Healthcare Market Analysis
Situation | Offering Benefits
- Almost every European country is adapting its healthcare model, with the aim of lowering costs and increasing personal responsibility for health. In-country regulations are putting significant pressures on product prices, by favoring usage of generics, setting price caps or forced discounts, and establishing treatment-based (cost-benefit oriented) pricing systems, such as DRGs. Furthermore, governments are moving towards transparent, evidenced-based (outcomes) measurements, as well as an increased focus on adherence to formulary/positive lists.
- In a number of countries, healthcare systems are being “opened” to allow for more flexible and efficient patient services to take hold. Prescriber status is being given to nurses and pharmacies under certain conditions and the set-up of alternative, integrated provider systems is encouraged. Additionally the privatization of hospitals is supported, enabling a much more commercial approach to healthcare provision. Furthermore, the rising power of patient advocacy groups, through their organizational growth and their increased influence on local patient networks makes them a stakeholder that must be dealt with.
- As a result every country’s healthcare system has its own peculiarities, with numerous stakeholders not only influencing the prescription process, but also pricing and access to medication. What are the most up-to-date trends affecting a countries healthcare system development? Who are the key stakeholders within the system? And what opportunities (or threats) do these developments bring for the pharmaceutical product suppliers in their business relationship with both providers and payers?
- The above questions are still today seldom answered as such assessments are a time consuming activity. Additionally, an assessment of this type goes beyond the traditional pharmaceutical customer base of the providers and is therefore new territory for pharmaceutical companies. However, the necessity to understand the local healthcare economy is becoming more and more evident, as shown by the quantity of related industry articles and the search for more appropriate business models.
- Executive Insight’s network-based healthcare market assessment identifies and maps out:
- the key stakeholders who need to be approached by Sales and Marketing,
- the formal and informal roles they possess
- and helps to understand their needs as well as related services
- Based on our experience of numerous client projects, Executive Insight employs an assessment methodology that brings transparency into a somewhat daunting and complex task. Together with a client team we take the time to analyze market trends and combine them with existing internal customer knowledge, augmenting it with primary and/or secondary research information.
- Understanding the local healthcare economy, with its different types of networks, i.e. collaborative provider-, referral-, hospital- and influence networks, paves the way to begin looking at different ways of interacting with customers. Potential alternatives are:
- establishing an Account Management based approach as the go-to-market model in order to facilitate the collaboration between stakeholders
- developing collaboration concepts that demonstrate pharmaceutical value by focusing on improving health-outcomes and lowering overall treatment costs
- forming new networks in support of therapeutic guidelines, compliance regimes, or patient transfers between so-called hub hospitals and the outlying spoke (specialty) clinics
- With the groundwork laid by completing a healthcare market assessment, the results open the door for new interaction opportunities with customers, securing product revenues in evolving and increasingly regulated markets and finally rebuilding the trust that is badly needed in the pharmaceutical industry.