Pharmaceutical marketing refers to the digital and offline strategies used to attract new patients and increase awareness around a specific drug or treatment plan. Pharma marketing can either be geared towards physicians (the lion’s share of the market) or towards selling directly to consumers.
In medicine, patient compliance describes the degree to which a patient correctly follows medical advice. Most commonly, it refers to medication or drug compliance, but it can also apply to other situations such as medical device use, self care, self-directed exercises, or therapy sessions.
The short term benefits seem clear. The launch will hopefully generate some media interest and coverage and will result in some patients re-assessing and changing their own medicine-taking habits.
It may temporarily raise awareness of the on-going problem and cost of poor adherence.
And it might make physicians think about their own approach to it, and give patients a reason and ‘permission’ to discuss it with their doctor.
A secondary benefit is derived simply from the process of bringing such a multi-disciplinary team together to create, develop, and execute the campaign.
A 2018 study published in Innovations in Pharmacy found that patients have both improved medication adherence and improved outcomes when they use blister packaging, or the blisters Gillies’ pharmacy uses. These blisters work to improve adherence on their own, the study found, but even better when combined with medication therapy management sessions with pharmacists.
Of course, making medications easier for patients to access and manage is only half the battle, experts agree. Drug prices are soaring, making many treatments out of reach for patients who might incur high out-of-pocket costs.
But for less costly drugs, these pharmaceutical marketing strategies can work to more easily connect patients to their drugs and manage complicated drug plans, ultimately addressing some patient behavior barriers to medication adherence.
Medical professionals can encourage patient enrollment in a pharmacy delivery service by providing financial incentives. Patients surveyed as a part of the BMC study indicated that a three for the price of two deal could convince them to join a mail-order pharmacy program.
Additionally, the researchers found that patients who understood that mail-order pharmacy services can be convenient and safe were more likely to enroll in the benefit, underscoring the importance of patient education in this area.
Finding ways to reach those patients most likely to benefit is also a key issue.
Local, face-to-face initiatives are often the most effective, but such initiatives can be time-consuming and expensive to replicate at a national level.
Sustaining an on-going campaign is always a challenge, too.
Awareness campaigns of this kind tend to explode onto the scene with a flurry of noise and activity, but then rapidly lose momentum.
Key stakeholders change, budgets shrink, and the story becomes ‘old news’. A campaign can simply fizzle out.
