Howdy Partner

If you work for a pharmaceutical company, ask yourself this question:  What business are you in?  To the average American, you are in the business of selling.  To survive and thrive you must be in the business of advancing the public health.  And to do that you must be seen as both teacher and expert.

And partner.

Partner with physicians, certainly.  With patients, definitely.  But also with government.  You must walk the tenuous tight rope of being both regulated entity and public health colleague with the regulatory mandarins who watch over you.

Your internal legal and regulatory departments may gasp.  But you will gain.  And it can (indeed must!) be done.

As ever greater regulatory oversight for your marketing practices comes into play across the globe, you must rethink both the type and timeframe for successful communications.  Rather than focusing strictly on short-term product sales programs, you must now create a firm foundation for trust built on the substrate of public health progams.

For example, in the United States the FDA will shortly launch an initiative called “safe use.” In addition to adverse event reporting, the FDA wants to communicate with physicians and patients about how drugs can be used safely and appropriately.  Because a product used safely is a safer product.  It’s the flip side of pharmacovigilance.  But the FDA needs allies.  It has no budget for public health outreach beyond the bully pulpit.  Who will step up to the plate to work with the agency?  What are the perceived barriers the pharmaceutical industry faces in doing so?  If you want the agency to be both regulator and colleague, so too must you be prepared to play those identical roles.  It takes two to tango.

Similarly in the EU, the rules are changing when it comes to the Brussels concept of Information to Patients (ITP).  Consider this verbiage from a recent report from the EU Parliament:

“Member States authorities may not be in a position to fully address patients’ needs in terms of the substance of information and the access via different means … The pharmaceutical industry has the potential to be an important source of information to respond to the growing demand for more and better information by patients and to help reduce the current information gap, provided that there will be adequate rules to ensure reliability, objectivity, and quality of information.”

The time is long overdue for industry to embrace public health communication programs as a powerful tool for corporate reputation, payer relations, physician education, patient empowerment, and yes – product sales.

But this strategy also requires a new appreciation of time.  No longer can industry marketers exclusively design programs for short-term unit sales purposes. That only reinforces the perception of pharmaceutical companies as hucksters.  The 21^st century demands a new paradigm.  It won’t be easy.  And it can’t be achieved through lip service.  Industry can’t talk itself out of something it acted its way into.

The roadside of healthcare sales strategy is strewn with the carcasses of failed marketing alternatives.  Advancing the public health in concert with the governments with whom the pharmaceutical industry does business is not only the right thing to do – it’s the smart thing as well.