 The healthcare sector covers businesses whose focus is to research, develop, market and/or distribute drugs, mostly in the context of healthcare. The pharma space is a highly competitive, regulated and a high risk sector requiring major investments in R&D over many years. The major players are very large organizations with typically many tens of thousands of employees. This creates complex challenges to stand out and keep ahead of the game. Due to the size of the organizations and regulated nature of the sector, there are challenges with any new communication channels and compliance is critical in any new processes. In the US alone, pharmaceutical companies spend $19 billion a year on marketing. Challenges:
Opportunities: Employee communications The top pharmaceutical companies have over 100,000 employees and the constant challenge for the corporate and employee communications department is to ensure a strong corporate culture, and that information is flowing smoothly throughout the organization, thus ensuring a high level of productivity. Many companies have invested heavily on intranets and extranets. Since these are reactive tools, it is difficult to ensure that employees are frequently going to these portals, and thus obtaining the information that is important to them. Furthermore, email blasts often experience low open rates, especially given the saturation of people’s inboxes today. i-comm allows the organizations to :
Sales force communications: A medium-sized pharmaceutical company might have a sales force of 1,000 representatives, and the largest companies having tens of thousands of sales reps. Currently, there are approximately 100,000 pharma sales reps in the US pursuing some 120,000 pharmaceutical prescribers. The number doubled in the four years from 1999 to 2003, and pharma companies spend $5 billion annually sending reps to physician offices. The size of these sales forces provides enormous challenges for the pharma companies in ensuring effectiveness and that the necessary information is being passed down through the organization. A research was recently carried out by a large interactive agency which showed that phone calls and voicemails were really the only effective communication channel to sales reps. They respond poorly to email and extranet activities. i-comm would address this issue of effective communication to these sales reps:
Communication to physicians Physicians are extremely busy and have little time to spend with reps, and to search for information on corporate portals. This creates challenges due to the investments being made by the pharma companies to send reps to physicians, and their investments in portals and web site activities. Today, patient education is an area that is of strong interest to the pharma companies. i-comm would allow physicians:
Communication to patients Since direct-to-consumer media advertising was legalized in the FDA Guidance for Industry on Consumer-Directed Broadcast Advertisements in the 1980s, new methods of marketing for prescription drugs to consumers have become important. i-comm would allow for a:
Other possible communication uses of i-comm in the pharma space: Retail pharmacies and stores Lobby groups, governments and institutions Investor relations Public relations Medical schools and students |
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