Daniel J. Klein Discusses the Importance of the PAN Challenge

Many institutions and researchers responded to the PAN Challenge call for papers last year, and even more are expected this year, said Daniel J. Klein, president and CEO of the Patient Access Network Foundation. He emphasized that this year’s Challenge is especially important because it can help reduce the financial hardships that many cancer patients often face.

Transcript (slightly modified)

Who are the typical applicants for the PAN Challenge call for papers and call for studies?

Well, we get papers from a number of sources. We make an effort to reach out to academic institutions, schools of public health, and researchers at medical schools, graduate schools, who are active in looking at health economic issues and looking at access issues. So we’ve had a very good response last year and we are expecting an even better response this year to the request for papers.

Why is the PAN Challenge important?

We think the PAN Challenge is especially important this year, because of the great deal of attention that the cost of prescription medications, brand medications, has gotten recently. And I think as we see higher and higher costs and more and more cost sharing, we know that patients are being impacted.

The leading cause of bankruptcy among people is related to high healthcare costs, and cancer patients are several times more likely to face bankruptcy than other patients. And they’re also more likely to face financial hardships, either being unable to pay their rent or being unable to pay their credit cards. We know that if we could reduce the out-of-pocket costs for cancer patients they’d be much less likely to face these kinds of financial hardships.