with serious illness who have high out-of-pocket costs, high cost sharing, are likely to either not initiate treatment, or to delay initiation of treatment, or not to adhere to treatment, and as a result they’re going to be less successful with their therapy. So seriously ill patients are likely to be the ones who benefit most from these strategies.