STAT+: Pharma is still struggling to widen access to medicines — and reach patients — in low- and middle-income countries

Amid calls to expand access to medicines in low- and middle-income countries, a new analysis finds that most of the world’s 20 largest pharmaceutical companies have taken steps to reach patients, but many efforts are yielding decidedly mixed results.

On the one hand, 19 companies have established methods for providing treatments to these countries — but only nine of the drugmakers created comprehensive plans. Moreover, there is no consensus on how to calculate the number of patients being reached, so the approach taken varies widely among products and countries.

And while most of the drug companies provided metrics for verifying access goals, few shared the calculations used to measure patient reach. In addition, most of the companies rely on sales volume to measure access goals, but this can be an imperfect benchmark because it does not ensure that medicines actually reached patients.

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