Acorda Therapeutics, Inc. Q2 2010 Earnings Call Transcript

And third, we’re continuing to educate prescribers and other healthcare professionals about the clinical profile of Ampyra and appropriate patient selection for the product.

Our commercial team has made significant progress in improving the overall customer experience at APSS, Ampyra Patients Support Services, which is our prescriber and patient service hub. We’ve increased staffing at APSS and we have eliminated the backlog of prescription requests from the initial pent up demand at launch.

Most new prescriptions now begin processing within 24 hours of being sent to the hub and the average time between submission of an Ampyra prescription and when the drug is in the hands of the patient has been reduced.

As with any new drug launch, the actual time in which patients receive their first prescription is still dependent on several factors primarily the requirements of the insurance carrier.

Now, to ensure that the process improvements we’re making at APSS are actually translating into a better customer experience, we’ve been implementing several programs including surveys and other market research. We’ve just completed a survey of 101 prescribing physicians and results indicate that we’re making solid progress, 98% of the respondents said that they are likely to continue to prescribe Ampyra.

Our marketing and medical teams have been implementing programs to support the launch including advertising in professional and trade publications, consumer and professional websites, exhibits at major medical meetings, and a professional speaker’s bureau. And we continue to submit scientific information about Ampyra for presentation at medical meetings.

As of June 30th, a majority of insured individuals had no or minimal restrictions to access. A significant minority are subject to more restrictive prior authorizations and a mid single-digit percentage of individuals are currently blocked from receiving Ampyra, in some cased because their plans have not yet reviewed the drug. These figures are consistent with our own internal pre-launch projections.

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