Over the past few years, in the pharmaceuitical industry, aggressive product marketing to physicians has been losing its effectiveness. Pharma companies are cutting sales forces, and reinvesting the cash to target patients and payers, whether that’s via disease awareness campaigns, continuing medical education, market access strategies or, in the U.S., direct-to-consumer advertising.

Recently, a specialized sector of the marketing communications industry has sprung up to meet these needs.  Focused on healthcare, its functions include informing patients, payers and healthcare practitioners about the benefits of individual medicines. Its goal is to help meet government demands to improve public health by increasing patient awareness, education and disease prevention.

Marketing to payers has become crucial. Those who pay for healthcare—whether government bodies or private insurance companies—now rely on cost-benefit analysis tools when making budgetary decisions. This shift from healthcare providers to payers represents a major change for pharma companies, and the industry has been slow to pick up on just how important it now is to prove their products’ cost-effectiveness, as well as their efficacy and safety.

The uptake of health technology assessments (HTAs) in decision making, already used in countries such as the U.K. and Germany, is spreading, with the U.S. considering setting up an HTA agency. How the payer will perceive a product’s economic value is now at the heart of product development and commercialization efforts. Demand for the services of market access specialists is rising to meet these needs, working alongside broader ‘value communication’ groups.

But it’s not just regulators and payers— pharma companies must now also consider the views of the patients who use their products. In the past decade or so, there’s been a huge increase in information available about patients’ experiences, and those patients are having an influence on healthcare decision-making. For example, a public outcry in the U.K. over the breast cancer drug Herceptin played an important role in its licensing for early-stage disease.

Real-world evidence of patient experiences is also, increasingly, being taken into account in post-approval evaluations by both payers and regulators. This trend is sure to continue, if not accelerate, spurred by a move towards outcomes based payments in the U.S.

Regulators are also looking to patient engagement to rein in healthcare costs by promoting preventive care for conditions such as obesity, hypertension and diabetes. There has been a noticeable theme of patient engagement behind healthcare reforms in the U.S. and Europe in an effort to improve healthcare inefficiencies.

However, perhaps the biggest impact on the healthcare marcomms landscape in recent times has come from the inexorable rise of new technologies and social media. Two-thirds of all U.S. patients now research their conditions online, and hundreds of millions of people worldwide have at least one health-related app on their smartphones.

Pharma companies must incorporate digital and social media messaging within their communications strategies—but the uptake has been somewhat sluggish compared to other industries. The landscape for pharma is more complicated than it is for selling consumer products and digital marketing rules remain far from clear.

With the declining effectiveness of traditional channels—sales reps, conferences, leaflets—has come a realization that technology can help create a brand and drive patient engagement. Pharma companies are now realizing the value of partners who can provide digital-based patient engagement services. Increasingly providers of healthcare communication and engagement solutions are leveraging technology to capture data and provide analytics to improve targeting and maximize ROI – particularly in the U.S. with the availability of claims data. Technology innovation is also increasingly necessary to access and interact with the consumer patient.

The expanding reliance on healthcare marketing communication has led to a huge amount of M&A activity within the sector. Big players such as IMS Health have spent more than half a billion dollars on more than 20 acquisitions in the past three or four years. Many of these are in the healthcare communications sector, from cloud-based marketing to market access capabilities, as well as a technology-enabled real world evidence platform.

With pharma companies inexorably increasing their outsourcing in the field of market access in particular, a diverse group of buyers, from CROs to data specialists, have been snapping up small market access specialists. But across the board, healthcare communications is a field where growth is unlikely to slow down any time soon, as players big and small look to take a slice of the business. 

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Hemavli Bali
Results Healthcare

Hemavli Bali is an executive director at Results Healthcare. She has spent more than 14 years working in financial services and has almost 10 years of experience as a corporate finance specialist. Ms. Bali joined Results International in 2008 and has recently relocated to New York to head up the firms Healthcare operations in North America as Executive Director.