Cultivating Compliance By Peter Carkeek, Pharmaceutical Executive Europe. May 1, 2006
This article, composed of discussions with senior executives from some of Europe’s biggest pharmaceutical companies, speaks directly to the problems and potential solutions of phama’s involvement with compliance programs, issues raised in this blog in the post, Making Pharma-supported Compliance Programs Independent Of Marketing. I’ve listed some of the major ideas in excerpts or condensed form below, but the entire piece deserves reading.
Len Starnes, Head of e-business at Schering AG (Germany), points out that there “is a disconnect between the short-term focus of most marketing teams and the long-term commitment required to ensure the success of patient compliance programmes, particularly in long-term and chronic health conditions.”
The challenge, according to Di Stafford, head of patient relationship marketing for Pfizer UK, is obtaining the “cross-functional buy-in” necessary for success of patient compliance programs by these groups: medical, marketing, information technology, and sales.
Only high-value brands that are prescribed long-term offer sufficient financial returns for compliance programs. One solution recommended is involving other stakeholders, such as third party payers, to help finance more programs. Another is to view compliance programs as an integral part of the product itself rather than a value-added offering.
While compliance programs have the potential of benefiting multiple brands and business areas, most companies operate at the brand level with regard to planning and budgets.
Some pharma companies have had some success, establishing sophisticated programs that “integrate a variety of patient touch points such as dedicated professional nurses, contact centres, websites, and direct mail” and segment patients according to their risk of noncompliance.
Some companies are using behavioral specialists to garner an empathic understanding of patient issues.
David-Romain Bertholon, public health project manager at Schering Plough in France, reports “forming partnerships with patient organizations throughout France to better understand how to produce informational brochures that are both convenient and easy for patients to read.”
Bertholon goes on to say that the biggest challenge is to convince other non-pharma stakeholders that patient compliance issues and the pharma-supported compliance programs are important.
Yvonne van der Schouw, patient relations manager for Abbott in the Netherlands, also works with patient organizations, specifically to discover “how to improve information flows through print channels, such as magazines and newspaper articles, offering disease information on rheumatoid arthritis — an area of therapeutic importance to Abbott.” She also reports on Abbott’s use of third parties to communicate with consumer to avoid running afoul of restrictions on working directly with patients.
Commentary
This is a thoughtful reconsideration of pharma-sponsored medication compliance programs, which provides a valuable service by pointing out the complexities and intrinsic organizational conflicts that have limited the success of such efforts in the past. While some of the potential solutions vary, these fundamental concerns are parallels to the issues I’ve raised on this site and John Mack elaborated in his post, Compliance, Math, and Marketers. Clearly, the over-simplified notion of a time-limited adherence enhancement program that uses unproven methodology to promote one brand, an idea that has long been the standard approach in the industry, is insufficient. While it is disheartening that this trend has flourished and opportunities have been lost, that it is being challenged now is most encouraging.
Even more exciting (OK, it’s exciting mostly to patient adherence geeks like me, but still, … ) are the concepts raised in response to these problem. If manifest into reality, such ideas (e.g., expanding the scope of those involved in supporting the programs, bringing in other stakeholders, using behavioral specialists to identify important patient traits, and working with patient groups) hold the potential to make a quantum leap in compliance enhancement.