Lab Workers Beware

You Are Pharma's Next Marketing Focus

Most people know the days of drug reps in tight skirts offering doctors tickets to championship sports events to sell product are long gone.

Expensive human drug reps have been with replaced with Ask Your Doctor ads, patient front groups (astroturf), unbranded disease awareness campaigns, online disease “Am I sick” “quizzes,” disease “clubs,” magazines like ADDitude, drugmaker funded “research” in medical journals, newsrooms repeating same as “news” and, of course, celebrity drug pitching.

Recently, tables in Northwestern medicine waiting rooms in the Chicago area were adorned with piles of “Point-of-Care” drugmaker planted “content hub,” “cover wrap” magazines designed to look like real publications. They are distributed at key locations in patients’ healthcare “journeys,” designed to be relevant.

The pharmaceutical industry’s legislative/governmental/medical conflicts-of-interest, self-dealing, kickbacks and revolving door maneuvers are, of course, not new but they fly under the radar.

Nor is tax-payer funded research at medical centers enriching drugmakers after we paid for it new thanks to the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980.

Today, medical schools shamelessly name fellowships after their Pharma partners and hospitals name building wings; where will the relatively new phenomena of direct-to-patient Pharma-owned practices and telehealth operations, bypassing doctors and pharmacies altogether, lead?

Still, the high budget marketing—some say Pharma is the fourth branch of government—does not mean all is well in prescription-ville.

Listen to the messages in industry webinars and you’ll hear about how margins are shrinking and “eligible” patients are being missed due to marketing “inefficiencies” like email clutter, “noise” and message overload. (And who caused that?)

Low “therapy awareness among prescribers,” slow adoption of new “therapies” and of course competition from other Pharma marketers are resulting in impaired therapy “uptake” and conversions say Pharma marketing experts. (They don’t mean football conversions)

Especially concerning they say is the delay in “therapy adoption” even after doctors have been reached and brand-converted: A seven day delay can mean a 50 percent loss of sales; a three month delay can mean a 70 to 95 percent sales reduction. We’re talking about real money here, people!

But there’s hope say drug multinationals and everyone who has noticed the “get-screened-for-everything” movement will not be surprised.

The lab needs to be the new first point of contact going forward. Seventy percent of healthcare decisions are made on the basis of diagnostics not office visits…so stop dragging your feet Pharma say marketers.

After all, pathologists went to the same medical schools as other doctors and can diagnose diseases based on lab result data. But they need to be targeted, reached and converted like other doctors in the chain. Who’s been sleeping at the wheel?

Yes, the lab “landscape” tends to report results very differently from HCPs and insurers but AI can take care of that and actually is doing so now.

If your data strategy is anchored on old fashioned claims and billing data from doctor visits, get with the program say the top Pharma marketers today. You’re missing sales, sorry conversions, due to time delays. You need a “diagnostic forward” multimodal data strategy that lets you “segment, target and engage” in near real time. (And yes, you also need to learn Pharma-Marketing Speak.)

As marketing grows in the diagnostic lab “space,” will we see more “you may feel fine but get screened right now because you’re probably not” marketing? Will sensors on lab instrumentation increase as lab results become real time and Pharma waits for “therapy adoption” results with bated breath? Hopefully Pharma won't bring back reps in tight skirts with the new marketing. END