Digital Pharma news

Despite pharma’s best efforts to improve systems for calling on physicians, access to targets remains a problem across the industry.

As the health service grapples with the need to provide quality care while containing spiralling patient care costs (something all stakeholders will need to do for decades to come), the ability to manage care in a holistic, safe and cost effective way is a priority for commissioners. 

Choosing the best healthcare partner to deliver these often complex and detailed healthcare requirements is high on the agenda for many commissioners and with the recent changes to NHS commissioning and the publication of the Homecare Medicines Review guidelines, this task has become even more important to get right first time round.

So what can you do to ensure the right partnerships are formed that best meet your individual service objective needs?

First of all, the healthcare partner should offer a broad and integrated range of services such as medicines distribution/logistics, clinical homecare, medicines support, dispensing services, medicine preparation and clinical trial support. Not only does provision of these cohesive services avoid the need for other external partners and contracts, but it also creates the flexibility to add-on future services as end-to-end patient healthcare needs develop and expand. 

In addition, this fully integrated approach has a greater potential to lead to service efficiencies, flexible service delivery and improved patient care. ..

The healthcare partner must help patients make better use of the medicines and therapies they are prescribed and by doing so, the NHS can be supported to deliver the demands of the Government's QIPP (Quality, Innovation, Productivity and Prevention) agenda ..

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Most importantly, a partner should be able to demonstrate a strong track record of patient-centric care that supports patients throughout their care journey...

An aspect which is perhaps given less weight is the existence of shared values and complementary multi-disciplinary expertise between stakeholder organisations. In my opinion, evidence of this is critical to engender mutual trust and respect between both organisations, as no doubt the ability for co-operative working will be tested under the current challenging and changing healthcare environment.

Ultimately, the true measure of success will be the strength of the relationship between the healthcare provider and partner as they work together in the pursuit of mutual goals to deliver the best possible care for their patients.

Actually Pharma often has a clear goal for why it wants to work with online communities, which is a good start.  The issue, perhaps unsurprisingly is that the goal is often self-serving.  Exciting for the Pharma company, less so for the HCPs.

Continuing our blog series discussing where we expect pharma marketers to be with their digital marketing strategies in 2014, we continue this week w

One research firm thinks that pharma companies' app have been too niche, not designed with best practices in mind and not integrated with companies' core business.

Dinesh Chindarkar, Co-founder, MediaMedic Communications elucidates about eDetailing – where technology and graphics, married with rich content, come to the rescue of mundane communication. Detailing has always been the backbone of doctors’ communication with the pharma industry for over the last three to four decades. This print tool, though has undergone quality improvements in terms of its content, visual appeal, some added gimmicks etc; all these have been value-adds within the box. Nothing has challenged it so far.

With the advent of technology, video content, graphics, motion and interactivity, and newer digital tools are challenging this visual aid and redefining communication. This version of detailing adds an ‘e’ of electronic to it, making it completely different from the current mode of communication. A different form of eDetailing is one where communication is sent to doctors on the PC without a personal interaction. But we are talking of eDetailing in the context where the electronic detailing aid is used by the sales rep in person-to-person call.

The objective of having a rich, content – driven conversation with the doctor, so as to discuss about newer medical advances, sharing updated information and help him make the right decision for prescription can be achieved using eDetailing. All this can be done weaving the brand within the conversation rather than the brand dominating the communication.