Marketing with patients, payers, and providers in mind
Veronique Toully, vice president of UCB, on how to position the 3Pspatients, payers, and healthcare providersat the front end of company strategy.
Remember when healthcare providers were the only primary stakeholders in the pharmaceutical industry? How times have changed. These days, stakeholders consist of an array of healthcare providers, payers, policy makers, and patients. Those companies that fail to acknowledge this changed dynamic are setting themselves up for a rude awakening, says Veronique Toully, vice president of UCB.
The world has changed and we need to change as an industry, she says. In order to adapt, she recommends positioning what she calls the 3 PsPayers, Patients, and healthcare Providersat the front end of the company strategy. To start with the first of those, Toully says that a marketing strategy fit for the 21st century must collaborate with payers early in the development process.
Seek advice from HTAs
In the olden days, pharma often would wait until marketing authorization to engage with payers; that is, until it was time to be reimbursed. We all know now thats a recipe for failure, Toully says. A more enlightened approach is to start considering payer needs as early as Phase II, she says. And to do so, she recommends seeking early advice from Health Technology Assessment agencies like the UKs NICE.
Novartis was a pioneer on this front. In 2008 the company sought the advice of the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) regarding its psoriasis drug NOV001. Specifically, Novartis was interested in trials design, choice of comparator drug, study population, and endpoints, as well as the design of the economic evaluation. Novartiss partnership with NICE was successful, and as a result NICE has created an official process for other companies to seek their counsel. Its as easy as going to the NICE website and informing them that you have a product in Phase II and would like advice.
UCB, says Toully, has used NICE for a Phase II product and has been satisfied with the results, though it hasnt been painless to institute the change. It needs to involve a very collaborative approach within your company, Toully says. Because you need to convince your clinical development colleague that they need to talk to the payer in phase II, which is something completely new for them. At the end of the day, however, those same clinical development colleagues have been absolutely impressed and like the suggestions, Toully says. I encourage any company to go through that process because its really, really insightful.
Integrate patients into the strategy
Like payers, patients need to be considered early and integrated into a marketing strategy, says Toully. The healthcare market used to be viewed as a unique case, in that the client (the patient) was not the actual market client. Rather the doctor was. Which meant that ultimately it was not patients who were driving payments or decisions.
That, too, has changed, Toully says. Thanks to the Internet and the rise of social media, patients are more empowered than ever before and often are the ones buying drugs and voicing opinion. Toully says its critical to listen to them.
One way to do so is to partner with a patient advocacy group or a patient community. UCB, for instance, has partnered with PatientsLikeMe, an online community that aims to improve the lives of patients by allowing them to share each others stories, find other patients like them, and from these patients learn how to achieve the best health outcomes. PatientsLikeMe groups patients into communities by diseaseMS, Parkinsons, ALS, etc.wherein patients can create a profile and compare that profile with others.
Partnering with Advocacy groups
UCB partners with PatientsLikeMe to support patients with educational tools, but also to gain access to consolidated data. For us, its a mine of information, says Toully. They really report by themselves the way they are treated, how they cope with the treatment, and its an enormous source of data that we would like to use as we use data from observational studies. Ultimately, the data allows UCB to better understand patient needs early on in their development cycle.
As for the third Phealthcare providersToully says its essential that pharma understand how providers and patients connect or, in many cases, fail to. In this changed marketplace, she says the nature of the dialogue between patients and providers must be built into early phases of a marketing strategy. Patients and providers often dont speak the same language, she says. They are not in the same emotional mode, and they are completely disconnected. And thats where we can help them reconnect for the good of everyone.
Patient-provider dialogue
Toully recommends doing ethnographic research to better understand the patient-provider dialogue. Ethnographic research entails examining a community in an unobtrusive manner (through observation, video, or self-documentation). Ethnographic research is especially useful relatively early in the insight gathering stage to get a broad understanding of experiences, behaviors, beliefs, and needs. UCB recently did an ethnographic study for a product in development in diabetic neuropathic pain, or DNP. They were interested in knowing when patients and providers talk about DNP, who initiates the conversation, and is the dialogue communicative?
UCBs take-away from the study was that gaps exist on both sides of the line, and that UCB must work to fine-tune its message and create educational tools to help develop the relationship between the patient and the physician. Whats nice about ethnographic research like this, says Toully, is that study size is small (oftentimes around 20 patients) and thus not too costly. Considering the amount of information you can glean, ethnographic research gives pharma a lot of bang for its buck.
To summarize, says Toully, clearly as a group our objective is to bring those payers, patients, and healthcare providers into our world development team, to be sure that the colleagues who are working on the drug of the future have access to this real-life experience, and can really learn from them and incorporate that into the front end of the UCB strategy.
You can meet Veronique by attending eyeforpharma's Marketing Excellence & Analytics conference in Sydney on 27-28 April. More details can be found here.