Assistance program reaches patients across Mexico | Takeda Stories
Mexico assistance program reaches patients ‘from cities to the most rural villages’
It’s an impossible parental dilemma: choose between buying food and water, sending your child to school or paying for necessary medicines.
That’s exactly what some families in Mexico faced while also facing a cancer diagnosis.
To help overcome this financial barrier to access, we established an affordability-based Patient Assistance Program (PAP) to support patients with Hodgkin lymphoma. Such programs are a way to provide financial assistance based on individual circumstances, often bridging the gap between when a treatment receives regulatory approval and when it’s listed for reimbursement through national health schemes – which can sometimes take several years.
Takeda has more than 30 affordability-based PAPs in place worldwide, but this was the first one in Mexico. So, to maximize our impact, we partnered with Unidos, a local non-profit that specializes in providing health care access to people living with chronic diseases.
Unidos helped us reach a wide network of program-eligible patients across the country and coordinated the distribution of prescribed medicines, explains Unidos president, Paulina Rosales.
Paulina Rosales, president, Unidos
“We had patients in every part of the country, from cities to the most rural villages. And because Takeda has provided treatments for people in every corner of the world for so long, they were able to reach every person in the program.”
In fact, here’s the impact this program had over the course of seven years:
- 300 patients enrolled,
- a 40% increase in access to treatment for eligible patients,
- more than 9,400 treatments delivered in
- 15 hospitals across 11 states, and
- seven out of 10 enrollees having 100 percent of their treatment donated.
“This is exactly how access to medicine should work: sustainable, equitable access to medicines for those that need it, and this is why I am so happy with my decision to work at Takeda. You can make a real difference.”
Mariana Mendez, head of Market Access, Takeda Mexico
Veronica Sosa, associate director of Access to Medicines, Takeda Mexico
But it wasn’t all smooth sailing. Veronica Sosa, associate director of Access to Medicines at Takeda Mexico, says the PAP, which began enrolling patients in November 2017, faced unanticipated challenges when the global pandemic made distribution and face-to-face health care more difficult beginning in early 2020.
“This is where being a global company with centuries of experience of putting patients first was helpful,” she says. “We had the technical knowledge and the logistical partners who could transport the treatment during this difficult time.”
This kind of innovation has been core to Takeda’s longevity and is central to the company’s future as well.
Mariana Mendez, head of Market Access and Commercial, Takeda Mexico
Mariana Mendez, head of Market Access and Commercial at Takeda Mexico, explains that the national government has now taken steps to make the treatment available through national reimbursement to people in Mexico living with Hodgkin lymphoma, which means that while the PAP is no longer required, Takeda’s role in supporting Mexican patients with Hodgkin lymphoma is entering an exciting new phase.
“This is exactly how access to medicine should work: sustainable, equitable access to medicines for those that need it,” Mariana says. “And this is why I am so happy with my decision to work at Takeda. You can make a real difference.”
