The Inspiration
In the movie, Miracle On 34th Street, Kris Kringle is hired to be the Santa for Macy’s store on 34th Street in New York City. He causes a storm of reactions of all sorts when he sends one woman shopper to another store, Schoenfeld’s, for a fire engine for her son and tells another mother that Macy’s rival, Gimbel’s, has better skates for her daughter.
And the result?
Kris Kringle’s unorthodox practice of recommending rival stores when they have better bargains generates so much good publicity and customer goodwill for Macy’s that Mr. R.H. Macy himself proffers bonuses to the executives who hired Santa and, in a show of cooperation, shakes hands with his biggest competitor, Mr. Gimbel (Herbert H. Heyes), owner of Gimbels Department Store.
And What Does That Have To Do With Patient Compliance?
Well, perhaps it’s time for pharma to acknowledge that running patient compliance programs that focus on only one medication the sponsoring company manufactures has resulted in neither improved compliance or good will from the public or healthcare professionals and consider the potential benefits of cooperating with their competitors to create a patient compliance strategy that is widely supported and targets a wide range of diseases and treatments.
Nor should pharma be the only group involved. Improvements in patient compliance would primarily benefit two industries financially: pharmaceuticals and healthcare insurance. From this admittedly oversimplified perspective, it follows that these two groups would have the most to gain by funding such a project.
To avoid both regulatory problems and divisiveness within the leadership, this consortium would fund a third party organized for the purpose from experts in the scientific or medical community to develop and administer the program with the funders and other stakeholders serving as a board of directors. To assure transparency, full and detailed reports of the activities of this patient adherence supergroup would made not only to the directorship and all funders, but also to clinicians and the public.
For their part, organizations representing healthcare professionals and healthcare organizations, such as hospital and outpatient groups would have a seat on the oversight committee in return for their support in urging their members to follow the guidelines produced.
Likewise patient support organizations would have an official role exchanging information and insights with the project leadership in return for their support of and cooperation with the programs.
Finally, the other major stakeholder, the government, also a major fiscal beneficiary, would coordinate the multiple regulatory agencies to streamline the program implementation and provide tax advantages for those funding the project.
That doesn’t seem very realistic
As Fred Gaily, who successfully represented Kris Kringle at the hearing to determine if he were actually Santa Claus, puts it,
Besides, there’s this Who’s Been Naughty & Nice List thing.
