Making Pharma-supported Compliance Programs Independent Of Marketing

12-11-2006 | Categories:

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:

These are my personal opinions and do not represent the opinions of Pharma Marketing News, a monthly e-newsletter that I publish. Read the newsletter for a more unbiased presentation of facts, product reviews and coverage of pharma industry conferences — all based upon interviews with experts in the field of pharmaceutical marketing.

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:

One thing I learned was that to understand compliance and adherence problems, you need a lot of data and analysis — math, in other words. Many of the presenters were vendors or solution providers and some presented data tables and plots, which I saw sailing right over the heads of many pharma marketers in the room. Aversion to math is just one problem about assigning the compliance problem to marketers. The other is that compliance is a long-term problem and marketers — especially pharmaceutical marketers — are short-term thinkers. How can they be otherwise? After 2 years, product managers move on to another product or department. Compliance is the next guy’s problem.

Mr. Mack goes on to describe ideas raised about using social networking to reach patients and concludes,

In fact, every solution we came up with would be a problem for pharmaceutical marketers who don’t understand patients’ needs very well. Whatever the compliance solution is, I propose that marketers be taken out of the equation. They are neither equipped nor motivated to solve the problem.

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:

Just as MSLs and physician education programs are now separate from marketing with their own budgets, patient advocates and patient education programs (ie, compliance-focused campaigns) must be separate from marketing and have their own budgets as well. Only then will pharma companies be equipped to deal with the long-term issues of compliance and adherence and perhaps solve them, IMHO.

From Mr. Mack’s lips to God’s ear.


Footnotes


  1. 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. [back]


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