It's a Patient-Payer World - Health Works Collective

This is the twelfth and final blog post in a twelve part series that transforms ideas from the marketing world at large into practical plans for pharmaceutical marketing in the time of health care reform.

There’s a strong patient and payer bent to the topics I chose for this blog series. That’s because I believe we are coming to the end of physician marketing, as we know it.

From now on, it’s going to be a patient-payer world.

There will of course be communication to physicians. But rather than providing 20 glossy pages parsing minute differences between drugs, I believe promotional efforts will increasingly revolve around improving the patient experience, outcomes and costs. And payers, not physicians, will be the primary arbiters of what constitutes acceptable results at a good price.

In the future state, there will be virtually no “work around” solutions for products that don’t have a real value story.

And I am not alone in my views. At a Marcus Evans conference I attended,

Kurt Graves, CEO Intarcia, said the decision to launch a product now comes down to one question, “Is there enough value in this product for payers to pay for it.”

Physician marketing will also have to change, according to Steven Pal, Corporate Vice President, Global Strategic Marketing at Allergan. In his Marcus Evans talk, gone says Pal, are the days of the large mass-market field force. Instead, companies need to deploy, “smaller, more agile sales forces that are more attuned to customer needs.”

Patients will be at the forefront of any value equation in the future. In fact, according to Ben Haywood, co-founder of PatientsLikeMe, it will be patient value that defines market value, His company is helping industry incorporate relevant patient reported outcomes (PRO’s) into their drug development efforts.

Patients are finally getting the information they need to assess the price/value equation for the healthcare services they consume. The Health and Human Services Secretary release of the irrationally variable costs for common in-hospital procedures was a first good step. Across the country, the public’s eyes have been opened to the need to price shop, given the wide variability, even within the same city.

And quality of services, long held to be outside the ability of most patients to evaluate, is more readily available and digestible. For example, in Minnesota, patients can compare how individual clinics fare in helping patients meet their diabetes management goals.

Pharmaceutical marketing in the future will need a radically different game plan, one that is decidedly patient and payer oriented. Healthcare is evolving as we speak. Substantial change will happen regardless of how the Affordable Care Act, popularly known as “Obamacare,” is implemented. The outsized and often irrational costs of our current system have brought us to the place where the status quo is no longer possible.

As the popular saying goes, “People don’t change when they see the light, they change when they feel the heat.” Pharmaceutical marketers are now feeling the heat with shrinking budgets and sales forecasts. My intention with this blog series is to provide a little “light at the end of the tunnel” by demonstrating how others have addressed similar problems. Extro-analogs aren’t brain surgery. All you have to do is use the 3 e’s: