Expert Article: Pharma needs a digital reset same as above
Is your content even a tiny part of the online conversations about your disease and therapeutic areas? A look at the search results might horrify you…
This article was created in association with Reuters Events: Pharma Marketing USA 2022 (November 8-9 2022, Philadelphia),where 200+ Marketing, Digital, Analytics, Data, Commercial, IT and Brand leaders will unite to learn what capabilities are needed to take a deep dive into healthcare’s new digital landscape.
A clear understanding of customer needs among cross-functional teams that are aligned to meeting these needs is key to launch success in the omnichannel age
Without internal alignment, pharma cannot serve its most important stakeholders as they now expect to be served in today’s multichannel, on-demand engagement landscape.
This is an ambitious undertaking from companies that are only now dismantling the legacy silos that prevented true internal collaboration and it is one that must begin by aligning everyone around a common goal.
Current operational silos cannot serve customers as they now expect, says Konrad Dobschuetz, Head of Digital Innovation, Customer Solutions and BIOME Lead UK at Novartis. “It's not working the way it's set up right now, it's just not working.”
Defining and coalescing around the correct task or problem to be solved is a vital first step to working well collaboratively, says Dobschuetz. “If you define your problem well, your solution is just one step away. Definition is at the heart of everything.”
So, before cross-functional teams are let loose, it’s necessary to step back and look at how customers operate, what their lives look like and what they need from the business. Getting into HCPs’ heads in this way is important, says Paul Dixey, External Consultant, Global Digital Lead, Commercial Operations, Tillotts Pharma, “to understand the real life of our customers, not where they are in deciding whether to prescribe our drug or not.”
The non-fiction book and resulting British TV series This is going to hurt, about the unvarnished experiences of an NHS doctor, is a good example of the kind of insights that pharma should be looking for, rather than a narrow view of their prescribing behaviour.
“That's the real life of one of our clinicians, getting up in the morning, the car doesn't work, getting into the hospital, nothing works. The administrators are giving them a hard time. They're trying to keep a relationship in place,” says Dixey.
“Understanding that and what we can do to help them in their real life and what products and services can help them provide better care for the patient. It's not: ‘where do you prescribe this particular drug in comparison with others’? It's actually, ‘how can do you get home on time and try and keep your relationship alive?’ That's the real life of our customers.”
Gaining insights into what patients need and the context in which they experience care and treatment matters too. Digitally savvy patients can have an impact on a launch and so should now be seen as key external partners that cross-functional teams should be engaging with, says Parveen Jayia, Therapy Area Head, Breast & Gynaecological Cancers, AstraZeneca.
“They want to work with you, but they don't know how to work with you. It's a great opportunity. Let’s explore those opportunities and those different channels. There are new patient charities popping up all the time and they're becoming more and more active.”
How to do this is a challenge since it’s clear that existing insight-gathering methods are no longer sufficient. The industry needs new approaches and part of the answer will lie in collecting insights from truly diverse samples of patient and HCP populations.
Establishing true diversity in external stakeholder interactions in this way is important to truly understanding the needs of all, not just a small subset of them. A good example of where current approaches fail is advisory boards that convene repeatedly with the same individuals, says Dobschuetz. “We get the same insights from the same people and they just like to talk to us. We need to break that mould to reflect the true nature of society.”
As well as broader advisory board representation, it is also useful to capture a representative sample of voices in other ways, such as via social listening and voice-of-the-customer surveys, adds Dobschuetz.
There is then a job to do to put these insights into context by mapping out groupings of customers and their needs, says Dixey. “We need our market research team, or a business insights analytics team, to really help us understand our customers with behavioural segmentation or personas.”
Having gathered these insights and attained clarity on the mission, it is then possible to work out how to help internal teams work to meet it effectively cross functionally.
This includes:
Building cross-functional trust and understanding
Working to ensure everyone is familiar with the demands and requirements that each function is tasked with meeting is a pre-requisite to establishing high performing cross-functional teams.
This should include embedding different team members in other functions for short periods, so they experience the realities and requirements of colleagues in person, says Loucif Léo Ouyahia, Lead Global Medical Affairs & Operations, Biogen Digital Health.
“We need a new model of working and collaboration between functions. We need to understand other functions, what they do, what they need. Immersions or short experiences within these functions is crucial.”
Training should seek to enable teams to understand the big picture but also to skill individuals up for their particular tasks, says Ouyahia: “We need to have a model where we have core trainings for everyone to understand what other functions do and what are the needs from other functions. And then you have personalized trainings to train them in their needs and building the strategy for the future and to gain expertise or to gain external vision, for example, for the future.”
Internal functions that are not always considered as part of cross-functional efforts need to be factored into cross-functional working here and the should include colleagues from procurement, patient safety and data privacy, says Dixey. “The simple things such as procurement, saying ‘we don't have a code for that type of service’, could then take you four months to try and get sorted out because the codes are set at the global level.”
Equipping cross-functional teams with the right skillsets
Training up teams to operate well in an omnichannel context is vital, and if necessary, bringing in talent from outside if gaps remain, says Dixey. “In a world where we have all channels on all the time and face-to-face, are we recruiting the right people?
“Are we constantly upskilling our people? Are we making sure that they're really fit to the role, not promoting somebody into marketing because they've spent X number of years in the field and they want to come into head office? We're going to have outsiders come in and they will break the model, hopefully.”
But space should also be made for allowing learning by doing, including letting teams make and correct mistakes. Such experiential learning on the job is a big focus at Novartis, says Dobschuetz. “People need to be allowed to make mistakes while they learn on the job. There's no reason why we can't have people experimenting, getting stuff done and making mistakes while they go. We need to move away from screen learning or classroom learning.”
Recruiting for curiosity
When teams are convened, the right mindset is an increasingly important factor as well as skillsets. Being keen to learn things that are outside the role an individual was originally recruited for is one such quality.
“How do we recruit people who are curious, who want to learn, who are not waiting for the next piece of learning to be sent to them on the internal learning platform and who are instead going out and finding stuff. I think it's a really valuable competency,” says Dixey.
Cultivating a cadre of ambassadors who will foster the external relationships and alliances needed to operate in the new collaborative normal is another important strategy to ensure success beyond launch, adds Dixey.
Another way to look at building the right cross-functional teams is to build a common mindset around a seamless scientific narrative which individuals across the organisation understand and communicate in a co-ordinated way that is tailored to the needs of clinicians, says Jayia.
In order to achieve this, a mind shift is needed internally so that medical and commercial see themselves as part of a larger brand team with the same objectives but different jobs to do, says Jayia. “Whether it's commercially or medically led [it’s about] using real-time insights so that we can personalise that scientific narrative in the way that the clinician wants to digest and understand it. It's not a medical project, it's not a commercial project. It's a truly integrated project because we all have that same scientific narrative to give to the healthcare professional.”
Creating a ‘can do’ compliance culture
Infighting between commercial and medical, which often happens around how a particular objective might clash with the compliance framework, requires a further shift in mindset, says Dixey.
“The overall compliance flag really annoys me. Is it a code of practice? Is it legal? Is it data privacy? For me, the key [questions] are: Are you doing something with the right intent? Are you doing it for the right reason? Are you doing anything that could jeopardize the safety of a patient? And are you being completely transparent in what you're doing?
“If you can tick off those, then you're probably on a good track. And then you say to the whole team, do we all buy into this objective? Are you committed to it? How might we possibly do this? And for the team to come up with thinking about possibilities rather than just, why can't we do it?”
Inverting existing approaches to compliance issues offers a better way to the solutions, adds Dixey. “If you say to somebody, ‘why can't we do it?’ They'll tell you why you can't do it. But if you ask, ‘how might we possibly do something’, you get a whole different set of answers.”
Sharing customer success stories
A further powerful agent of internal motivation and change is being able to show all team members that what they are doing is working for customers, says Dobschuetz: “When you're the only person jumping up and down in the company and saying ‘we need to do this’, nobody's ever going to listen to you, but people listen to your customers. Get your customers to talk well about the stuff that you're doing. Try to create external advocacy for the good stuff that you're doing.”
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