Successful pharma companies are adapting commercialisation strategies to align with transformation in healthcare delivery. Vintura’s Richard Ogborne and Chris Reynolds provide practical guidance as to how cross-functional teams can contribute to commercialisation strategies where value propositions are baked in from the start.
Most pharma organisations know and accept that commercialisation planning should start much earlier in the product development lifecycle. The pressure to be more forward looking is increasing, given the growing sophistication of therapies and the rising financial challenges facing healthcare systems. So, how can companies deliver the shift that’s needed, going beyond traditional sales and marketing planning to create a commercialisation capability that will achieve greater success?
From our recent discussions with clients about the growing impetus for change, and the new ways with which brands must differentiate themselves in the market now, some strong themes have emerged.
The need for revised commercialisation models is being driven by the transformation of healthcare, and the optimisation of patient pathways; the need to build a watertight economic case for products; and the expanding opportunity presented by digital health to solve some pressing issues for patients and healthcare providers.
Cross-functional resources
The companies that are successfully aligning their commercialisation strategies with accelerating healthcare transformation, through sufficiently early planning, are finding that they can differentiate their organisations and individual product brands in new and important ways. They are able to create and communicate richer value propositions that resonate across the different stakeholder groups, for instance. And they can continue to build and enhance the economic case for their products with insightful data captured post-launch, through strategic real-world evidence capture. Harnessing digital diagnostic and monitoring tools and co-creating digital patient support platforms are potential examples .
Adequate resourcing and the right capabilities across the cross-functional team are key to providing the platform. Having people with specific expertise in the right areas from across adjacent disciplines (Medical Affairs, Clinical, Market Access), for instance, with capabilities and expertise – e.g. around digital health tools and intelligent data analytics – is becoming increasingly important.
Transformed commercialisation strategies, then, start with pooling resources, talent and knowhow from across the key internal teams, and looking to plug any gaps in knowledge and capability through strategic hiring and targeted external partnerships.
Capturing the right data
Equipped with a fuller appreciation of existing patient pathways and official guidance, the cross-functional team can start to explore how they can look to improve the uptake of their drug or therapy within that pathway. By mapping out care pathways in hospitals – the specifics of how the patient flows through the system, and where they’re likely to receive the given therapy – they can start to understand gaps in care, and build quality metrics and improvement plans to address them.
While the relative emphasis of the value proposition is likely to vary by stakeholder group (physician v payer/insurer v patient), the richer the data package that’s built as a drug is developed, put through trials and finessed for launch, the stronger the impact as commercialisation teams start to talk about the product in the market.
This points back to the criticality of early commercialisation planning – and the design of clinical trials, planning for target indications, and the need to ensure that the right data is being captured from the outset.
Planning for opportunities
Communicating and potentially extending its value proposition is hugely important in the age of more personalised treatments that are very costly to develop yet have only a finite market (e.g. in the case of very rare diseases, and subsectors of oncology where patient populations are small).
Opportunities here include designing Phase III registrational studies with economic end-points in mind, as well as pragmatic post-launch/phase IV studies for real-world evidence generation, which support a compelling value proposition for all stakeholders (physicians, payers, patients, providers).
This is one area where digital health applications can play a strategically important role, simultaneously adding value for patients and healthcare providers by extending monitoring and support beyond a hospital setting and provide a vehicle for tracking how patients fare, feel and draw on healthcare resources over time.
Leading pharma companies are already recognising that a shift in commercialisation strategy is necessary early in the development cycle for a new or repositioned product. A cross-functional team spanning Market Access, Medical Affairs, Real-World Evidence and commercial roles can support companies with smarter trial design, evidence gathering and value proposition building, by harnessing the right data at each phase on the journey to commercial success.
