Beyond the Drip: The State of Immunoglobulin Therapy with Luba Sobolevsky, President & CEO of IgNS

Jon Love (0:02)

Hi, everybody. Welcome to Beyond the Drip. I'm Jon Love, and super excited to bring you another episode of Beyond the Drip. This is episode 20, and it is now September, and we are getting ready to go into kind of the conference season here. And so super excited to have back with us for the second time, Luba Sobolevsky. Luba, welcome back.

Luba Sobolevsky (0:23)

Thank you so much for having me, Jon.

Jon Love (0:25)

Absolutely. Now, Luba, I want to go ahead and introduce our co-host. So got Brian O'Sullivan from the O'Sullivan Group. Hey, Brian, how are you?

Brian O'Sullivan (0:33)

Doing great. Thanks, Jon. Luba, I can't believe it's been a year. Great to have you back. Thanks. Great to be here.

Jon Love (0:38)

Absolutely. Pam McIntyre. Pam, you've got like 17 companies now. I'm still going to go with Infusion Consulting Services in general, and then, you know, I'll let you rule the world while you work for Pam one day, which is not a bad thing, let's be honest. Pam, welcome back.

Pamela McIntyre (0:51)

Thanks, Jon. Good to see you, Luba.

Luba Sobolevsky (0:53)

Good to see you.

Jon Love (0:54)

Luba, this is now the second time. I'm so excited. The first time you came on, right afterwards, right? I told you, we have to do this every year. And you were like, let's do it. And so it was easy for us to do that, right? Because, you know, I think that you have this unique voice in our industry and what I kind of call Beyond the Drip, I named it that because there's so many things that goes into beyond just infusion pharmacy therapy, right? Yes, we often drip medicine, right? But the tech, the regulations, the clinical, the nurses, the drug, the things that you've told me about IG and how long it takes and things like that. I think we need to have someone like you on every year to kind of give us what I would call the state of IG, right? And so having your voice here is incredibly important, I think, to our audience and to the infusion industry in general. Before we kind of get into that, I want to do a quick thank you to ProChant. So ProChant is our only sponsor. So thanks to ProChant, Revenue Cycle Management, one of our crown jewels in the industry. So thanks to them to do that. Luba, I don't even know how to ask you this loaded question, but you know me, I'm not going to play fair, so I'm going to ask you because you're tough, so you can do it.

A year ago, we talked about IG, we talked about its growth, we talked about all these different things. It's a year later.

I think we're all looking at you to say, hey, what has your eyebrows up when you think about it? It's a year later. What do you pay attention to when it comes to IG right now in kind of a state of where IG is?

Luba Sobolevsky (2:24)

Yeah, it is a loaded question, Jon. But I've come to expect that of you. And before we move on, I do want to thank you and Brandon and Pam and Brian and Prochan. Thank you so much for having me. And thanks for the opportunity to talk about IGNS and the IG therapy industry as a whole. You know, every year we, I think all of us think, oh, well, by now we've seen it all. We've seen all the different cyclical changes, different types of challenges. But every year we seem to be facing a new set of various types of challenges on every level with this therapy. But if you think about it, it is a therapy that is used in over 70 different indications, 40 billion plus plus, you know, industry that is also considered to be a niche therapy, right? A biologic that treats a large variety of rare diseases. And so with that comes all the layers of complexity. And we've seen that through side of care shifts, which have sped up really since last year. I mean, the shift into the alternate side of care is going at an incredible rate, much faster than a lot of the providers are able to kind of move with the changes that need to happen in those sites of care, right? We've had incredible hair level challenges this year from every direction. A lot of anthem denials and other pairs as well in the beginning of the year that no one could explain that continue to persist to various Medicare pickpicks code issues that we've all been working on.

And it seems that the bigger this industry gets, the more complexity it sort of attracts into our ecosystem.