December 15, 2009 » HCP RM: 3 Tips To Start

1. Identify leadership, budget, and resources: One of the biggest challenges to implementation, especially in larger pharmaceutical companies is: Who is going to lead the initiative? Who owns this “new” program? The brand? The sales force? Another party? Who will pay for it? And what changes will need to be made to the technical infrastructure to support the program? This may prove to be the biggest obstacle. A truly effective RM program should be thought of as an infrastructure investment; not a mere campaign. By its very nature and considering the many departments that an effective RM program impacts, this initial step has the highest likelihood of derailing or significantly delaying the entire project. Our advice is to pilot a program with one or more brands that share the same specialist. Do not go “enterprise wide” right out of the gate. Learn from the mistakes that were made with the adoption of online programs in Pharma(See Blog Post #3).
2. Devise the right segmentation strategy: Who are the right and wrong physicians for your program? What are the best messages to deliver to your different audience segments? To succeed in this area, you’ll want to work with outside resources to “really” understand your audience segments. Successful programs are based on segmentation that’s psychographic rather than segmentation that’s demographic, script-driven, or decile-driven. It’s important, too, not to forget the nurse segment, as nurses perform most of the legwork and patient interfacing. By first effectively segmenting HCPs and determining your goals, you can then move onto choosing the appropriate tactics and channels for those various segments.
3. Build the right databases. Having a database that meets your RM goals is key to delivering customized communications to each specific audience segment. Successful and strong relationships can only be attained when the database can continually “learn” and react over time. Pharmaceutical companies are notorious for having physician databases that are anything but robust. And many lack the capability to appropriately design, build, and maintain the right kinds of databases. Unfortunately, many vendors who excel in this area have proprietary databases that pharma companies can only rent, preventing the pharma companies from truly owning, mining, and leveraging its own data. Still, there are tips for creating an effective database. It’s essential, first of all, to set up your database correctly from the beginning, ensuring that the data fields you collect are indeed the right ones and that the right people are using the database. It‘s critical, too, that the database be designed to acquire and decipher incoming information—eMails opened, poll questions answered, site pages visited, rep observations—so that the database continually learns where each target is on the behavioral continuum and what is required to move them further along. This ensures that your communications meet the specific information needs of each segment, reflects their knowledge of the brand and where they are on the continuum. Your budget and technical requirements must also be able to support the data to be collected and stored.