Marketing

Patients are the heart of the healthcare system. Lets treat them that way!

This week eyeforpharma launches its very first Patients Week.

This is, in fact, the first time weve launched any kind of week, patients or otherwise.

Why start with patients? Because thats where our industry starts.

Management expert Peter Drucker reminds us that the purpose of business is to create and keep customers. Pharma certainly does a lot of customer creation, with its disease awareness campaigns and advertising.

But these activities don't do wonders for our wider reputation.

Surely, we can go a little further. Surely, the best customer is one getting great service.

Surely, we can and should be talking about the real wonder of our industryimproving and saving patients lives.

In our industry, creating and keeping customers means making people healthier, not just informing them that they are diabetic and need medication.

Pharma can do so much more than it does now.

Regulations and adverse events are paltry excuses for not doing so.

More often than not, they are crutches used to keep us thinking in the same comfort circle we've always thought in.

Why aren't pharma companies creating any of the great innovations we're starting to see in telehealth?

Why aren't we able to disassociate ourselves from our medicines to simply consider the pure patient experience?

Why are websites like CureTogether and PatientsLikeMe funded from non-pharma sources? Where is pharma's customer-service guru in the mould of Tony Hsieh?

Why are interested outsiders creating awards for patient services, writing patient reviews and books, and driving the agenda for games in health?

This week is all about reacquainting us with the need to think from the patient's perspective, not just how pharma can play lip service to patients in order to secure a new market access deal.

We hope you agree that everybodyfrom sales to business development to drug discoveryneeds to focus on patients.

Because there is so much more we can do.