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A recent industry survey by ZS Associates about Call Planning Practices in the US shows that almost a third of the companies currently consider group practice affiliations in their call planning, and an additional 40% are planning to do this in the future. So group practices are becoming an important factor.

A recent industry survey by ZS Associates about Call Planning Practices in the US shows that almost a third of the companies currently consider group practice affiliations in their call planning, and an additional 40% are planning to do this in the future.

So group practices are becoming an important factor.

Most organizations that are using group practice data report only average or low satisfaction with the data quality, which may explain why almost all involve the field to gather or complement group practice information. There is a lot of frustration with these processes, and significant energy is spent on making group practice information more robust and reliable.

But could it be that the need for better affiliations data is just a red herring? The key question is what we use this data for, once we have collected and cleansed it. And in the vast majority of the cases the answer is to identify lower value physicians within a practice to allow opportunistic calls, i.e. allow making calls to physicians that would normally not make it onto the call plan.

Since the rep is anyway on site, it is very sensible to make these additional calls. The incremental costs of these calls are almost nil. But if allowing these opportunistic calls is the objective, why limit ourselves to group practices? What about the physician who is in the same street, perhaps even the same building, but NOT part of the group practice? The same logic should apply to these co-located physicians as well, shouldnt it? If this is true, spending all the energy on getting the affiliations right may be a waste of time.

Instead, we should rather make sure that we have accurate addresses, i.e. the location of the doctor, and use those to define clusters of doctors that are in proximity to each other, or co-located within a chosen radius. And that is a much easier task. Working on the affiliations would be needed if companies wanted to handle group practices as accounts. But this would require that group practices really behave like an account, i.e. set account therapy guidelines, make joint decisions that affect Rx behavior etc. And the reps would have an account strategy and an account management plan. But that is rarely the case, at least in the US. In reality most group practices are just doctors who band together to share a facility for convenience and support synergies, not to define any practice-level therapy strategies. Regarding Rx decisions, the docs are still mostly independent (there may be some exceptions and in countries outside the US the situation may also be different).

So calling on them in 1:1 interactions makes perfect sense. And in that case co-location is more important that group affiliation and we dont really need to worry so much about group practice data and its quality (or lack thereof). Any opinions?