February 2007
	Patient Persistence, Adverse Events and Drug Safety Once again this month, we change our focus to look at an issue of great importance and complexity: patient persistence, or a patient’ s continuing to take a medication until he or she is told to stop by their health care provider. More specifically, we examine why patient persistence, which is critical for a patient’ s health and safety, can be derailed by a number of factors that can vary by treatment area and patient segment. One roadblock affecting pharmaceutical marketing researchers’ ability to study the issues surrounding patient persistence is the “Don’ t ask, don’ t tell” approach toward the handling of Adverse Events (AEs) by some pharmaceutical companies that have developed internal policies for employing marketing research methodologies and questions that avoid causing a doctor or patient to report an AE. While we do not want to have another detailed discussion about AEs here, since we have covered the issue at length over the last few months, this article examines the benefits of using open-ended, exploratory techniques and lines of questioning to tap into the underlying issues of patient persistence up against the risk that this form of open dialogue might provide a respondent with the opportunity to report an AE. We believe that if asking these types of open-ended questions to better understand the issues of persistence might help keep millions of patients on drugs they genuinely need, it far outweighs the “risk” of having to report an AE encountered during research. Read More Using Direct-to-Consumer Communications to Improve Patient Adherence When Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) advertising first became mainstream, pharmaceutical companies used this tactic primarily to motivate patients to obtain a prescription for the advertised product from their doctor. The good news is that DTC advertising has clearly met expectations in this area with survey data showing that most physicians will write a prescription for a product requested by a patient as long as he or she believes it is a reasonable choice for that patient. While this is certainly a positive trend, encouraging patients to visit their doctor to get a prescription is simply not enough today. With fewer new drugs approved each year, pharmaceutical companies must also focus on increasing revenue from their existing products. In a DTC Perspectives article titled, The Doctor and DTC, GfK U.S. Healthcare Companies Group CEO, Richard B. Vanderveer, Ph.D., discusses how physician promotions and DTC communications can help in this regard by focusing on patient adherence, or getting a patient to regularly take a medicine as directed, and for as long as directed, by the physician. Read More The “Presentation” of Marketing Research Information: Leveraging the Principles of Information Design to Maximize Clarity in Presentations There is often a lack of clarity that exists in the presentation of pharmaceutical marketing research information. Given the complexity of the information that we, as marketing researchers, must communicate, it is critical that we pay more attention to excellence in our presentations. However, it is not uncommon in our profession that more effort and attention is given to the design of the research screener than is put into the actual presentation of the research results. Here we will strive to provide you with at-a-glance information you can use to improve the clarity of the marketing research results you present to colleagues and managers. Read More Meet Our New Additions: Senior Leadership As a "destination employer" for the industry, the GfK U.S. Healthcare Companies continue to draw top marketing research talent. While our new researchers offer our clients a variety of methodological and therapeutic expertise, they share the common background of being marketing research veterans with experience specifically focused in the pharmaceutical industry. Read More				What’ s it Like to Be a Physician? One of the things that makes me nuts about pharmaceutical marketing research is that we spend so much time studying our products, and so little time studying our customers. Compare this allocation of focus with that of our brethren in consumer research companies, who spend much of their marketing research effort getting an understanding of the customers, their segments, etc. In fairness, there is a significant difference between the pharmaceutical and the consumer businesses that these marketing researchers service. In the pharmaceutical industry, we are typically handed a developmental or launched product with a fixed profile of efficacy, side effects, etc., by our colleagues in clinical development or in licensing and acquisition. There is usually little we can do to change this profile, so we are left mainly to help assess its sales potential, assist in the development of a story that will optimally communicate this profile, etc., and with all of these activities under increasingly tight regulatory supervision. In other words, we are literally involved in the marketing research business. Our colleagues in consumer goods, financial services and other areas are in a different situation. In those settings, they actually get to do market research, i.e., to determine the wants, needs, motivations, etc., of their customers and the segments thereof, and then to help design products that actually meet these needs, either through modifications of existing products or the design of entirely new products from a clean slate. That having been said, those who have been following any of my recent writings and speaking engagements have heard my lament that the pharmaceutical industry, as a whole, is woefully devoid of a body of knowledge concerning basic customer issues, choosing instead to make assumptions on such matters. Having spent most of my life doing pharmaceutical product marketing research, I am increasingly impressed and concerned about what we, as an industry, don’ t know, and especially about what we don’ t know about our customers... Read More Richard B. Vanderveer, Ph.D. Group Chief Executive Officer GfK U.S. Healthcare Companies Did You Miss the January Issue of Topline? The January issue of Topline was our most widely read edition yet! Click here to catch up on what you may have missed: a guest editorial by Kim Slocum, President of KDS Consulting, a discussion about the use of "message-monitoring research" in the new regulatory environment and how to stand guard against the competition using "war gaming" research techniques.