Why Pharma is Wrong About The Importance of Field Forces

It is essential that pharmaceutical companies and healthcare professionals (HCPs) work closely together; this can lead to medical advances and better healthcare provision, and ultimately to healthier lives for patients.

Collaboration between industry and healthcare professionals (HCPs) and healthcare organisations (HCOs) benefits patients. It is a relationship that has delivered numerous innovative medicines and changed the way many diseases impact our lives. There are numerous examples. Take HIV, seen as a death sentence in the 1980’s, is now viewed as a chronic condition that can be managed through the use of innovative medicines. In cancer, death rates have fallen by 20% since the 1990’s in some countries. Recent pharmaceutical innovation means around 90% of patients living with Hepatitis C can be cured through a 12-week course of medicine.?

Digitalisation is not only changing how people perceive healthcare but is also equipping healthcare systems to address public health challenges. By adopting a data-driven mindset, pharma companies can ensure that the right kind of data delivered in the right way can help address key issues.

In a recent report on 'How Pharma-HCP Engagement Should Evolve', EPG Health ranks journals, independent websites, and scientific meetings as their most important sources of information, with pharma channels and social media being the least important for HCPs. Pharma, however, considers field forces as most important for delivering information to HCPs, followed by scientific meetings, and ranks all types of medical websites among the least important of channels.

It appears that the pharmaceutical industry is acting against not only HCP demands, but some of its own objectives and outcomes as well. As we are seeing that HCPs favor websites as a source of medical information, there's a lot of potential to use the digital channel space for the earlier part of the customer journey so that when a sales representative is in front of a customer, all they need to do is sell. It is crucial to match the engagement with the HCP needs, to shift away from reps defining the engagements, to develop a field force that thinks differently about engagements and develops different skills, and to move to a more customer-centric mindset.

We should focus on how well those fewer reps interact with customers, and not who shouts the loudest and swamps the market with reps.

Providers, payors, pharmaceutical companies, and patients require quicker and easier access to medical data, more personalized care. All parties concerned require new solutions to both optimize emerging innovations and to enhance collaboration to bring together information, people, and processes across the health ecosystem.

A hybrid sales model, with options for on-demand engagement, is here to stay. Most physicians (54%) prefer this ‘hybrid approach’, indicating that this will be the way to create engaging customer relationships that add real value to their interactions with the industry. Half of the physicians say non-rep (MSL) interactions are remote only while 1/3 say interactions are hybrid remote and in person, similar to rep interactions

It is imperative that pharmaceutical companies focus on effective engagement. Every channel and resource possesses its own advantages and disadvantages, and they need to be carefully weighed against the needs of the target audience and the objectives desired at the specific stage of the brand lifecycle. Although much of the focus during the pandemic has been on the shift from in-person to virtual meetings, it is important for companies and their field forces to engage with HCPs in the way they want to be engaged with – and at a time that’s right for them.