Sanofi-Aventis CEO Gerard Le Fur today annouced, while reporting on 2007 results, that the company's efforts for the coming months would focus on decentralising management and a greater focus on health economics.
In places such as Germany and the UK, where pharma's restructuring has been hugely accelerated by successive government efforts to prove value prior to giving the green light to prescriptions, the number of executives calling for pharma to 'prove its value' is enormous.
Many manifestations of this 'value' appear to be around added services surrounding the patient and supplementary prescribers.
But sometimes I can't help feeling that these extra services, which are often no more than local pilot schemes of many varying types (with little consensus on how ROI is proven), don't tackle the issue at its root cause.
A rapid rise in the importance of Health Economics is already being witnessed by most of Big Pharma, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was to supplant traditional commercial efforts over the next few years.
Marketing managers are turning into analysts and number-crunchers, and sales managers are turning into negotiators.
But which marketing manager joined their company only to be told they have to beef up their numeracy skills and be expected to recall health policy changes at the bequest of their CEO? Hardly glamorous is it?
Value should lie at the heart of a drug
The problem with value being synonomous with 'value-added services' is that it is merely tinkering around the edges.
A larger trend in pharma is that drugs must be inherently valuable, and so encouraging commercial knowledge to mix with a drugs development is increasingly common. Of course it is fraught with political obsticles both internal and external, and pharma companies are already under pressure for designing pipelines only around profit and not always the greatest need.
However, for pharma companies to continue to get market access, they have to align their product development to the needs of that market. Therefore commercial insights must increasingly play a role in development, a practice called 'early commercialisation'. This can then tie into the health economics process, because a stronger product means a stronger argument for its pharmacoeconomic benefits.
I think we agree...
I think we're broadly in agreement there.
I'd like to know how widespread the push for early commercialisation really is, and what the main obstacles are. I can't imagine any product at the moment being launched without serious efforts here; though I suppose the need for country-specific efforts and economic arguments might require too many resources.