In pharma marketing, messaging and targeting are everything. The most appropriate words delivered to a carefully selected group of healthcare professionals leads to patients getting the best treatments. Or does it? When listening to patients and physicians separately, we often get different answers. Asking a patient how a diagnosis was delivered or how medicine was prescribed often yields very different answers compared to what the Healthcare Professionals (HCPs) recalled.
Physicians feel they are clear and empathetic. They don’t want to be too scientific in their delivery, yet they work hard to ensure that they don’t talk down to the patient. They think before they speak, and have lots of practice communicating to patients. Despite these efforts to get it right the first time, patients have become more demanding when it comes to information.
Patients feel that they aren’t getting the answers that they need because doctors don’t have time to answer their questions. They respond by not always saying what’s on their mind and waiting until their doctor is on his or her way out the door.
The problem for product managers is that their brand is often at the center of these conversations and all of the work they’ve put together to ensure the proper delivery of messages has gone awry because the communication between the doctor and patient has been broken. Annals of Family Medicine published an article titled: Intervention to Enhance Communication about Newly Prescribed Medications, Jan. 2013. In the study, it was found that the more elements physicians incorporated into their medical communications index (MCI), the higher the patient ratings about new prescription[1]. See the summary in the chart below.
The points in the MCI scale are all common points for discussion: medication name, purpose, directions for use, duration of use, and side effects. The good news is that you can have an impact. Consider these ideas to help the messaging through the channels from your company agents, to your prescribing HCPs, and yes, to the patients we all serve:
1) Ensure clear and consistent messaging across all channels. That includes your KOLs who are speaking at speaker talks having the same primary messaging as the representatives calling on your HCPs. Provide solid education to each agent to ensure consistency.
2) Develop patient education that is uplifting and informative. Patients want to learn about their disease state, yet they need to know about the prescriptions they are given to increase compliance and adherence. Give them something useful that will help them understand so that they get care that is truly in their best interest.
3) Offer a doctor-patient video to your HCPs on how to best have a conversation on your disease-state for HCPs to learn from the best KOLs who practice in the specialty.
Take some small, yet simple steps to help ensure that your work includes all channels. Doing this right might ensure patients receive the best treatment. Better therapies to patients may increase your prescription business.
[1] Intervention to Enhance Communication About Newly Prescribed Medications, Derjung M. Tarn, MD, PhD. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3596029/
