Andrew Witty : Great question, Erin. Before I ask Heather to give you a few more details, I think we’re super pleased with the progress we’ve made, particularly on the biosimilar innovation that’s coming this year in the next few weeks. And the work that’s been done within Optum Rx to deliver a contracting strategy, which ensures that everybody who wants to use a HUMIRA molecule, whether that’s the brand or whether it’s a biosimilar, gets access to lower cost right out of the gate has been a super important innovation in terms of our contracting strategy. So without folks having to be shifted from drugs or dislocated in the marketplace, we found a way to bring lower cost to everybody in that environment. And I really want to give credit to Heather and her team for the work that she’s done to lead on all of that.
As you rightly say, we’re passing those benefits directly back to the payers and the folks themselves. And with that, Heather, why don’t you pick up and describe what else is driving the Rx growth this year?
Heather Cianfrocco : Sure. So first, let me give you just another sense of maybe next phase when you think biosimilar and then let’s hit the strength of the earnings for us in ’23. So as Andrew said, we intended to set up the biosimilar strategy to allow the most value to pull through in year one that we can to clients, and we’re proud of that. But this is a multiyear strategy, and the markets dynamic will continue to watch it. What’s important here is creating a marketplace for competition of the originator with a biosimilar in the specific unique environment with HUMIRA and so many manufacturers coming to market. But over a period of maybe, say, the next 18 months with different attributes, our strategy allows them to compete based on their clinical criteria and product attributes, how the manufacturer support the product and then, obviously, the economics and the pricing.
So that’s the goal. We’ll see that play out over the years. And the goal was to provide choice, not a lot of disruption and be able to extract value without restriction or exclusion. So we’ll watch that play out. But when I think about the earnings and the strength of the position we’re in or what we hoped to be by the end of ’23, think of it as some of the stories you’ve heard us building and what we’ve been talking about for the last couple of years, and that’s strengthen our pharmacy services. I’ll give you an example. Yes, the community pharmacies are growing. They’re expanding quickly. But our specialty pharmacies, our Frontier Therapies where we serve some of the more rare disease and orphan drugs are growing as quickly. And in many of those are getting scale.
So for instance, the community pharmacies are scaling to the point where we’re allowed — we have central fill supporting because we have the volume of scripts going to those community pharmacies. And we’re getting better with negotiations, we’re able to negotiate harder on some of our procurement in those businesses. But also look at the PBM. You heard strong selling season again. We hope to have another strong selling season. The pricing is dynamic. We moved quickly with our pricing, with our product attributes. Our product adoption is up 40% year-over-year in our PBM products. And then we’ve got some return on some of the investments we made in the last year or two, Optum Frontier Therapies, our partnership with RVO. So that, I think, is when you look towards the next year, focus on those areas and look for us to drive earnings growth in those particular areas.
