By Zoltan Lantos, Client Management Director

Developed countries have been struggling for some time with increasing twofold cost pressure on their health care systems. On one side, procedure volumes are rising because of the greater medical needs of the aging; on the other side, unit values have increased with the cost of improved medical technologies and procedures. To cope with these cost pressures, health care reforms have mainly focused on reduction of the reimbursement. This measure is usually referred to as cost containment but has little correlation with the real cost of a procedure or intervention, rather, only reflecting the expenditure of the reimbursing body. As a result of these financially based actions, the expression of health care reform has become equal to superfluous combat.

Meanwhile, for practicing physicians, with their knowledge of medical procedures and their own curative experiences, the clear need for patient centricity has become ever more obvious. In 1993 Harvard Medical School with the Picker Institute (Gerteis 1993) formulated the characteristics of a well-functioning, patient-centered care system. For more than a decade, however, this concept couldn’t gain traction in medical practice until Michael E. Porter and Elizabeth Olmsted Teisberg published their epoch-making book, “Redefining Health Care,” in 2006. The book’s subtitle, “Creating Value-Based Competition on Results,” concisely reflects the essence of the new foundation of modern health care. It is creating value at the level of patients as end users – value that is measured by results on patient health.

By L. Andrew Douglas, Senior Vice President

“The advertisements (in a newspaper) are more full of knowledge in respect to what is going on in a state or community than the editorial columns are.”
Henry Ward Beecher, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit (1887)

In the pharmaceutical world, messaging has been an important part of the marketing and sales strategy through the sales representative. With the advent of digital communication and the ever-changing and less interactive sales environment, it has become increasingly important to quickly identify messages that work from those that do not. Because of competition vying for physician time across communication channels, we can no longer simply rely on the sales rep’s evaluation to identify physicians who are positively responding to communication. Where in the past physician’s acquisition of changing medical information came primarily through the detail interaction and CME, today information can be accessed and questions answered with the simple stroke of a computer key. Standard market research has been ill-equipped to handle the emerging Twitter generation, where poignant, quick and less repetitious information is demanded.

We have developed a good working knowledge of what research methods are best suited in optimizing and testing/tracking message performance. These insights and novel methods can help ascertain how typical message-tracking data can be integrated with secondary data, novel metrics and robust analytics to enable us to get inside the heads of physicians to determine how messages are functioning.

As a destination employer for the industry, GfK HealthCare draws top marketing research talent. While our new researchers offer clients a variety of methodological and therapeutic expertise, they share the common background of being marketing research veterans with experience specifically focused in the health care industry.

We invite you to join GfK HealthCare Feb. 23-24 in Philadelphia at The Center For Business Intelligence’s (CBI) 4th Annual Life Sciences Forum on Speaker Program Management.

This forum brings together experts in speaker program management to discuss compliant practices and innovative formats that are increasing the value and ROI of speaker programs within their organizations. GfK HealthCare will discuss KOL mapping technology and how to accurately identify the most respected high profile and emerging speakers for a brand.

Click here to read the issue, which includes:

- Medical Device Pricing and Forecasting Require an Artist-Scientist 
- Patient Insights - Opportunities in a New World
- What's the Buzz on Drug Development in 2012? MM&M's "Pipeline 2012" Features GfK Commentary


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