There’s a lot of emphasis on the need for partnerships between pharma and physicians. They must work together to provide value and accomplish their shared goal of improving patient care and outcomes. Pharma companies can achieve this by rethinking how they plan, launch, support, communicate, and coordinate with healthcare providers (HCPs).
In their 2015 whitepaper “HCPs: We Want Partnerships with Pharma”, Eyeforpharma details the changes affecting the relationship between the two parties. They surveyed 549 HCPs from various specialities. Asking them ‘what can pharma do to improve patient care?’
Today’s article is Part 1 of a 2-part series exploring what healthcare providers desire from their pharma industry counterparts.
We are calling it AUTHENTICITY.
In Part 1 we will explain how HCPs want pharmaceutical sales reps (PSRs) to raise awareness about diseases, improve their understanding of patients’ lives, create treatment packages, help with research to educate doctors on rare diseases, provide education for patients and physicians, and produce new drugs and data.
Awareness
Healthcare providers believe that the pharma sales and marketing teams should be striving to increase awareness about diseases - especially rare ones - health-related issues, and treatment programs.
They can improve communications by organizing seminars that focus on diseases and treatments, provide better information for the public, and develop products and apps that help educate doctors and patients.
Digital channels should also be utilized for raising awareness as the majority of doctors and patients seek out medical information online.
Understanding
Right now pharma reps are focusing on medical conditions in general rather than on individual patients. In order to improve the healthcare process they should seek to understand each patient’s individual story.
Treatment
HCPs want pharma companies to start creating treatment packages. A treatment package includes information resources for patients and their families, as well as emotional support programs.
They can use new technologies to begin creating personalized therapies, especially with the help and availability of new diagnostic and therapeutic options. This will allow for customizable healthcare.
Help
Pharma companies can help HCPs by addressing unmet clinical needs.
Rare disease research and education is an unmet need. Pharma can help by creating online learning modules – such as mycme.com – to help train general practitioners and specialists on how to treat and care for patients with these rare diseases.
For their part, PSRs should also be utilizing digital content management to organize all of their content. They can place their research and education pieces into designated folders or sales playbooks that enable them to have easy access and multi-channel capability from one device. This empowers PSRs to become information concierges, ready with information whenever a physician needs it.
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Other unmet needs that pharma can help research include: HIV treatments, autoimmune diseases, cancer, infectious diseases, allergies, etc.
Education
PSRs need to provide education, information, and digital resources for both patients and HCPs.
Creating easy access to literature for patients and physicians can help to improve their knowledge about diseases and medications. Pharma sales and marketing teams can use digital channels, publish online or in print, they can focus on specific disease understanding and prevention. Pharma education needs to be available on the platforms that patients and HCPs are using. This will be further explained in Part 2 in the ‘Technology’ section.
One interesting way that some pharma companies are improving education is by partnering with the government at a local level to create learning programs. These programs are proven to be successful in raising awareness, leading to disease prevention and earlier diagnosis. However, these programs do take a lot a time to set-up and organize.
Meanwhile, access to HCPs is declining; they have less time than ever to spend in sales meetings (Source: ZS Associates, 2015). This means that PSRs need an efficient way of delivering information in a time crunch. To combat this PSRs can use a pharma sales enablement platform to send content directly to doctors, letting them view it at their own convenience. They can also monitor HCPs content engagement in real time, seeing which pieces of content were the most useful.
New
Investing in research into new drugs, devices, and technology will provide the greatest satisfaction for doctors. New generations of drugs and data can change the course and prognosis for many diseases.
New innovative research is what doctors want pharma to focus on. This includes, phase 4 studies (clinical trials evaluating the long-term effects of new drugs and treatments, post-FDA approval), molecules, combining drugs into simple pills, levels of tolerance, antibiotic development, and rare diseases (Source: Accord Clinical Research).
There has also been a rise in real-world evidence (RWE) studies. This research is gaining favour with HCPs because they’re beginning to recognize the benefits. Since RWE represents a broader population than traditional clinical trails, and often over a longer timeframe, it provides HCPs with more information on outcomes, allowing them to accurately assess drug performance details (Source: Eye For Pharma, 2015).
Conclusions
HCP desire AUTHENTICITY from pharma.
That’s really what it boils down to. You can’t fake authenticity. You have to build it into the way you engage, and into the value that you deliver.
This article explains the second half of authenticity. How healthcare providers (HCPs) want pharma sales reps (PSRs) to utilize technology, ask for patient input, build a support community, become more involved in the healthcare process, and work as a team. The final point will be to discuss why PSRs are working hard to improve patient care and outcomes.
If you’re struggling to gain access to HCPs, to deliver the content they want to use, or to earn their trust for long-term outcomes, you may be in need of an adaptive sales enablement solution.
Request a demo below and let our sales specialists show you just how easy ‘authenticity’ can be.
