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Thought leadership and innovation for the Pharmaceutical Industry

We have whittled it down to the final five. Here are the contenders for the Most Valuable HCP Initiative award.

By Adam Chapman on Feb 1, 2019

What makes our species so unique is our ability to spread ideas. This cross-pollination has enabled peace and prosperity to flourish, and ignorance to be supplanted by understanding.

Each of the innovative programmes recognized in this year’s awards have made a meaningful contribution to improving people’s lives. Perhaps they have eased the burden on patients, or helped HCPs navigate the demands of their job, or entered a fruitful collaboration. Through sharing their ideas, we hope you too will be inspired.

The winner of the Most Valuable HCP Initiative award will be an innovative project designed to deliver tangible working and healthcare improvements both in the long and short term. Demonstrating understanding of real health requirements prior to implementation, the winning project will have been managed to an outstanding level and will have made an exceptionally positive impact on its intended customer.

Here are the finalists:

Vision for a brighter future for people suffering with retinal disease
Bayer

Loss of sight due to retinal disease has a devastating impact on people's lives, as well as on the lives of those around them.  With no clear consensus on how best to manage the disease, ophthalmologists at the forefront of tackling these conditions are frequently faced with making difficult, uninformed decisions on how best to manage clinical challenges.

As a leader in the ophthalmology field, Bayer has committed to transform this situation through a ground-breaking innovative programme – the Vision Academy – which will improve how retinal disease is managed to make a positive difference to patients’ lives.

The Vision Academy is comprised of more than 85 highly esteemed international experts; the aim is to share existing skills and knowledge to address clinical challenges in areas where there is a lack of decisive evidence.

The Vision Academy is unique and is improving patients’ lives through the communication of robust science, knowledge and experience in ophthalmology.  The Vision Academy is sponsored by Bayer but operates independently in terms of which clinical challenges to address and what guidance to communicate, thus increasing the credibility of its clinical recommendations.

Over the past 2 years, the Vision Academy has become a proactive educator and the ‘go-to’ global authority on the management of retinal disease, influencing local and regional clinical practice and improving patients’ lives.  With an emphasis on providing the tools and educational engagement to drive implementation of clinical recommendations and guidance, the Vision Academy expert recommendations are now reaching the wider ophthalmic community to improve patients’ lives.

Interactive guidelines asset Gina
Boehringer Ingelheim

The Global Institute for Asthma (GINA) is a non-profit organization of healthcare professionals and public health officials working to reduce asthma prevalence, morbidity, and mortality. The GINA Scientific Committee has developed a sophisticated set of procedures to review the world’s scientific literature about asthma management and publishes an updated GINA report on an annual basis.

Boehringer Ingelheim, in collaboration with its digital partner Aptus Health, has created a way to provide HCPs with a concise summary of the latest GINA recommendations, as well as local treatment guidelines, in an interactive way that is informative and respectful of their busy schedules. The collaboration is striving to empower evidence-based decisions and support HCPs in the daily management of asthma patients.

GINA guidelines are an important contribution to the asthma community. Through this educational, interactive asset, HCPs can familiarize themselves with the clinical content and recommendations in a way that is easy to use and time-sensitive. The asset is designed to help guide the HCP through the content through a range of modules, bringing the content to life through technology.

In addition, this approach is something that HCPs can return to as needed—it provides quick access to the guideline to support clinical scenarios. For example, the 1-minute page is also designed to be printed and pinned in their office for quick reference if needed, such as during a patient visit.

The interactive asset was deployed in a number of markets and has proven to be one of the most popular assets rolled out by the brand team to date. The most frequently selected option by the users is the 20-minute version, suggesting that HCPs find the offering appealing and valuable to them.

Virtual Cardio Academy
Ecopharm

It’s common knowledge that doctors are short on time and resources. It is also common knowledge that pharma has a somewhat frayed relationship with HCPs. Virtual interactions with HCPs can remedy both. Ecopharm unleashed this potential.

Ecopharm organized a nation-wide year-long Virtual Cardio Academy which consisted of 10 virtual events on cardiological topics with 4878 participants, led by national Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) in Bulgaria, using the digital tools offered by cloud-based platform CredoWeb.

Each event in the series was a practical online discussion on an important cardiological topic. The discussions were invite-only events, providing cardiologists and general practitioners with the opportunity to partake in common environment and share opinions, experiences, clinical cases or seek advice and ask questions to the moderator and between each other.

On a weekly basis newly-created content based on the community listening from each event has been distributed to the physicians through CredoWeb’s multiple channels.

While the benefits to HCPs are manifold, it has afforded Ecopharm the opportunity to digitize its marketing activities of the company and integrated its offline and online activities. The key to this success has been the mixture of digital activities including virtual events, continuous medical education, mailing and branded e-detailing. This led to increase in revenues of the company’s whole portfolio by 19% (twice as fast as the market growth) and profit increase of 129%.

Bridge Project
Menarini

Disease management is a highly complex area to navigate yet has an outsized effect on all stakeholders in the healthcare system. Bridging the disconnect between how HCPs and patients view a disease could hold the key to improving patient outcomes. But gathering the data on these differences can be an enormous undertaking, one that is impracticable for time-strapped HCPs.

This is where Menarini steps in. In 2013 the pharma company launched the ‘Bridge Project’ to observe and understand how different patients and physicians perceive Stable Angina(SA) and the impact of SA on QoL (Quality of Life).

Menarini used primary market research (PMR) methods to gather the data; the rationale being that PMRs would be the perfect approach to address the objectives, due to its flexibility and ability to explore the human (social and psychological) aspects of disease management.

The study consisted of several large-scale qualitative and quantitative surveys involving hundreds of physicians treating SA patients. The article on the study was published in the peer-reviewed journal Angiology in August last year and went on rank second in Angiology Stable Angina’s 614 articles for relevance and the third most downloaded.

Abstracts from the Bridge Study were successfully presented at the satellite symposium during the 2018 European Society of Cardiology (ESC) Congress in Munich and the symposium was followed by a large medical audience which highly appreciated the outcomes and found topics extremely interesting and eye-opening.

The project generated new learning for physicians regarding their perception of differences between patients according to time of diagnosis, PCI intervention and gender, showing real health requirements in creating more awareness amongst doctors regarding the treatment and impact of SA for patients.

Optimising IBD care through digitalization and reinforced patient empowerment
Takeda

Takeda has co-created together with hospitals and the IT company Bestor, an algorithm-based platform that utilizes real time data provided by EMRs, disease registries and by patients in their home environment themselves, giving them a more active role in managing their disease.

By utilizing the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the algorithm predicts the individual risk for a patient to get a relapse in the upcoming 3, 6 or 9 months and sends a traffic light based recommendation to HCPs.

HCPs can focus on patients in need and work more efficiently while experiencing higher work satisfaction and providing more meaningful work. Improved productivity and greater focus on serious cases and patients who are most in need are the result. At the same, the initiative strengthens the patient–provider relationship and helps in the operational and financial transition to value-based healthcare.

The Predict and Prevent initiative focuses on Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD). Chronic diseases such as IBD account for two thirds of all healthcare costs. Therefore, more efficient resource usage is key. 

The health economic analysis performed by the hospital partner, which was a part of the proof of concept, demonstrated a potential saving of up to €8M/per year only in the reduction of hospital admissions.

The initiative is intended to be scaled within IBD in several countries across Europe and can serve as a blueprint for value-based healthcare solutions in other therapeutic areas.

Your exclusive opportunity to witness these, plus many other real world, successful case studies awaits! Find out more about the Awards Pitch Day Europe here