The value of medicine: opportunities, not threats
Bruce Charlesworth from Adelphi Values (formerly named Mapi Values) writes for Pharmaphorum about the opportunity surrounding defining value in healthcare, and how it has evolved from traditional efficacy or tolerability.
Bruce considers the key components of product value through comparison with the more insight driven FMCG market and challenges the difference in approach to defining the value to multiple stakeholders. He then contextualises this, suggesting that unprecedented changes in the healthcare product market place have resulted in a pharmaceutical world that is fast appreciating the need to proactively and willingly address the needs of multiple stakeholders in bringing healthcare brands to the right consumers (read patients). He goes on to explain that investigating, demonstrating and communicating value requires an unusual blend of scientific excellence and commercial acumen and a strategic approach to Insight, Evidence, Tools and Communication.
After exploring each of these areas more thoroughly, Bruce concludes:
…with the patient perspective, health economics, robust clinical evidence and real-world outcomes ever increasing in importance, the need to understand, investigate and demonstrate value has never been higher… …Success is dependent upon an early, critical look at the value landscape, and a change in mind-set… …With deep enough insight, appropriate evidence, intuitive tools and creative communication the ‘challenge’ of market access can be viewed as an opportunity to shine. That opportunity is to improve patients’ lives with not just innovative products, but with innovative products that have relevant, understandable, universally appreciable, and scientifically proven value.