Access to medicines and healthcare
Access to medicines and healthcare is a key pillar of our ESG strategy, and it is critical to helping women and girls achieve their promise. We aim to help address the barriers to accessing our medicines — whether they are geographic, financial, social, cultural or political — and create a better and healthier every day for every woman.
For more information on our strategy, goals and progress, please see our ESG Executive Summary in the ESG reporting center.
Improving access to contraceptive options
The decision of whether — and when — to start a family is one of the most important choices a woman can make, with critical consequences for her life and that of her family, community and the economy.
Yet, for millions of women and girls worldwide — especially women from low socioeconomic backgrounds — this life-altering decision is at times no choice at all.
Family planning can also help women space out their pregnancies and avoid adolescent pregnancies, both of which lead to safer births. Unfortunately, women in low-income countries often lack access to contraceptives that make these choices possible.
Our Her Promise Access Initiative collaborates with organizations around the world to help women and girls prevent unplanned pregnancies. The initiative is part of a multi-agency global effort to expand contraception availability in the 73 lowest-income countries.
The initiative began in 2012 at the London Summit on Family Planning. The resulting program — known as FP2020 — brought together stakeholders including NGOs, government agencies and pharmaceutical companies. We began our participation when we were a part of our former parent company. As part of this coalition, we partner with NGOs to provide patients with family planning options to help address this global need. Together with collaborators around the world, we aim to provide education, training and improved access to family planning options.
Learn more about our Her Promise Access Initiative.
Her Plan is Her Power
Around the world, unplanned pregnancies are preventing women and girls from achieving their promise. We want to rewrite their future.
In 2021, Organon approved an ESG commitment that included a mandate to develop a charitable giving strategy centered on our women’s health vision. This commitment has also been reflected through multi‑year initiatives such as the Her Plan is Her Power program, which supported partnerships advancing access, education and emergency response in women’s health from 2023 through the program’s completion in 2025, with activities continuing throughout the reporting year.
As part of our ongoing fulfillment of the 2021 commitment, Organon then launched the Her Health grants program, establishing a new framework for charitable giving aligned with our Her Health vision; outcomes from the program’s first grant cycle will be reported in 2027.
Our portfolio-based approach to access
Organon’s access to medicines efforts are overseen by the heads of the Women’s Health and General Medicine Commercial Franchises, in full collaboration with other key members of our Executive Leadership Team, including the heads of Manufacturing and Supply.
The ESG Committee of the Board of Directors, the ESG and Policy Council at the management level, and the franchise governance teams develop and implement Organon’s access to medicines strategy. Although we have ESG-related metrics embedded in our company scorecard, which has an impact on executive compensation, we do not currently include any specific access-related metrics on the scorecard. Our Board of Directors also reviews enterprise risks and discusses them with management, including issues relevant to our business, reputation and strategy, such as intellectual property risk, pipeline and business development, pricing and patient access, legal and regulatory matters, and manufacturing.
Our approach to access to medicines and healthcare is tailored to each of our product portfolios and underpinned by our commitment to advancing health equity. Given the unique business context of each of our product portfolios, we do not have an enterprise-wide approach to access to medicines and healthcare. Instead, our approach to access is tailored to the products in each portfolio.
We believe that women’s health can have benefits that extend beyond women to their families, societies and economies. We design our access programs in a fit-for-purpose way to reach the women who need our products the most.
Women’s Health
In our Women’s Health franchise, we are working to expand access to our contraceptive products and other products across the portfolio in areas such as fertility, bacterial vaginosis and osteoporosis.
General Medicines
Our General Medicines franchise is composed of innovative products as well as those, called Established Brands, that are beyond market exclusivity and face generic competition in the markets where they are available. For those products, we continue to preserve their value to patients, healthcare providers and health systems.
Biosimilars
Core to the General Medicine franchise is our Biosimilars portfolio, which is composed of products that deliver value and cost savings for health systems and patients. We have implemented patient assistance programs in the United States and Canada that enhance access to these products for those eligible, and we are exploring the launch of similar programs in other countries. Given the contractual arrangement with our development partners, our ability to expand into new markets is limited.
Fertility access
When Organon was founded, we recognized the long-term economic implications of falling birth rates and unplanned pregnancy. Holistic family planning policies that create an enabling environment for individuals to choose their reproductive future help to build demographic resilience. We believe everyone should be able to start a family if they choose to, regardless of location, financial status, relationship or gender status, sexual orientation, or demographic and cultural background.
However, in many countries, barriers to accessing fertility treatments persist. We work with partners to advocate for education and policy reforms to ensure equal access to fertility treatments and services for all aspiring parents around the world.
Examples include the following:
- We commissioned and provided support to Charles Rivers to develop a global and Asia Pacific fertility policy with the participation of fertility experts from global and Asia Pacific. This paper aims to take stock of progress made with regard to access to assisted reproductive therapy, and identifies barriers, opportunities and policy recommendations for improving access to fertility care.
- We are proud to be the lead private-sector partner of Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Smart Families, offering our perspective and expertise as a women’s health company and helping to support the creation of the most comprehensive set of family planning policies ever developed for this region. The menu of policy options centers around reproductive choice, taking a comprehensive approach to proactively provide people with the information, tools and resources to make reproductive health decisions that best support their personal goals. The full menu can be viewed here: APEC Smart Families.
Value and affordability
For healthcare to be broadly accessible, it must be affordable.
We are committed to improving the affordability of care for women throughout the world. We work with women’s health and gender equality advocates, patient organizations, NGOs, multilateral organizations and commercial partners to expand access and reduce barriers to care. Our investments in this area include health literacy, healthcare provider training, support services, and financing and affordability solutions aimed at improving access to health services and medications for women around the world.
General Medicines
Within our commercial strategy, we continue to focus on General Medicines that seek to provide high-quality options to governments and other payers.
Many General Medicine products have supported patients in managing critical, chronic, and acute conditions — including those that disproportionately affect women, such as psoriasis, atopic dermatitis, cardiovascular disease and migraine — and have done so for decades.
The over 50 products in our General Medicines portfolio represent a broad array of products, some that are generally beyond market exclusivity. Yet feedback from health authorities, healthcare professionals and the general public tells us that our medicines are still helping people around the globe to better manage their health, especially in those countries where branded products are preferred.
To meet unmet needs, we are expanding access to many of these brands through new indications, markets and populations. We design our access programs in a fit-for-purpose way to reach those who need our products the most.
Biosimilars
At Organon, biosimilars are a vital part of our strategy to expand access to effective and potentially more affordable treatments. Our commitment is to build a lasting movement toward broader biosimilar adoption, globally. We’re focused on helping healthcare systems around the world gain confidence in these therapies, encouraging adoption and access, market by market to help create a sustainable healthcare system.
Biosimilars are biologic medicines that are highly similar but not identical to reference biologic medicines, which are therapies produced by living cells.
Biosimilars have no clinically meaningful differences from reference biologic medicines and must meet rigorous standards for market approval. They provide additional biologic treatment options and introduce market competition that can potentially reduce the costs of treating serious medical conditions.
We recognize the importance of delivering treatment options that potentially help reduce spending pressures on healthcare systems and enable a greater number of people to access important medicines. We champion care equity by supporting increased access to biologic treatments and we see an enormous — yet currently underused — path to realize this goal by:
- Incorporating biosimilars into the biologic treatment life cycle
- Increasing adoption and uptake of biosimilars with payers and prescribers
Learn more about our product donations to patient assistance programs in our ESG reporting center.
Responsible pricing
We seek to advance responsible pricing to help improve health equity and access to medicines and healthcare. All price changes on our products in all markets go through our defined review and approval process.
Our standard operating procedures define the pricing governance process, including the purpose, scope, key principles and responsibilities of key stakeholders in pricing governance. This governance requires local market oversight by appropriate teams, including Finance, Legal and the managing director, and it also incorporates a global review and approval process.
We regularly review our pricing strategies and prioritize patient access to therapies. We know that situations vary from market to market and from patient to patient. When considering pricing, we look at factors including value to patients and healthcare systems, unmet need, access, R&D sustainability and competition.
To achieve greater accessibility and equity, we offer many different pricing and investment approaches, including tiered pricing, that expand access in low- and middle-income countries. In areas of highest public health need (low-income and select lower-middle-income markets), we partner with global NGOs, governments and other stakeholders to offer family planning options at cost-plus pricing.