Your books
"Market Access in Pharma in Developed Markets" and "Market
Access in Pharma in Emerging Markets" were ranked in the top 20 of the
"100 Best Pharma Books of All Time" list in 2021. Can I get your
thoughts on this success, which is a valuable reference for Turkish Health
Economics?
In 2015, since there were no books on Health Economics and
Market Access in the Health Economics literature, we decided to publish a book
in this field. Due to the inadequacy of finding detailed resources on developing
countries, we started regional research. The book "Access to
Pharmaceuticals in Emerging Markets", in which regional research was
published, was published in 2016. Subsequently, we published the book
"Market Access in Developed Markets" for developed countries in 2018.
Both of our books have not fallen below the top hundred since their
publication. In 2021, it was even ranked among the top one hundred
pharmaceutical books of all time on the BookAuthority website. Another book we
have recently published is Pharmacoeconomics From Cinical Perspective. Our aim
was to provide a more clinical perspective of pharmacoeconomics, that is,
pharmaceutical economics. That book also made it into the first hundred.
May I know the source
of your books?
It contains information about the entry of health
technologies into the markets of countries, with a focus on pharmaceuticals.
For example, if you want to sell a health technology, medical device or
pharmaceuticals in Germany, you can find basic information in these books. The
references are the legislation of the countries and our expert authors who have
detailed information about the countries. In our books; You can access market
access processes about the health economy of 14 developed and 21 developing
countries.
On the basis of your
experience in the field of health economics, may I get information about
Turkey's market share and international position in the Pharmaceuticals and
Medical Devices sector?
We see that Turkey's expenditure on health is parallel to
its economic weight in the world. This fluctuates between approximately 1 percent
and 0.8 percent. In summary, we can say that there is neither too much
expenditure nor too little expenditure on a general economic scale. However,
when we look at the per capita health expenditure or the ratio of health
expenditure to GDP, we can say that Turkey spends less on health than it
should. There may be many reasons for this situation. First and foremost, high
population reduces per capita expenditure. It can be said that the tight price
policy of the public sector causes this. Considering that 70-80 percent of
health expenditure is made by the public sector, there is a market with
suppressed prices due to the strict price policy implemented by the public
sector. This is our position in the world in general. However, when we look at
some specific diseases, especially genetic diseases. The rate of consanguineous
marriages in Turkey is much higher than in developed countries. When we look at
regions such as the Middle East and North Africa, we see lower rates but higher
rates compared to Europe and America. For example, while there are 4000
patients with a genetic disease in a population of 300-400 million in Europe,
we can see that there are 5 thousand patients in a population of 80 million in
Turkey. We see that the frequency of genetic diseases in Turkey is above
normal. Since the cost of such diseases is higher, there may be some problems
with these products. Normally, our pharmaceutical market share is about 1 percent
in the world, but in such products, we can be 5 or 10 percent of the world
market, depending on our population and economy. When we exclude genetic
diseases, we do not have a big problem, but when we include genetic diseases in
this pot, we see that we are a difficult market.
In 2019, you founded
ECONIX, a research and consultancy company. What led you to establish ECONIX?
ECONiX Research was founded in 2019 and today, as it
completes its fifth year, it has a separate company in Estonia and an office in
Tunisia. Moreover, it has turned into a company that conducts health economics
and market access research not only in Turkey, but also in the countries I
define as Roman and Ottoman Geography, emerging markets, health economics and
market access research. Although this is the case, in a geography extending
from Slovenia to Algeria, Mogolia in the East and Saudi Arabia, Turkey has the
largest share in terms of health expenditures among these countries. ECONIX
carries out research mainly in the Turkish market, 70-80 percent, and 20-30 percent
in the other countries mentioned above.
What is the
distribution of private and public institutions that ECONIX serves?
We mainly work with international pharmaceutical and medical
device companies. We also work with universities in projects funded by the
World Bank or the European Union that can benefit the public. In summary, we
can say that we cooperate directly or indirectly with academia and the public
sector, although the private sector is predominant.
What is the latest
innovation developed in ECONIX's research centres?
We see every research we conduct as an innovation for the
stakeholders we work with. In the field of health economics in Turkey, we have
developed an application platform called ECONALIX, where anyone can access the
interface to conduct cost effectiveness and budget impact analyses free of
charge for use in their academic studies. They can perform cost effectiveness
with the Decision Tree methodology, which is most frequently used in health
economics analyses. They can perform sensitivity analyses with the Tornado
method. Another application is the drug data bank. In this data bank, you can
track historical prices, weekly changes and conduct pharmaceutical oriented
research in Health Economics. ECONALIX was our first project. It was supported
by KOSGEB and we successfully completed it in 2021. We had a second project in
2022, and in that project, our aim is to add medical devices and healthcare
services to our ECONALIX application and improve our data set. After adding
them, we are working on a web based application that will use the Markov
method, both to expand our database and to upgrade the application we use for
decision tree analysis. In the coming years, we will be offering it to the
service of the Turkish academia and we aim to make it free of charge.
What are your future
plans for ECONIX Research Company?
When we set out on this journey, we aimed to grow not only
in Turkey but also in our neighbourhood and we are trying to achieve this.
While we are trying to achieve this goal in our first 5 years, our goal in the
next 5 years will be to make ECONIX the first preferred institution in public
and private institutions in the health sector.