Just a few weeks ago across the pond, the NHS Physical Health Monitor (for Lithium) was released as an app for smartphones in London, UK. Lithium Carbonate is the most common form of treatment for Bipolar Disorder in the UK. The major drawback to this treatment is that it requires strict regulation and frequent health checks. Back in 2013, St George’s Mental Health NHS Trust and South West London partnered up in attempt to streamline this regulation process and make it easier for the patient. The final result? An innovative app that addresses the need for a safe and convenient way to prescribe, administer, and monitor Lithium. Looking forward, they plan to extend the app’s capabilities to manage a broader range of treatments.
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In the book “The Innovator’s Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Health Care,” Clay Christensen, who developed the theory of disruptive innovation, stated, “There are more than 9,000 billing codes for individual procedures and units of care. But there is not a single billing code… for helping patients stay well.” In the pharmaceutical industry, disruptive innovation improves health by generating ideas that create new drugs at the expense of existing ones. It is an alliance between technological advances and new business models that dramatically changes the performance of the industry. The progressive spectrum of disruptive innovation challenges include lessons from the past showing resistance to change, implications surfacing in the present which emerge from cautious analytics and trailblazing dynamics in the future aligned with patient centricity.
As the above example shows, the advancement of pharmaceutical innovation efforts are most often prevented by established world views, opinions, customs, attitudes, societal values and complex psychological and emotional issues ingrained in the network of relationships that define individuals singly or collectively. In certain situations, innovation challenges are rejected directly because they are seen as threats to the means of support and character of many stakeholders, such as pharmaceutical companies, Federal regulatory institutions and the American Medical Association, that deploy an intangible but forceful influence on decision-making. Resistance to change in pharma emanates from industry incumbents whose jobs rely on sustaining the existing business model and political power. As Upton Sinclair said, “Never expect someone to understand change when their livelihood depends on not understanding it.”
In the future, the drug lifecycle needs to incorporate many facets of patient centricity, including the use of new technologies such as gene- and proteomics, gene therapy, nanotechnology, and Big Data driven predictive analytics. Precision medicine will identify exact patient needs and tailor molecular profiles to create the most beneficial treatment plans for patients on an individual level. New social media tools will allow patients to share information and participate in collaborative discussions with regulators and pharma.
Pharmaceutical marketing is changing. With increased industry spend, new marketing channels, a more informed consumer, and a shifting healthcare landscape, it is clear that marketers need to be smarter than ever with their investment decisions. It is also clear that DTC marketing is no longer just about pumping money into national TV ad buys (though they continue to receive substantial investment). It’s now also about targeted messaging. It’s about digital. It’s about patient engagement. In this environment, it is more complex than ever to understand how to get the right message in front of the right consumer at the right time. Marketers will need to innovate.