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| November 2007 | ||||||||
 HIV/AIDS Treatment as a Groundbreaking Model for the Future of Disease Management
By Noah M. Pines, Executive Vice
President, GfK V2
If you'd like a glimpse into the future of
medicine, one therapeutic area to consider as
a model is the treatment of HIV/AIDS.
HIV/AIDS not only represents an astoundingly
rapid victory of medicine and science over
disease, having been essentially downgraded
from a death sentence to a chronic,
manageable illness in just a decade (in the
Western world, at least), but also serves as
a looking glass, largely because of three
factors:
 What We Can Learn From Physicians' Searches
for Point-of-Care Information 
Physicians repeatedly access point-of-care
information, often five to 10 times a day or
more, mainly to determine what product in a
drug class is covered by a particular
patient's managed care formulary. If we could
observe what information was being looked up
and in what sequence by significant numbers
of physicians, it could be argued that we
would be able to learn a significant amount
about the salience of various drugs to
physicians, the aspects of individual drugs
on which they are focused, the drugs
physicians are looking at comparatively, etc.
A source of such data could be made available
to the pharmaceutical marketing research
community, and we believe it is important to
become familiar with these data, their
applications, limitations, etc., to make sure
that if and when released, these data will
provide maximum value to the pharmaceutical
companies that purchase them. In this month's
published document for The Orange
Pages, we examine this potential new
source of information, which would result
from reorganizing data derived from the
well-known and respected Epocrates software
system for PDAs, and how we, as
pharmaceutical marketing researchers, can
best learn to use this information in our work.
Opportunities for Manufacturers to Address Unmet Needs in Alzheimer's Disease and Newly Emerging Area of MCI
By Kim Lazarus, Vice President,
GfK Market Measures
November marks National Alzheimer's Awareness
month, providing a timely opportunity to
share some of what we have learned in the
Alzheimer's disease category drawn from GfK
Market Measures' recent Therapeutic Class
Studies. This article aims to provide
insights from some key stakeholders by taking
a closer look at the physicians in the
commercial environment and caregivers of
Alzheimer's patients to learn about mild
cognitive impairment (MCI).
As the category evolves, the question of
whether the stages of Alzheimer's disease
will remain as mild, moderate and severe or
come to include the newly emerging area of
mild cognitive impairment remains a question
yet to be answered. On the other hand, MCI
may become its own independent disease state.
To provide clients with information on this
topic, we have begun to investigate this
question within all our Alzheimer's studies.
The following is a brief overview of some
interesting findings from this exercise thus far.
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 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.
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 Assumptions We Make as Pharmaceutical Marketing Researchers I've had some really wacky experiences in my career as a pharmaceutical marketing researcher. Many of the wackiest have involved people with reason to know better failing to see the integral connection between marketing and marketing research. Two key examples come to mind. The first was when I invited Seth Godin, one of the greatest marketing gurus and visionaries of our time, to give a keynote speech at a PMRG conference I was chairing in Orlando. Seth gave one of his usual scintillating presentations, this time based on his "Purple Cow" book, and fascinated me as always. What really got me, though, was the fact that several people came up to me afterward to ask why I had invited a "marketing guy" to a marketing research meeting, since they could not see a connection between the two. The other occasion that rocked my socks happened a few years ago when an abstract for one of my presentations, dealing with assumptions that we implicitly make every time we use a particular marketing research methodology, was rejected by the association hosting the conference, with a note indicating, once again, that marketing researchers would have no interest in exploring the marketing foundations of the research methodologies they employ on a daily basis. In case the two examples have failed to make it clear, I strongly believe that unless one has a firm and up-to-date understanding of underlying marketing principles, one is doomed to do mediocre marketing research at best and hopelessly misleading marketing research at worst...  Richard B. Vanderveer, Ph.D. Group Chief Executive Officer GfK U.S. Healthcare Companies   Did You Miss the October Issue of Topline?  Click
here to read the issue, which includes:
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