Casey Butrus, PharmD: Thank you all for this rich and informative discussion. Before we conclude, I’d like to get some final thoughts from each of you. I’ll start with Amy.

Amy Brennan: My final thoughts are I think it’s key for all of us to work together as the prescriber, as the patient advocate, as the payer, and as the insurance company, the specialty pharmacy, and the local pharmacies. There are a lot of moving parts, and I think we all need to work hand in hand to be able to deliver that patient experience to the patient that we were referencing.

Casey Butrus, PharmD: Dr Keegan?

Brian Keegan, MD, PhD: I want to thank you all for having this discussion today, I’ve learned a lot. And I know that we do work, unfortunately, within an imperfect system, but one of the great things that the system does rely on is that all of us are really striving to help patients have a better patient experience. And in recognizing where they might need a little bit more education, where they might need a little bit more background, where they might need a little bit more help in order to ultimately have the patients do better. That’s the goal at the end of the day.

I think we talked about a few things that may make it sound like some of the treatments can be daunting in terms of how many things we have to document, how much time it takes to do prior authorizations, these different kinds of things. But like anything, we get good at them, and we can do them in a pretty efficient manner. So I think it is worth the time to learn how we can do it a little bit better. Hopefully, we shared some tidbits today that are helpful so everybody can be able to offer better patient care.

Casey Butrus, PharmD: Dr Cameron?

Michael Cameron, MD, FAAD: What an exciting time to be involved with atopic dermatitis. If you think back, as I said earlier, before dupilumab, there was nothing out there, and now we’re just blossoming with all these new therapies. Finally, we’re seeing real innovation on the topical side. We need to continue to have these types of conversations so that we can find a way to get these therapies in our patients’ hands while still maintaining this ecosystem so that it still makes sense for the manufacturers to continue to deliver topical innovation.

I don’t think we talked about this today, but think about how long it takes for the medication to go from the bench in the lab all the way to the patient’s hands; it can usually take over 10 years. So we need to make sure that manufacturers have some ROI at the end of that innovation. But at the same time, we need to not bankrupt the health care system. To your point, it’s a complicated ecosystem and we’ve got to make sure it works for all the stakeholders. But again—I’m sure Dr Keegan agrees with me—it’s just such an exciting time to be able to offer our patients these therapies.

Casey Butrus, PharmD: Thank you. Thank you all again and thank you to our viewing audience. We hope you found this AJMC® Peer Exchange to be useful and informative.

Transcript edited for clarity.