VIDEO: Disparities exist in access to hereditary angioedema specialists, medications

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Healthcare disparities for this condition? I mean, I would answer that a couple of ways. One is, globally, there are huge disparities. You know, in the United States we're very fortunate to have multiple medicines FDA approved for HAE, so for the most part, we have options to choose and really try to get the best plan for each patient based on their characteristics and how they tolerate medicines.

If you look across the globe, there are very few other countries that have that many options. Many countries in Europe and elsewhere do have some of the modern therapies, but they're more restricted. And there are many countries across the globe where they have none of these new therapies that we know are very effective and quite safe. So that's one answer, is, globally there's a lot of health disparity based on healthcare systems and access to treatment.

I would say within the US, it boils down to a couple of things. One is access to a specialist who's knowledgeable about HAE. There are quite a number of those across the United States, but you do have to kind of work to find the person who knows all the options and can have that conversation with a patient to help them make the best decision. So access to specialists, and then access to medication, even though these are FDA-approved medicines, that's also not the same across all health plans.

So there are a lot of restrictions put on HAE medications by insurance companies and payers, and that can really influence the treatment plan for a given patient, meaning that we may know that this is the most effective and best medicine for a patient, but if their payer says, "We're not gonna cover that," it becomes inaccessible. So that's another issue we see, you know, when treating patients. There can be big differences in access to medication based on health plan policies.