Four New Ideas—
And How Public Relations Helps Make Them Real


“In Pharma 3.0, companies will not be selling pills as much as managing entire patient experiences…companies will need to build the long-term relationships with patients that will become increasingly integral to their brands.
Ernest & Young “Progressions” Global Pharmaceutical Industry Report
2010

Yes, yes, there are a welter of change agents affecting the pharmaceutical industry and the larger health care enterprise. Many of them have been talked into the ground by industry observers, politicians and members of the health care communications community.
Ernest & Young recently published Progressions, its 2010 Global Pharmaceutical Industry Report. The report is full of good observations, but I was most interested in four seismic changes that they predict are having a profound and for the most part positive influences on health care and health communications.
1. Patient Empowerment Transforms to Patient Responsibility
Kind of sounds like a Republican Party catcall, but it’s a pretty accurate description of where the patient movement is going. Fifteen or twenty years ago we were talking about how the patient was becoming a partner in his or her health care and how the doctor was no longer the god in the white coat.
The democratization of information brought on largely, but not entirely by the Web, accelterated this. But just as the patient now has a voice in treatments, his responsibility towards risk-sharing is also rising. Just look at your drug co-pay scheme. You can receive the latest and greatest medication, vaccine or antibiotic, but you may be asked to contribute $40 or event $80 a month from your pocket for the treatment. Contrast that with a generic medication which may cost you just $10 or $20 dollars.
There are often extremely good reasons for using a newer medication. But as costs rise, the patient (and the doctor) will need to weigh its value versus older generic drugs.
Some predict patient responsibility may become even more urgent as some health care plans and companies consider rewarding employees practicing healthy behaviors or imposing higher insurance rates on over-weight employees or employees who smoke. For a number of reasons penalizing obese employees is bad public policy, but the idea is certainly on the table.
Public relations can help companies explain the relative benefits of branded medications and who should most profit from them. We can also work with companies outside of the health care arena on employee wellness initiatives.
2. The Transformation to Pharma 3.0.
This is Ernst & Young’s term, but the notion is not theirs alone. Pharma 1.0 could be considered “the good old days” in which a blockbuster drug would put wind in a company’s sails for years. A billion dollar molecule could contribute ten, twenty even forty percent of a company’s income. The problem was that as the patent ran out of gas, the company desperately had to refuel with another blockbuster or two. If was much like a treadmill, with its speed constantly increasing.
Pharma 2.0 was the diversification model: sell lots of drugs, but sell other things too, from over-the-counter brands to sutures. Abbott and Baxter led the way with this model, but others caught on as well.
Pharma 3.0 (which nicely merges with patient responsibility) is a new way of looking at the core business of the drug company: rather than simply selling medicines, it is selling health outcomes. So if company X is in the diabetes business, sure, it is developing a glucagon-like peptide analog, but it is also offering disease management programs for physicians and patients, drug persistence programs and other tools to help get the patient to where he or she needs to be.
Public relations plays a integral role here, as we are in a great position to help companies increase patient compliance and persistence through educational programs such as interactive learning modules and other tactics.
3. The New Players and New Partners
Health care companies are enlisting usual and not so usual partners in helping achieve Pharma 3.0. For instance, Bayer Healthcare has linked with Microsoft and the National Multiple Sclerosis Society to create “MyBrainGames” an online mental games center for people with MS.
Bayer has also partnered with Nintendo to create “Didget” a glucometer for kids with type 2 diabetes that can be plugged into a Nintendo game console. Novartis, Vodafone and IBM have created “SMS for Life,” that uses mobile phones and other technologies to manage supplies for people with malaria.
Relatively simply technology is allowing us to do great things. Johnson & Johnson, the federal government and other partners have launched Text4Baby, a service that sends SMS messages about nutrition, health and other important topics to pregnant women, based on their due date. A simple but effective service for women with limited access to other resources.
With so many potential partners in the greater health care space, public relations has far more opportunities for client partnerships. As many of these initiatives are centered on communications, who is better to help out than our industry?
4. The Value Proposition & Value Mining
It doesn’t take a health economist to figure out that in a cost-conscious environment, finding the relative worth of a medication will be the price of entry. There are many ways of looking at comparative effectiveness, far more than we can review here.
There’s a new spin on the value proposition, however. It’s called value mining.
In the old days, clinical trials and outcomes data were the private property of pharmaceutical companies. Outsiders, even clinical investigators, would get information only when the company thought it was time. Not so anymore.
According to Ernst & Young, regional health companies such as Partners in Boston and Intermountain Health in the west are using historical, empirical data to determine effectiveness of drugs already approved by the FDA. Armed with outcomes on thousands of patients, and computers capable of scrutinizing dozens of variables, these companies are running “parallel universe” clinical trials by simply and cheaply examining historical data to see which drugs work best on which patient groups.
Yes, this is turning clinical trials on their heads, looking backward instead of prospectively for outcomes. But how can biopharmaceutical companies deny the value of reams of data on thousands and thousands of patients? Communicating precisely the meaning of these retrospective trials and their implications for payers will be a massive challenge.
Patient responsibility, Pharma 3.0, new players and value mining are four change agents that cannot be ignored. They may not sound as sexy as the profound changes we are seeing as a result of the digital health transformation, but their impact, I believe, will equally great.