Measuring patient communication success
Integral to any corporate activitys longevity is proving its value to the company; patient communication is no different. Unless those in charge of divvying up funding understand that an investment in patient education will result in a direct increase in new patients and a higher adherence rate for those already on the product, they will not allocate resources to continue the programs.
Large pharmaceutical companies face falling stock prices and imminent patent cliffs. Small pharmaceutical and biotech companies see their cash-on-hand depleting more every day, with no available funding on the horizon. None of these companies can afford to throw money away on programs that show no financial benefit. With no dedicated resources or perhaps even worse, insufficient resources valuable patient communication programs will never reach their full potential. Brand teams must find ways to measure accurately both the quantifiable and qualitative aspects of their programs and clearly present the results to management.
As it stands, only half of surveyed brand teams consistently calculate ROI on their patient communication campaigns. While not a rule, for the most part, brand teams in charge of the larger, more recognizable products seem the least likely to measure ROI. This is most likely due to the fact that these brands already drive in hundreds, if not billions, of dollars in revenues. For now, executives in charge of these brands are not demanding to know why they should continue funding patient education programs. Should market share start shifting to another brand, however, this will change. Proactive brand managers must begin measuring ROI now when the climate is favorable to their drug in order to be prepared for when patients start flocking to the latest and greatest brand to hit the market.
The smaller brands already face the difficulties associated with limited market share. If these brands do not document sales growth due to their activities, their patient education programs will be discontinued. In light of that, these brands show the most innovative techniques to quantify qualitative data, instead of relying solely on total prescription growth. Brand teams for the larger products would do well to learn from their smaller product counterparts. Incidentally, overall marketing budgets show no correlation to the brand teams proclivity to measure or not measure ROI.
Find ROI Measurements that Will Prove Patient Communication Success
Although there are more than a dozen quantitative ROI measurements, most brand teams choose from a shorter list of five:
Total prescription volume
New prescription volume
Returned postcards volume
Website traffic
Call center volume
As Figure A shows, no one measurement shows universal acceptance among brand teams. Of the 16 surveyed brand teams that calculate ROI on a regular basis, the most prevalent measures website traffic, new prescription volume and total prescription volume are only used by nine, amounting to an underwhelming 56%. The next highest in prevalence, call center volume, falls a mere 6% behind, and returned postcards volume provide the least benefit to brand teams. Nineteen percent of surveyed companies choose to utilize other metrics in addition to those above. These include request-for-information emails, patient meeting attendance and visits to patient centers.
The lack of consistency underscores the difficulty inherent in establishing an ROI protocol. Of the five most prevalent techniques, none are likely to show a direct link to patient communications. New prescription volume and total prescription volume result from numerous other company activities sales rep details, journal ads, DTC, sampling, speakers, pricing and reimbursement strategies, coupons and more most of which probably have a more direct influence than patient communications.
Website traffic also presents a gray area. Patient communication teams cannot prove that website traffic has increased based on their campaigns. They have no idea how many hits were due to independent research by the patient, random hits from people searching for competitor products, or even competitor companies studying the website for their own needs. To compensate, brand teams will scrutinize how people reached the site (either directly, through a search engine or from an online advertisement), length of time spent browsing on the site, which individual pages are accessed and recurrence of visits from single IP addresses. Even so, brand teams find it difficult to prove ROI based solely on website traffic.
With new technology, brand teams should have the capabilities to document a direct link between patient communications and website hits. For example, Eli Lillys depression drug Cymbalta has frequently been aligned with the phrase depression hurts.
Figure A: Prevalence of Quantitative ROI Measurements in Calculating Patient Communication Success
If patients type in www.depressionhurts.com, they will be redirected to Cymbaltas home page. The same holds true for Mercks HPV vaccine Gardasil and its one less campaign. Knowing how many hits to a site are generated from a phrase specific to a patient communication campaign will go a long way toward proving direct ROI.
Returned postcards probably present the closest link to patient communications programs, but they, too, misrepresent the effects of programming. While the postcards may only be available within the patient program, they do not necessitate reading through and comprehending the pamphlet about the brand. On the other end of the spectrum, few patients completing the program will take the time to return a postcard. The postage is free, but the time to fill out the card and deliver it to the post office is not. In addition, as the world has become increasingly high-tech, mailing a postcard to find out more information on a product seems obsolete, so most patients will not bother. In many cases, the websites information is more detailed and is immediately available to anyone with an Internet connection.
This article is an excerpt of a study conducted by pharmaceutical intelligence firm Cutting Edge Information. To learn more about the study, download summary here: http://www.cuttingedgeinfo.com/patient-communication/