Improving patient communication: New year, new approach?
As we all strive to follow through on our New Years resolutions, Di Stafford offers her own resolutions for pharma to engage successfully with patients in 2011
For companies with smoking cessation and weight loss products, this is one of the busiest times of year, as people use the impetus of the New Year to resolve to finally kick the habit or fight the flab.
Perhaps then it would also be a good time for pharma marketing managers to reflect on their own plans for the coming year, to look at what weve learned over the last 12 months, and to resolve to make improvements in 2011.
Here are my own suggestions for improving patient communications and relationships in 2011.
Market to people, not to patients
Thankfully, weve now moved away from defining people by their condition.
We say people living with diabetes rather than diabetics, for example.
But we sometimes fall back into the habit in the way we communicate with them.
To pharma, a patients condition and relationship with their medicines may seem like the most important factor in their lives, but in reality its often what they least want to think about.
Patients are people; they have families, friends, hobbies, interests, jobs, and responsibilities, all of which compete for mind-share.
We need to work hard to understand our patients in the context of their everyday lives and build the relationship in a way that integrates seamlessly with this.
Which healthcare professionals do patients trust and listen to most?
Which media do they use most often?
With which websites and communities do they most actively engage online?
By partnering with groups that patients already trust, pharma can quickly build more meaningful and effective relationships.
(For more on engaging with patients, see The patients view: How patients can add value toand influencepharma.)
Invite patients to join the conversationor join theirs
Its now over a decade since Prahalad and Ramaswamy first introduced their concept of co-creation in the Harvard Business Review, then going on to further develop the idea in their book The Future of Competition.
Co-creation is the collaboration between users and producers to create a product that the end-user really wants and values.
It is about organizations unleashing the creative energy of people by inviting and enabling them to interact differently.
Openness and information-sharing does not come easily to the closed-door, highly confidential pharma industry, but leading co-creation advocate and president of the Experience Co-Creation Partnership Francis Gouillart passionately believes this is precisely the approach that will yield greatest success in the future.
In many cases, patients are already having the conversations with one another, and pharma needs to start playing a role.
On PatientsLikeMe.com, chronic diseases sufferers co-create with one another to take control of their conditions.
Using on-site tools, they can track their symptoms, treatments, and responses over time.
Information about a patients medication and treatment is collected, and they can compare their response with others.
Overall efficacy and side effects of medications can be easily viewed.
Pharma needs to initiate conversations with patients and invite them to help improve the medicines they take, and companies also need to join the conversations and debates that are already taking place.
(For more on collaborating with patients and physicians, see The pharma connection: How to foster patient-physician collaboration.)
Develop a clear focus on patient effectiveness
Over the last few years, weve seen continuing focus on sales force effectiveness and customer effectiveness, but weve yet to see a meaningful discussion about the concept of patient effectiveness.
Commercial value may be the ultimate end goal, but its important to understand the key patient-related drivers that lie behind this.
Where is brand growth going to come fromnewly diagnosed users, people switching from other brands, or from improving adherence among existing or lapsed users?
Which patients account for the highest percentage of brand volume, and how well served are they?
Committing to an on-going review of existing activities is also vital to establish what works and to make informed choices about where to invest both time and budget in the future.
Invest in developing patient marketing capability
Rather than being seen as just the marketing secondment for the former sales representative, its time that the job of patient marketing manager was recognized as an important role in its own right.
The rolewhich may include leading patient research and segmentation, developing propositions, and a communications strategyrequires a broad range of capabilities.
A truly patient-centric approach is necessary, and specialist knowledge to develop and run patient adherence programs may also be needed.
Rather than hoping that on-the-job training will suffice, companies should seriously consider investing in patient marketing training and capability development.
Leading pharmaceutical companies are already running training programs to create a common approach to patient marketing and developing processes and tools together with case studies to demonstrate and share best practice.
The world of patient marketing is constantly evolving, with new channels and challenges emerging.
Marketing capability programs are being continually updated to reflect the changing landscape and prepare marketing managers, giving them a competitive edge for the future.
So, will we see pharma companies embracing these resolutions in 2011?
I really hope so.
Of course, as patient behavior-change experts, we all know that old habits are hard to change.
And did I mention that a recent survey found that 90% of New Years resolutions had been broken by February? Probably best not to
Happy New Year!
Di Stafford is director of The Patient Practice, a health-marketing consultancy. She specializes in health communication, patient compliance, and health-related behaviour change.