Affordability
What is Affordability at AstraZeneca?
The company’s position, policy and performance on the pricing of medicines, including tiered pricing, differential pricing, capped pricing, early access programmes, Patient Assistance Programmes, royalty-free licensing, pricing transparency, reimbursement strategy, and commercialisation, strategy, availability and registration.
Our approach
The price of our medicines is designed to ensure the financial sustainability of the healthcare system and our research-led business model. Our methodology helps us understand the burden of treatment cost and level of affordability when patients have to pay for their own medicines. We aim to make our medicines more affordable through:
- Patient Assistance Programmes tailored to each market that can make our medicines available through donation
- Patient access programmes that coordinate with health systems to deliver medicines at lower out-of-pocket costs for the patient
- Our targeted pricing strategy, which considers ability to pay
- Structured product donation programmes
- Mainstream operations
Our stories
Patient assistance in China
AstraZeneca collaborates with charity organisations to relieve patients’ economic burden and help more patients obtain timely and effective treatment, as well as higher quality of life. We carry out more than 10 Patient Assistance Programmes for oncology, cardiovascular, diabetes and respiratory treatment.
The One Dose programme, launched in 2015 in partnership with the Chinese Red Cross Foundation, donates dual antiplatelet therapy for acute coronary syndrome patients (an AstraZeneca medicine and aspirin) to improve the success rate of treatment. The One Dose project changes the ‘patient waits for medicine’ scenario into a ‘medicine waits for patient’ one. As of September 2018, the project has covered 4,089 hospitals, emergency command centres and community health service centres, and more than 1.9 million patients have benefited. It was honoured with the 10th China Charity Award by the Ministry of Civil Affairs of China, the top award of its kind.
Patient Assistance Programmes
At AstraZeneca, we have offered programmes for discounts and donations for more than 35 years. Our Patient Assistance Programmes had cumulatively reached 9.3 million patients by the end of 2018. We continue to add new programmes. In 2018, we donated more than $686 million of medicines through our assistance programmes, the largest of which is AZ&Me in the US. Here are a few of the programmes we currently operate around the world to provide access to our medicines:
• Disfruto Mi Salud in Central America and the Caribbean
• AZyYo in Chile
• Karta Zdorovia in Russia
• FazBem in Brazil
• Patient Access Card in Central and Eastern Europe
• Elegir Salud in Argentina
• AZ&Me in the US