Kal Patel, MD, CEO and co-founder of BrightInsight . He has over 20 years of experience in regulated pharma, medicine and digital health.
In my recent conversations with pharma CEOs, a common theme emerged: Frontline marketing teams are limited in their digital health strategy thinking.
The problem, these executives tell me—and I've seen as Amgen's director of sales for Enbrel—is that their marketing teams are still too traditional and increasingly digital. They still focus on TV advertising and digital marketing. When a support program is intended for a specific therapy, it's usually a glorified drug website transformed into an app with little or no personalization or interactivity for patients.
However, management believes that digitization is the ideal way to cut through the noise and have a greater impact on patient experience and outcomes.
Pharmaceutical leadership teams see digital technology as a potential solution to challenges facing organizations. On the one hand, the ability of competitors to fast-track and inspire each other's innovations is unmatched, exclusivity is slowly eroding. Traditional marketing efforts are under increasing pressure to demonstrate return on investment (ROI), television commercials for prescription drugs have reached saturation point, and pharmaceutical sales representatives have limited or no access to physician offices, much less access. Downward price pressure.
A large proportion of new drugs fail to achieve their growth targets. According to Deloitte's analysis of actual and projected sales of new drugs between 2012 and 2017, about 36% of respondents failed to meet market expectations in their first year, and 70% of them continued this trend after that first year.
