Gérard Klop - Vintura Consultancy
Traditional healthcare delivery has been on its way out for well over a decade now, as patient outcomes and measurable value have increased in importance. As the population demographic continues to age, all stakeholders in the industry need to plan care pathways that emphasize a more holistic approach. This should have a focus on wellness; the targeting and tracking of emerging conditions; and pre-emptive interventions.
However, these changes also present the pharmaceutical industry with a golden opportunity to reposition its role and contribute more directly to a healthier future – one in which the ecosystem functions more seamlessly as one, improving and integrating existing care delivery, and where outcomes and value can be more readily measured.
The major players have known for some time that the days of simply supplying pills are over. Becoming more deeply embedded in the delivery and monitoring of patient outcomes offers pharmaceutical companies a new chance to reposition themselves as trusted healthcare partners who can play a role in transforming healthcare, and build their reputations both as individual companies and as an industry.
So how can pharmaceutical companies position themselves optimally for such a future?
New Types of Partnership
The pharmaceutical industry's role is going to change, whether the industry likes it or not. The cycle of developing and patenting blockbuster drugs and maximizing sales before they fall into the hands of generics manufacturers is coming to an end. As more advanced, personalized and targeted therapeutics take over, pharmaceutical companies need to be able to justify the high prices of those treatments through closer real-world monitoring of their impact on patients.
Most leading pharmaceutical companies recognize the need for such change. They acknowledge the shift to value-based and value-managed healthcare and, in many cases, have already started to nurture new types of partnership with hospitals and physicians, sowing the seeds for a more collaborative, embedded and value-based role.
Long-Term Engagement
However, this journey will be a slow and steady one. A shift away from each ‘function’ or set of stakeholders in the healthcare ecosystem operating from its own agenda is an important step forward, but for the industry to really assume a role as a trusted partner, it must first identify what it is bringing to the table, beyond simply access to products and therapies.
Teams cannot just approach healthcare providers with a different Powerpoint presentation and expect to reset the terms of engagement. Rather there must be long-term engagement at different levels in the healthcare system, from physicians up to national authorities, to reposition the role of the industry and shape the readiness of healthcare ecosystems for upcoming innovation.
Shaping Healthcare Evolution
Compared to physicians who are delivering care in the here and now, pharmaceutical companies are ahead of the curve in their scientific knowledge and have deep research and valuable clinical development-based insights they can share. And because they understand precisely how more-targeted therapies ought to work, pharmaceutical companies have an opportunity to help shape the evolution of the healthcare system and the way that it contracts and budgets for treatments.
As proficient collators and analyzers of data, meanwhile, pharmaceutical organizations could help to transform the monitoring and reporting of outcomes, by providing advice on shared access to appropriate IT infrastructure and making it easier for clinicians to capture data more routinely and consistently.
Follow an Overarching Strategy
It is tempting for companies to send ‘advisors’ into individual hospitals to establish individual projects linked to a particular treatment with a view to accelerating progress, but this approach is likely to backfire. A piecemeal approach risks driving up costs without achieving critical mass and, more crucially, without driving an overarching strategy.
Meaningful transformation requires conscious C-level reflection on the kind of role that pharmaceutical companies want to play in the future, which in turn will be informed by their primary areas of therapeutic focus to which they are committed for the long term. It is only by aligning any next decisions and steps with this vision and focus, and by differentiating their company brand, that pharmaceutical companies will be able to justify the status of ‘trusted partners’ to physicians.
Measuring Success
There are bound to be consequences from the industry's repositioning. As well as adopting a different mind-set, the shift from selling products to becoming more intrinsically involved in patient care requires that pharmaceutical companies develop new ways of measuring their own strategic progress – rather than continuing to rely on new and repeat product sales and short-term gains in market share.
But this in itself presents opportunities: greater involvement in the care pathway, for example, will afford pharma teams a chance to capture new insights into the impact of their therapies. Working more closely with care providers will also help to create fertile ground for the given therapeutic area and the way that associated and innovative care is delivered. These are conversations that drug sales reps are not equipped to have at the present time. So, companies will need to factor in adjustments to their core capabilities.
A Three-Stage Process
The reinvention of pharma will be gradual and right now it makes sense for companies to concentrate on shaping the environment and forging sustainable and strategic healthcare partnerships ahead of the launch of more-advanced therapies.
There are likely to be three stages to the process. First, via a ‘Traditional +’ model, the company can prepare market access, introducing the new therapy and its value story. Then it can pave the way for associated care to be delivered in partnership with healthcare providers, facilitating the adoption of innovation. Finally, to maximize long-term sustainability, companies should be looking to shape the healthcare system itself.
Emerging long-term strategies must start with the current product pipeline, which will help define the new role that each company could play in a more integrated healthcare ecosystem. And the more that pharma is embedded into care pathways, the more scope there will be to feed patient data and requests back to R&D, thus boosting the value of any therapy.
Transformation might appear to be a daunting prospect right now, but if pharma companies negotiate this new playing field successfully, they could enjoy an enhanced role as trusted partners in the healthcare system of the future.
Gérard Klop is a partner at Vintura Consultancy, which provides strategy consultancy to pharmaceutical and healthcare providers embracing transformation. Gérard has been a strategy consultant to the pharmaceutical and medical device sectors for two decades, and has written books on value-based and value-managed healthcare (VBHC and VMHC). Vintura, based in the Netherlands, Germany, France and the UK, is a recognized expert in VBHC and VMHC, and is specialized in strategy consultancy services targeted at both life sciences and healthcare providers.
[email protected]; www.vintura.com
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