Author: gatsby gatsby

By TKG’s Rachna Pawar

A KAM without support, without the necessary tools and research that customer-centric marketing delivers, is really just a pharmaceutical sales rep.

By TKG’s Rachna Pawar

In recent years, it has become increasingly clear that branded, product-centered marketing is no longer the most effective approach for introducing new drugs and treatments. Seen from the system administrator perspective, classic “this works better than that” techniques fail to address the challenges they face.

The years since the start of the Great Recession in 2008 and the enactment of the ACA in 2010 have produced good news for those who worry about the growth of healthcare spending and the share of GDP that it consumes: spending growth is tapering off and, as a share of the country’s economic activity, it continues to be relatively stable.

But while there is good news for the nation in the aggregate, the news for individual consumers is decidedly mixed.

An increasing number of providers are adopting the Motivational Interviewing framework when counseling patients about the need to change the lifestyle and behaviors that increase their risk for a range of disease states and readmissions.

What do these provider-patient interactions look like? And what impact do these interactions have on health outcomes?

In a recent article published in the Journal of Healthcare Leadership, TKG advisor Scott Conard, MD discusses the need for providers to alter their fundamental identity to incorporate a new kind of leadership role—that of the MDCEO^TM (i.e., the individual clinician who leads the practice to ensure that quality, service, and financial systems are developed and effectively managed).

In the case of innovative drug therapies, finding regimens that improve patient adherence to treatment plans – by simplifying the plan, by reducing side effects, by shortening the duration of the treatment – will accelerate the pace at which America achieves its goal of better health outcomes at lower cost.

How will America meet its future medical needs?

The answer to this question is going to involve a re-design of large parts of the healthcare system – including the definition of “seeing the doctor”. One promising re-design has been in use only sporadically since the 1990s but has been picking up steam in the last few years.

When it comes to America’s healthcare costs, demographics are threatening to be destiny.

It’s been 62 years since the 1946 start of America’s post-WW2 baby boom – the youngest Boomers, those born in 1964, turn 50 this year. The impact of aging Boomers constitutes a potentially ominous trend for the US economy.

The Commonwealth Fund’s most recent Mirror, Mirror report ranking eleven industrialized countries’ healthcare systems along key metrics, shows that the US system has a long way to go before it can deliver high-quality, cost efficient – and, most troubling, timely – care.

TKG’s strategic partner, University of Michigan’s Center for Value-Based Design, has recently released a white paper and video brief on V-BID principles to address clinical and economic effects of higher cost sharing for specialty medication.