Grants Can Fuel Federal Market Access

Bottom Line:

To transform federal grant wins into a strategic tool, manufacturers must overcome internal siloing and ensure the funds secured support precise pharmacoeconomic evidence within the federal health system.

Pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers routinely underestimate the strategic importance of federally-funded grants in their core market access strategy for the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and the Department of Defense (DoD). Although a generally an underutilized mechanism, grants represent a powerful integrated strategic lever that can address the high-stakes friction points in the federal payer environment.

For most organizations, securing federal grants is typically isolated as a reach activity, routinely confined to R&D departments or academic partners. This approach consistently fails to support market access due to a misalignment in the incentive structure. Most grant teams are incentivized by the total dollars secured rather than the strategic value of how the generated data can support market access. Consequently, the submitted proposal and research output, while scientifically robust, are frequently unconnected to the manufacturer’s data needs related to VA/DoD’s specific utilization patterns or cost models that a market access team could use to support product penetration. Instead, both the research team and the market access team must proactively align to collectively pre-define how the grant will generate the specific data necessary to overcome adoption or access barriers that the market access team can then leverage. This internal cross-functional alignment transforms grant pursuit from a cost-center activity into a de-risking opportunity.

The most significant barrier in bridging grant-supported research to market access goals is the lack of VA-specific or DoD-specific patient population comparative effectiveness data. This bridge is particularly important in VA as its formulary decisions are heavily weighted by the associated pharmacoeconomic data of a product. Manufacturers should therefore strategically apply for grant funding opportunities to support investigator-initiated trials or targeted real-world evidence (RWE) studies that specifically address critical evidence gaps related to sub-population efficacy or cost-of-care offsets. By proactively using grant funding to generate this specific, high-value evidence, manufacturers ensure their product’s value proposition is articulated in the language of federal healthcare stakeholders.

Grant funding also can provide a critical capital source for piloting operational concepts that validate market fit and utilization including localized, high-impact pilots. Generating robust operational data on implementation friction, staff training burden, or system compatibility can be used by market access teams as they pursue increased adoption. This tactical approach moves grants from a simpler focus on innovation and into the more complex landscape of operational validation essential for large-scale integration within federal healthcare system.

The failure to leverage grants as a strategic lever for market access is a missed opportunity. By strategically directing grant funding to validate both the clinical value and health system utilization, manufacturers can use secure and expand a product's footprint in the federal healthcare system.