Compliance, Math, and Marketers John Mack; December 01, 2006
John Mack provides an upfront description of hs blog, which is useful in placing his comments in context:
The specific posting that referenced here is based on Mr. Mack’s observations of the goings-on at eyeforpharma’s 3rd Annual Patient Compliance and Adherence Congress in Philadelphia. While the entire entry is worth reading,1 the portion most pertinent to my point follows:
Mr. Mack goes on to describe ideas raised about using social networking to reach patients and concludes,
I’m taken by this recommendation, especially coming as it does from someone intimately familiar with the pharmaceutical industry. When I’ve corresponded with marketers about compliance projects, those individuals were, almost without exception, bright, personable, and significantly more forthcoming than I would have anticipated. Still, they all thought of compliance, congruent with Mr. Mack’s assessment, in terms of short-term projects limited to one medication (one produced, of course, by their corporation) or, at most, one disease (for which their corporation produced a heavily-used medication). As Mr. Mack puts it, “How can they be otherwise?”
And, I agree that “Patient Opinion Leader” (Mack’s term for patients already on medication who would serve as outreach agents to other patients) is a grand notion (OK, I think it’s grand because I’ve been pushing it myself for a while now) as part of the solution. But, that idea, from my perspective, is a sidelight to the post’s main point:
From Mr. Mack’s lips to God’s ear.
Footnotes
- One somewhat puzzling note is the distinction between “compliance” and “adherence” Mr. Mack reports was made at the conference:
Compliance concerns following the dosing regime of a drug. You can measure it as the percent of doses of a drug taken as prescribed while the patient is actively taking drug.
Adherence, on the other hand, concerns refilling the prescription. As time goes on, patients refill less and less often and many drop the medication altogether. It has been estimated that in developed countries only 50% of patients who suffer from chronic diseases adhere to treatment recommendations. This is measured with ‘persistence’ curves.
I am unfamiliar with these distinctions, and these definitions are not routinely used by clinicians or in the medical literature. There has been a movement advocating the use of “adherence” as less patronizing than “compliance,” but despite years of this effort, the majority of clinicians continue to use “compliance” and “adherence” interchangeably.↩
1 response so far ↓
1 John Mack // Dec 11, 2006 at 11:03 am
Thanks for the comments.
Regarding terminology — compliance and adherence have different meanings for pharmaceutical marketers although it may not make a difference to the physician. However, not even pharma marketers understand the difference or see the difference. I am not an expert in this area and neither are pharma marketers, which is why this problem needs to be taken out of their hands.
John Mack