Changes in the Market Access Process to Combat COVID-19. An Exploratory Study in Italy

The aim of this article is to extend market access literature about specific changes considering the COVID-19 pandemic and what lessons can be taken to make the patient access more efficient. We explored the Italy case of the market access process during the outbreak. Overall, our results show that in an emergency, as the one due to the COVID-19 crisis, the market access undergoes significant changes because some levels of the process seem to be more affected than others. In sum, there seems to be a trend toward a more digitalized and horizontal process, which reduces the times of bureaucracy and overcomes the traditional hierarchical structure of the market access by downsizing the role of the regions in favor of a more direct dialogue between the national agency and the local hospitals. This article contains some relevant implications for policy making. We attempt to unveil empirically the most important changes that occurred in the market access process during the COVID-19 emergency by performing a comparison with the market access process before and after the outbreak.