Patient-centricity and People-centricity – The Two Sides of the Same Coin! – Brand Management 127
Sanjeev Navangul with over 30 years of experience in the pharma industry has successfully implemented quite a few patient centric programs.
He commenced his address with the most famous words of George Merck: “For the medical and pharmaceutical community to be successful, remember that medicine is for the patient. We try never to forget that medicine is for the people…”
Patients are people!
What a powerful statement.
The two sides of the same coin!
And it is with that purpose, Sanjeev Navangul could execute patient-driven programs very successfully
He spoke about two of them, one for hepatitis-C and other for diabetes.
He beautifully showed how to get external organizations together in patient centric programs.
When the pharma company and the people within the company are purpose driven, getting external organizations in the system is not difficult.
And what is that purpose? The purpose is to serve the patient; and serving patients is the same as serving the people of the nation.
And the most practical advice Sanjeev gives to pharma marketers: Change your mindset from ‘Go-to-market’ strategy to ‘Go-to-patient’ strategy.
As all readers know that a ‘‘Go-to-market’ strategy is a plan that details how an organization can engage with customers to convince them to buy their product or service and to gain a competitive advantage.
‘Go-to-patient’ strategy means engage the patient so he/she can stay with the medication, knows the consequence of missing a dose, the caregivers at home know how to handle the side effects and many more.
His clarion call: DUMP THE ‘GO-TO-MARKET’ STRATEGY. It is now GO-TO-PATIENT- STRATEGY
What happens when you go to the patient?
Through patient centered programs it is possible even to improve treatment rates. He showed with data that the treatment rate in Hepatitis-C which was 13% went up by 8 times in a year. And this naturally added to the revenues of the company!
A patient with diabetes he said, returns to the doctor on an average of once in 14 months when ideally he should be coming back at least once in 90 days
When any drug for diabetes or hypertension is introduced, the approval starts with the statement ‘…in conjunction with diet and exercise’. Yet hardly 5% are told about it. He observed that a typical doctor has to see 90 patients in three hours and doctors need help to cope up with this . And this aspect has also very strongly emerged in the study carried out jointly by Jamia Hamdard University and PharmaState Academy!
This is an opportunity for pharma companies to step in and help the doctors to be patient centric.
Speaker after speaker have said this, albeit in different words, that patient centricity does not ignore the wellness of the people.
Patient-centricity and people-centricity are the two sides of the same coin! And patient centricity does not ignore wellness!
And here is the YouTube link for his complete address: https://youtu.be/XQkUlTr1HzQ