Bridging the Gap: Market Access From Three Sides of the Table with Vidhya Segar

Bridging the Gap: Market Access From Three Sides of the Table - with Vidhya Segar

Real Pharma, hosted by Na-Ri Oh and Ian Wendt, with intern Amos Fung

Episode Summary

Health technology assessment is usually described as a system. Vidhya Segar describes it as a negotiation between people who are each asking a different question. When she worked in government, the question was always why: why this drug, why now, why this population. In industry, it became why not. In this episode, Na-Ri, Ian, and Amos talk with Vidhya, a pharmacist who has worked as a hospital clinician, as an evaluator at Singapore's national HTA agency, and now in market access at Ipsen. Using Singapore as the working example, the conversation covers how a drug gets from approval to reimbursement, what the US most favored nation (MFN) policy looks like from Southeast Asia, how agencies handle rare disease evidence, and what each side of the table could do to make the other's job easier.

About Vidhya Segar

Vidhya Segar is a pharmacist turned national health policy expert turned market access strategist. She began as a hospital pharmacist in Singapore's public health system, working across inpatient and outpatient settings and designing training programs for early career pharmacists. She then moved to the Agency for Care Effectiveness (ACE), Singapore's national health technology assessment body, where she was Senior Assistant Director in the Technology Access Division and led the national rollout of medical device subsidies. Today she is Market Access Manager for Singapore and Malaysia at Ipsen. She is also a regular speaker and moderator at regional pharmacy and health policy conferences and an active voice on LinkedIn on health economics, HTA, and the evolving role of the pharmacist.

What We Cover

[00:00] Intro: The show open and the guest introduction, read in alternating paragraphs by Na-Ri and Ian.

[02:05] Three chairs, one problem: Amos opens with Vidhya's path from acute care pharmacist to national HTA agency to industry. Her version: it was not a grand plan, but sitting on three sides of the access problem changed how she sees it, including the discomfort of realizing that funding one thing means not funding another.

[05:06] There are no bad guys: Why Vidhya thinks most access fights get adversarial, and why people who spend an entire career on one side of the fence tend to lose the ability to see the other side's constraints.

[06:23] A day in the life of a market access manager: Wh