Value Beyond the Pill USA

Dec 3, 2014 - Dec 4, 2014, Philadelphia

2-day conference on how you can provide value beyond the pill in order to move from a product-focussed to a customer-focussed business

Partners in Integrated Healthcare: Evolving to a Solutions-Based Model

Becoming partners in integrated healthcare will require intense collaboration by pharma both internally across functions and externally with non-traditional entrants. eyeforpharma talks to Marco Mohwinckel about some of the inherent challenges of evolving to a solutions-based model.



As the healthcare ecosystem continues to shift and evolve, pharmaceutical companies are being challenged to adapt their commercial models to offer individualized value propositions that deliver affordable health outcomes. Succeeding in this environment will require agile innovation and a reimagining of current business models centering around a partnership approach to delivering integrated care.

Intense collaboration

Understanding the full implications of integrated care on pharma's core business model was a core topic at the eyeforpharma Value Added Services Summit, held in London in September.

Pharma becoming partners in integrated care will require intense collaboration both internally across functions within the organization and externally with non-traditional entrants from a wide range of industries – IT, data analytics, mobile telephony, trade and others. It will also require collaboration with payers to understand the value gaps to be addressed and the need for immediate cost containment. In the words of Stephen Whitehead, CEO of ABPI: “It’s all about affordability” and creative measures will need to be enacted to ensure payers needs are met while simultaneously bending the curve on spiralling healthcare costs.

Integrated care also requires networking with people outside of the organization, and outside of pharma who provide access to new ways of thinking. Providing services is radically different from selling products and the old mentality of developing wraparound services to enhance product sales and differentiate is obsolete. Those companies that succeed will find that delivering value becomes the basis of an entirely new business model in which a single company assembles the various parts and then is compensated based upon outcomes, not from selling the component parts of care. This more comprehensive and integrated approach is truly the future of healthcare, and it will require intelligence and creativity to realise the true potential of these collaborative partnerships.

Key challenges of transitioning to a services-based model

Speaking at the Value Added Services Summit, Marco Mohwinckel, Global Head of Integrated Care, Janssen Healthcare Innovation, stressed the complexity of the shift to a more solutions-based approach: "Transitioning to a services-based model is not easy and it will require us to identity and address key gaps between pharma and payers, moving across the cycle of care into prevention and pre-emption, that is, intervening early enough in the disease process to prevent serious effects of the disease associated with progression.  He outlined some of the key challenges such as:

  • How do we best collaborate with non-traditional players such as healthcare facilities, electronic/mobile health firms, device manufacturers and IT firms to form creative alliances and valuable new avenues to innovation?
  • How do we create value by embedding products into an holistic offering with the aim to improve patient outcomes and communicate that value to individual stakeholders?
  • How do we reorganize internally to facilitate the ideation and execution of multidisciplinary solutions?

This event brought together the collective experiences and learnings of innovators such as Sanofi, Janssen and MSD, who have experimented with new partnerships and business models that combine drugs with devices, services and other tools.

Cultivating an agile culture of experimentation

New capabilities that will enable radical collaboration and drive innovative solutions will necessitate changes to pharma’s structures and processes, culture and mindset that will streamline processes, enhance information flow and cultivate an agile culture of experimentation. 

Managing external collaborations are complex and problematic and can get bogged down in bureaucracy; relationships can fail to move beyond the transactional, and the smaller firm can become frustrated by what they perceive as the slow speed and risk aversion of the larger partner. The ability to manage these partnerships successfully will be critical to the success of integrated care initiatives and will be the biggest point of competitive differentiation in the future.


To learn more about driving integrated care solutions within your organization, download the Value Added Services Highlights Report by clicking here.



Value Beyond the Pill USA

Dec 3, 2014 - Dec 4, 2014, Philadelphia

2-day conference on how you can provide value beyond the pill in order to move from a product-focussed to a customer-focussed business