New pharma

Pharmacists in Europe have backed plans to improve access to clinical trial results in order to allow independent analysis of drug data.

The European Association of Hospital Pharmacists, which represents pharmacist organisations from 34 countries in Europe, gave its support to the European Medicines Agency (EMA) policy proposal during a consultation period that ended at the end of last month.

The EAHP said that greater transparency was needed to offer opportunities for independent scrutiny of the methodology and results of trials.

Improved transparency would also prevent duplication of research and enhance patient safety by increasing knowledge about adverse events, said the EAHP. ..

The EMA's proposed policy divides clinical data into three categories of access: commercially confidential information; open-access data that does not contain patients' personal information; and controlled-access data that may include personal data and will only be accessible after the requester fulfils certain requirements.

Depending on what category data fits under, individuals and organisations will have controlled access to trial information if they meet certain criteria.

Plans for greater transparency have been an increasing subject of interest for pharma in recent years, and have attracted criticism from the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries & Associations (EFPIA), concerned by the impact any change would have on commercial confidentiality.

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The EMA said it will consider all comments as it prepares to finalise its policy, which is expected to come into force on January 1, 2014.

European Union agency responsible for the protection of public and animal health through the scientific evaluation and supervision of medicines.

The European Union (EU) has introduced a new process to label medicines that are being monitored particularly closely by regulatory authorities. These medicines are described as being under 'additional monitoring'.

Medicines under additional monitoring have a black inverted triangle displayed in their package leaflet and in the information for healthcare professionals called the summary of product characteristics, together with a short sentence explaining what the triangle means:

This medicinal product is subject to additional monitoring.

The black triangle will be used in all EU Member States to identify medicines under additional monitoring. It will start appearing in the package leaflets of the medicines concerned from the autumn of 2013. It will not appear on the outer packaging or labelling of medicines.

All medicines are carefully monitored after they are placed on the EU market. If a medicine is labelled with the black triangle, this means that it is being monitored even more intensively than other medicines. This is generally because there is less information available on it than on other medicines, for example because it is new to the market or there is limited data on its long-term use. It does not mean that the medicine is unsafe.

Russian Conditions to the health care market – How could the industry adapt?

This spring, I was as lucky to be invited to the Russian Pharmaceutical Phorum, May 23rd, in St. Petersburg (Adam Smith Conferences ).

In the preparation to my key note speech I prepared myself to learn the health care conditions of Russia.

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It is not your intentions that makes the difference to your customers, as well as the actual market activities you deploy will do. If you put your energy into promotional actions, you will be seen as a commercial company, as sales persons. But, to the contrary, when you work with health care professionals’ attempts to create better care for patients, then you can get to be seen as a partner to care, as a colleague maybe.
It relates to your business directly: when you only sell medicine, your business coincides with the price of your product. But when you work together with stakeholders to care for patients  you might be a collaborator and your value will go beyond your product’s price.

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The industry's innovation crisis will not be solved by quick fixes. Reconfigured value chains will give rise to new business models.

A cure for the pharmaceutical industry's innovation crisis has yet to be found. During the past decade, new molecules output decreased steadily from ~30 NCE per year to ~25 NCE per year while R&D costs more than doubled.1 Many of the attempted remedies may even be responsible for the high attrition rate of pharmaceutical R&D projects. Open innovation, currently trapped in an unsustainable coexistence of both end-to-end in-house capacities and extensive partnering, has yet to deliver its promise. What will future pharma business models look like? In this study we take a fresh look, with a focus on the R&D value chain, and offer five key insights gained from the study's analyses:
1. Quick fixes, such as outsourcing R&D services, have not saved productivity.
2. Constant changes in R&D portfolio prioritization reduce creativity—and destroy pipeline value.
3. There is a clear breakpoint in the R&D value chain between front-end discovery and late-stage development.
4. Pharma value-chain reconfiguration will result in two main new business models:
    - “discover modules”    

    - “Iplement therapies”.
5. Pharmaceutical companies will need to actively select and sharpen their business model before uncontrollable market forces drive the change.
Pharma companies that focus on one of the two business models will stand the best chance of success—trying to adopt both at the same time will invite a high risk of failing in both. The business model decision should be guided by a clear understanding of their competitiveness along the value chain, and its implementation should be based on sound, individual strategy. Only by adhering to these principles will a compelling equity story—a prerequisite for profitable future growth—be created.

Within the discussion around AstraZeneca's branded approach to YouTube, I've yet to see any commentary focusing on the fact that whilst the AstraZeneca’s Health Connections blog states that ‘AstraZeneca believes that it is important to share information with patients by engaging with them online’, the principle information it seems to want to convey is the cost of the medication.

If I didn’t live in a country with a national health system and I was considering taking Nexium, I’d want to know about its efficacy as a treatment for acid reflux before I turned my attention to how much it costs.
What’s the key message here?
Nexium costs $18 a month.

Thanks.

Now, what is it for, what does it do, and is it effective?

By all means make the implicit message that ‘Nexium is an affordable medication’ explicit, but not at the expense of explaining why the medication is an effective treatment for the conditions it is indicated for.

Not doing so makes it look like AstraZeneca is trying to smuggle a message about affordability in through the back door.

The truly disappointing thing is, there’s really no need to do this: of course cost is an issue to consumers in geographies that don’t have national health systems, but why not state that plainly rather than embedding the message in a graphic?
AstraZeneca should take a long, cold look at the disjuncture between the narrative that they appear to believe they’re constructing around supporting educational need on their branded channel on YouTube (with comments currently switched off, I notice), and the primacy of the message they’re actually conveying around medication cost which consumers are exposed to first.....

A lack of confidence about social media is preventing pharmaceutical companies from making wider use of social media, according to a new report.

Digital Health: Building Social Confidence in Pharma by PR firm Weber Shandwick also found that regulatory restrictions were no longer seen as the primary barrier to social engagement.

Instead the pharma marketing and communications executives interviewed for the report said they faced a greater challenges internally when trying to 'socialise' their strategies, instill social media confidence in their teams and align resources.

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read further at the blog for inspiring quotes!

See also the blog for download referal for the new report..

The pharmaceutical industry's understanding and adoption of multichannel strategy is, at best, variable. While more enlightened organisations are trying hard to challenge the old models of sales and marketing, others are stubbornly sitting on their hands and persisting with tried-and-tested traditional methodology.

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In truth, it's simply paper under glass. To progress, companies perhaps need to become more proactive and pull multichannel planning into the strategic process much earlier. But to do this, they may need to develop a greater understanding of the opportunity and challenge some of the historical cultural values that are deeply embedded across the industry.

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“Thankfully, we appear to be coming to the end of the industry-wide obsession with digital and reaching a more level playing field, where companies realise there's a balance to be struck. But to move forward, we really need to follow consumer marketing's lead and develop an empirical way of measuring the value of activity. That will significantly inform our ability to plan a multichannel approach.”

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At present, the industry's use of multichannel marketing is often tactical - and rather than being stitched into the fabric of a properly planned pre-launch strategy, it's bolted on at the end as a product of the 'must do something digital' philosophy.

Following up the presentation of our project with a pharma company in the Netherlands on how Pharma can enhance its impact and reduce costs of marketing, we present our chalkboard sketch to construe a new commercial model for a pharmaceutical market approach:

An approach that would guide the decision makers in the company to construe the right set of activities to focus on accounts with the best chances of success, engage with its decision makers on drug prescription effectively and provide added value to their medicines so as to help care providers to help their patients better.

The model starts with the acknowledgement that there is not one right way for approaching all different markets to pharma with a standard approach. Preference schemes for drug selection, local protocols, reimbursement schemes, actual health care systems’ conditions, drug prices, different stakeholders and the very portfolio of the company, can only lead to the conclusion that differentiation should be the name of the game. (see here). The model needs to accommodate for these different conditions.

Since 2005, we developed and implemented a strategy to create a new pharma market approach in the Netherlands. Since 2010 it proves to be effective to grow ROI. Here (1/2) we describe concisely the project. In a few days, we will present a chalkboard sketch of the approach (2/2), based upon our review of the very project and our activities  to change the market approach and make it all effective. It hasn’t been a very structured process, as experimentation and development often is not, but the innovation worked and we could collect its benefits to the ROI of our client, a local affiliate of a large global pharmaceutical company. We are now using the decision and action tools that we developed in the course of the project, to create more adaptive pharma roles for other companies as well.

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PatientView's latest PatientView Plus reports

In January 2013, PatientView published ‘The Corporate Reputation of Pharma—the Patient Perspective', based on the opinions of 600 patient groups worldwide. PatientView is now releasing four reports on the performance of major pharma companies in Germany, Italy, UK and USA.

Surprisingly, the corporate reputation of pharma, and the rankings of each of the pharma companies, varies significantly between the four countries.

In 2012, 40% of 600 respondent patient groups believed that the corporate reputation of pharma had declined worldwide. However, patient groups' attitude to pharma varies significantly across the four countries analysed.

Pharma in the USA stands out as worst among the four countries: 

Top pharma performers for 2012

Having witnessed the evolvement of the Dutch Health Care Reform (see Wikipedia), it is inspiring to review it to evaluate what processes and forces have initiated the development and formed its course.

Based upon our studies, we construed this presentation (see blog)

Of course, as in many advanced health care systems, as it is probably so too in emerging countries’ systems of health care, “finances” are the dominant driver. But the power of longing for a good health and care for health makes the world  turn around. Health care systems all represent a common and core value in life: the personal health condition. It is closely monitored at different parameters to see how its development effects the very human condition.

In discussing possibilities for moving desired developments, we were reflecting on what processes or factors might be used to work along to stimulate innovation and change. If we could do so, we could change the system for the better and alongside with it, develop our businesses when they team up with the same intentions: better and more care for less money.

We had a very stimulating discussion about these possibilities to pharma companies about teaming up with the innovating forces in health care systems: we suggest a few in the presentation. Of course, it is way different from that what has been comprehended with the term “Market Access”. It could rather be changed into “market -” or “innovation collaboration.” 

Maybe the gap between consumer packaged good marketers and pharma marketers is finally closing. According to a new Accenture Report  ”the sales and marketing models of today need to be reshaped in order to be successful in today’s “new normal.  Reducing costs, mastering multichannel marketing and improving digital effectiveness are the top strategic priorities for pharmaceutical sales and marketing executives.”

Accenture says, There is a customer engagement revolution in motion in the Life Sciences industry as it faces life in the “new normal” after the peak of the patent cliff1. The industry is in an era where targeting specific populations and improving patient outcomes is critical for specialty products and where reaching more customers in rapidly developing markets is paramount for growth. This revolution is requiring companies to rethink how they can reach patients, payers, providers and governments in both mature and emerging markets—at speed, at the right price and with the right information for each target audience. This is a significant change from the “feet on the street,” single message selling model that worked well for blockbuster drugs in mature healthcare markets.

And I think I finally found out why agency people are reporting that pharma is spending more in digital marketing. According to the report

The use of third-party service providers is a relatively common practice in the industry that will continue to increase.

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The real challenge is can third parties really provide the best analytics and digital marketing strategy as someone who actually works within the brand team/company?  It has been my experience that too many pharma companies treat third parties as vendors and don’t always share every bit of important information. Even more important outside agencies need to understand the dynamics, including the corporate politics, within the organization.  Employees who don’t understand digital marketing and want to hold onto more “glamorous” channels like TV may fight the shift in dollars to analytics and digital marketing. Still this is great news for pharma which has a reputation of coming late to the party.

Wer nach der Einnahme eines Medikamentes eine Nebenwirkung spürte, ging zum Arzt oder Apotheker. Doch ob das Problem weitergegeben wurde, wussten die wenigsten. Das kann jetzt jeder selbst ändern.
Patienten können in Deutschland jetzt direkt mögliche Nebenwirkungen von Arzneimitteln an Behörden melden. Das Bundesinstitut für Arzneimittel und Medizinprodukte (BfArM) und das Paul-Ehrlich-Institut (PEI) für Impfstoffe starteten die Testphase für ein Internetportal, um solche Berichte schneller und einfacher erfassen zu können. Dadurch sollen unbekannte Nebenwirkungen früher als bisher erkannt und – wenn nötig – Maßnahmen zur Risikominimierung eingeleitet werden.

Über das neue Internetportal verbraucher-uaw.pei.de haben Patienten und Verbraucher nunmehr Zugang zu einem (relativ) einfachen Meldeformular. .."

Pharma’s new commercial model is not easily created.

We see Pharma companies to add all sorts of new programs to their company, like “Closed Loop Marketing”, “Sales Force Effectiveness”, “Key Account Management”, “Key Opinion Leader Management”, “Customer First”, or “Customer Excellence”, “Market Access management” etc.

Surely all kinds of innovations to focus and approach promotion in a new way.
Also, Social Media, Websites and On line Communities are created to “get the word out..”

But for now, we want to focus on edetailing as a core aspect for triggering the road map to create more effect and collaboration with customers (physicians and other caregivers) to support patients’ therapies, such as compliance support. ...

See presentation

FirstWord Pharma - Gain Access to the Information You Need Track the Companies,
Products, and Regulatory Areas of Most Interest to You

Compilation of pharmaceutical trends and strategies 2013

from Cutting Edge Information.

The report gives a quick overview of key areas a pharmaceutical industry has to tend to for its business..

Download link to the pdf of the report

Warum Soziale Ärztenetzwerke für Ihre Marketingstrategie unerlässlich seien werden

My colleague Ritesh Patel (@ritters90 for those of you who don’t currently follow him) is going to be giving his thoughts from an event chairman’s perspective in the near future, but when it’s fresh in my mind I thought I’d give a perspective from the floor.

To me, the most important thinking fell into three categories:

- Pharma is finally putting multichannel in its proper context

- Social is getting serious

- Gamification is gaining proper meaning

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