Over the past decade, numerous changes have impacted the healthcare market and driven marketplace volatility. Among them, managed care continues to influence brand success, and Medicare Part D is creating a new dynamic within the industry.
Additionally, consumers are more educated about the effects and costs of drugs, while physicians are less accessible than ever before, both to the sales rep and patient. Opt-out and opt-in programs allow physicians to eliminate the capture of their prescribing, limiting the manufacturers’ ability to understand how best to serve their physician and patient base.
As these changes impact product sales, brand team leaders are charged with combating stagnating product growth. They must turn to evidence-based decision-making to drive efficient and effective brand strategies and tactics. The most effective marketing strategies depend on identifying the population of patients who are potentially eligible for treatment, further enabling marketing efforts to be focused on the unique treatment behaviors, attitudes and degree of influence exhibited by the healthcare stakeholders who play a role in treatment.
Increasingly, pharma companies are integrating anonymized patient-level data (APLD) into business processes to measure brand performance. APLD can be used to develop a patient market map that yields specific data about disease populations and the manner in which they are treated. By populating the map in this way, the brand manager has the benefit of a robust data set that allows for visibility into all aspects of a patient’s treatment. In today’s times of constrained resources, the map is an invaluable tool.
Heather von Allmen is senior principal, commercial effectiveness, at IMS Health
From the January 04, 2010 Issue of MM+M - Medical Marketing and Media
