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This month’s published document for The Orange Pages discusses a recent publication issued by PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Health Research Institute titled, “Healthcare policy in an Obama administration: Delivering on the promise of universal coverage.” The module flags important points for pharmaceutical marketing researchers to consider and monitor during the first year of the president-elect’s administration – and beyond. More specifically, it highlights the following suggestions the report makes for reworking the health care system.
- Reorder treatment around collaboration. The idea here is to make health care more efficient, and in turn deal with increasingly scarce medical care resources, by allowing greater authority to nonphysician health care providers, establishing in-store and in-office clinics, compensating practitioners for care given over the telephone and the Internet, etc.
- Simplify the system. The standardization of claims forms and price lists, for example, would significantly help to expedite the health care system and prevent patients from having to shop around for the best deal in medical care, pharmaceuticals, etc.
- Keep people well. It is more efficient to keep people healthy than it is to return them to wellness when they become ill. The challenge here is getting patients to comply. Setting objective standards for wellness can be of assistance.
- Make interoperable electronic medical records a reality. Even with the technology to render these documents in electronic form readily available, the only way to get practitioners to use them is through the carrot and/or the stick. By having insurance companies refuse to pay for charges not submitted by standard electronic format, having pharmacies reject any prescriptions not delivered in digital format, or paying doctors an extra incentive for complying with more complex electronic documentation, compliance suddenly increases significantly as does the quality of medical care, and the price of which in turn goes down.
- Use genes to pick the lock on disease. The time and expense necessary to conduct the trials to determine which patients a product will work for are often exorbitant, or even irrelevant by the time they are completed since therapy has moved beyond the agent(s) studied. Nonetheless, though it will probably be the last of these ideas to be fully implemented, this approach will certainly eventually make the greatest contribution to increasing the efficiency of medicine.
As we enter 2009, politics, finances, scarce resources and science will all continue to increase in importance in healing the ills that currently bedevil health care, both in the United States and worldwide. Hopefully, pharmaceutical marketing researchers will turn their attention away from fine-tuning advertising copy and measuring the “effectiveness” of our sales representatives and move in the direction of helping companies, and medicine in general, deal with the issues discussed above.
To download the complete December 2008 discussion on the PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Health Research institute report, please click here.
The monthly issue-based discussions that we publish in this newsletter
can also be distributed to you in hardcopy format via a complimentary
subscription-based resource we publish for our clients called The
Orange Pages. The Orange Pages is intended to serve
as a living, breathing resource of “Information, Education and
Issues Exploration for Today’s Pharmaceutical Marketing Researcher”
that we hope will be read with interest and kept within reach for
ongoing reference.
The format is a three-ring binder designed to hold packets of content
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packets will come to you in an easy-to-identify (and appropriately
colored) orange envelope and be delivered on a monthly basis. The
materials will be three-hole punched for convenient one-click assembly
into your binder.
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