Pharma 3.0
OK – so Facebook has +600 million users sharing more than 30 billion pieces of content a month. 24 hours of video gets uploaded to Youtube every hour and on Monday the 19th of November $1 billion was spent online in the US alone. … and right about … now, all this is old news. But what is new news perhaps is how these developments will impact health care. This was the topic of the SMI conference on Social Media in the Pharmaceutical Industry in London, January 25th to 27th, 2011
If PHARMA 1.0 was the era of the blockbuster drug, PHARMA 2.0 was the era of market access then PHARMA 3.0 is the era of healthy outcomes. Now, what does that mean? It means that healthy outcomes become the key indicator of a drug’s success. If healthy outcomes is all about quality of life for patients – and if that is an agenda that truly gets embraced by the industry – then that means that PHARMA 3.0 can turn out to be the era of regained trust in the pharmaceutical industry by payers, HCPs and the general public. It also means that PHARMA 3.0 is an era where the industry will be looking high and low for new ways to engage with patients.
Johnathan Richman’s simple manifesto from www.doseofdigital.com comes to mind:
In the future, it will be digital technologies that prevent, treat, and finally cure diseases and not the latest “blockbuster” drug that has yet to be discovered (and might never be).
At the conference it became very apparent that HCPs, patients and carers already have access to a wide array of information. Many HCPs now have to accommodate the more knowledgeable and better informed patient, who has developed a view on living with his medical condition. These patients have clear and realistic expectations about how their disease may progress and hence they know which management and treatment approaches may be of most value to them and which problems to expect along the way. At the same time these patients will be eager to share their experiences and look to fellow patients and HCPs for appropriate support, direction and help.
An interesting fact shared at the conference by Silja Chouquet was that 6% of Patient Opinion Leaders account for 90% of the content produced - - so armed with programmes like Ubervu, Social Mention, Radian6 etc allows the industry to quickly monitor the conversations already taking place – as well as to gauge the sentiment out there.
But perhaps what was not so apparent at the conference was exactly how pharma companies operating in this 3.0 reality should react. According to one of the surveys presented at the conference, top pharmaceuticals are currently spending less than 5% of their marketing budgets developing social media initiatives. So very much still an exercise of testing the waters – even if everyone seems to agree that there’s great potential in social media enabled concepts that allow pharmaceuticals to directly help patients cope with their conditions as well as assist by facilitating more productive patient-HCP engagement in the pursuit of healthy outcomes.
Perhaps finding novel ways to ensure medicines are used appropriately and effectively is the easy way to start. And even if the topic of compliance is not new – the ways to address it certainly are. Pharmaceutical companies will need to work much closer with companies like ours to find new solutions to tackle non-compliance. We live in interesting times.
