With the economy in the spotlight more attention is being paid to costs of healthcare
The healthcare model used to be so simple: you get sick or have a concern about your health, you go to you doctor get an Rx and pay the deductible. Today however the landscape has changed. Now you have to be worried if the medication your doctor prescribes is covered in full by your insurance. A branded medication may have a higher deductible which a lot of people cannot afford to pay today because they are cutting back. Pharma assistance programs are no help because the people that are cutting back are usually not the target audience and don't meet the requirements for assistance. My co-pay, for example, for Lipitor has gone from $5 to over $40 because I chose to take the brand over the generic.
Charts
like this are starting to pop-up all over the Web
urging consumers to ask for
generics
Now in addition to doing research on medical
conditions and medications patients and consumers are
going to have to go online to see how much money
their doctor maybe getting from pharma companies? How
many patients have the time to do this and besides
aren't physicians supposed to prescribe medications
based on what they feel is best for us (not because
they receive money from pharma companies)? Could
healthcare be any more of a mess right now for
patients and consumers trying to sought through all
the claims and social media?
The number one source of medical information is
HCP's. When people visit their HCP's they need to
believe that they are getting treatment based on what
is best for them not what is best for the HCP's
wallet. While there maybe some HCP's that succumb to
the mighty dollars influence my guess is that these
represent a very small percentage of practicing
HCP's. When I conducted research with patients
earlier this year the most common complaint that I
heard was that HCP's were not spending enough time to
talk with them about their health problems and
treatment options. Obviously doctors today have to
meet with as many patients as possible in order to
make their practice profitable but this leads
patients to believe that they may not be getting the
whole story and is a key reason why so many of them
are turning to the Web.
Books and articles
are now appearing everywhere on healthcare and
patient empowerment. CNN.com is running a series
called the "empowered patient"
and
one of the recent articles was titled
"Don't become a victim of medical
marketing". The article was
targeted at medial device makers but still it
would be a mistake to underestimate the key
message of this article and its viral impact.
You can download a free copy of this
book here
As I have written here before the pharma and medical
device market needs to change their business models
and change it fast. This does not mean launching a
website with payments to doctors; it means that the
fundamental way in which consumers and patients get
healthcare information, and the relationship with
pharma companies, needs to change and change
dramatically. Pharma needs to prove they are more
interested in patient health and less interested in
protecting sales of products. It means that pharma
needs to engage patients and customers as never
before; it means that pharma marketers need to get
into a two way conversation with consumers and
patients rather than a push information model that is
outdated.
Unless pharma, and the healthcare industry, start to
take a serious look at what they can do NOW to make a
better future for all of us we are in danger of
having costs continue to rise while quality of care
declines.