HealthDyne to Explore How Pharma Is Empowering Employers at Nephron
HealthDyne is pleased to announce that Sarah Thomas, Head of Growth & Commercialization, will speak at the Nephron Pharmacy & PBM Innovation Symposium on the panel Pharma Moves to Empower the Employer. She will join Kevin Hern, SVP of Lilly Employer at Eli Lilly & Co., and Chip Nash, Co-Founder and CEO of Crux, for a discussion on one of the fastest-moving developments in pharmaceutical access: manufacturers building direct relationships with employers.
Direct-to-employer (DTE) programs are moving from concept to reality. Manufacturers that first built direct-to-patient channels are now extending them to employers of every size, giving companies new ways to offer coverage for medications, including GLP-1s, that many have never been able to cover. As cash and government prices become more visible, employers are asking for more transparency and control over how their benefit dollars are spent.
Sarah will bring HealthDyne’s perspective from the infrastructure and pharmacy layer, where these programs succeed or fail. “Direct-to-employer sounds pretty simple on paper. The employer decides what to contribute and the patient gets access,” says Sarah. “Making that work in practice is the hard part. You have to connect eligibility, pharmacy fulfillment, financial flows and reporting without creating more complexity for the employer or the patient.”
For most employers, DTE isn’t replacing the pharmacy benefit. It’s creating another access pathway alongside it. The challenge is making that pathway work with the benefit already in place while giving employers and manufacturers the visibility they need to understand how the program is performing.
Access is only the beginning. The pharmacy has a front row view into what happens next, from whether patients start therapy to persistence, titration and drop off. That creates an opportunity to measure DTE by more than enrollment or prescription volume and better understand whether the model is delivering value over time.
“GLP-1s may be opening the door, but the conversation doesn’t end there,” says Sarah. “We’re starting to see a different way for manufacturers and employers to think about access. The real opportunity is figuring out where this model can solve a problem better than what exists today.”
For anyone in pharma, pharmacy, benefits consulting or employer health strategy, this discussion offers a practical look at how DTE is taking shape and what it takes to make it work at scale.
Session Details:
Pharma Moves to Empower the Employer
Nephron Pharmacy & PBM Innovation Symposium
New York | Tuesday, October 6
