AlignMap

Gosh, this is difficult.  Well, I may as well just come out with it – at the risk of appearing to be a shill for Pfizer, I must admit that the points made by European brand manager, Chris Venn, at eyeforpharma’s recent Patient Compliance Europe 2008 conference, as reported in Patient compliance programs: Learnings from the trenches, are valid, insightful, and useful.

That’s right – Mr. Venn is pushing ideas that are congruent with my own.

I know, what are the odds?

Excerpts follow:

There is evidence, he says, that disease awareness and health campaigns work, but companies must ensure that the campaigns are aligned with the expectations for physicians and don’t unduly influence the “worried well” to simply find new conditions to go talk to their doctors about. “As an industry, we must be aware of and sensitive to this concern,” Venn says.

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For those that actually register and participate in outreach compliance programs, adherence is improved, he reports, but there are concerns that self-selection and low registrations yield limited results. “We must do more work to be sure we’re registering the right patients and not just ones that would be compliant anyway,” Venn says. “If so, our ROI will be hugely negative.”

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Designing an effective program relies not only on providing information but on motivating and influencing patients, he says.

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He believes the industry is too focused on taking pills rather than on patient outcomes. “The real goal is improve outcomes for patients, regardless of how many pills they take,” Venn says. “So, we need to think much more broadly about our campaigns and activities.”

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To increase registration, a major hurdle for such compliance programs, Venn says companies must make sure that physicians recognize the program as useful. To improve registration rates, Pfizer includes information about LifeREWARDS in sales aids, makes easy for reps to explain, keeps it simple for doctors to register patients and makes it easy for patients to sign themselves up, Venn says. It is also working with other stakeholders, such as pharmacists and smoking cessation advisors, to support registration.

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He advises using segmentation to find similarities and identify the best ways to communicate.

Commentary

Let’s recap.  Mr. Venn promotes alignment of all stakeholders, the need to motivate patients rather than just provide them with information, the importance of looking at outcomes rather than adherence to a schedule of pill dosages, the futility of generating high compliance rates by de facto cherry picking of patients, and the utility of segmentation.

On the other hand, AlignMap.com promotes alignment of all stakeholders, the need to motivate patients rather than just provide them with information, the importance of looking at outcomes rather than adherence to a schedule of pill dosages, the futility of generating high compliance rates by de facto cherry picking of patients, and the utility of segmentation.

This is extremely heartening – unless it’s a sign of the impending apocalypse.