Thinking Beyond Your Product: Disease-Focused Campaigns

By Jo Oswald, Watermeadow Medical

Most people working within the pharmaceutical industry do so because they want to improve people’s lives, make them better, make them happier, help them to live longer and healthier. And, indeed, these goals are explicit in mission and vision statements throughout Pharma: Pfizer “are dedicated to improving quality of life and providing solutions for peoples’ health needs”; at Merck “our business is preserving and improving human life”, and Novartis “want to discover, develop and successfully market innovative products to prevent and cure diseases, to ease suffering and to enhance the quality of life”.

Creating new, effective and well-tolerated products that address unmet treatment needs is usually necessary to achieve these goals, but alone it is not sufficient. The benefits of new products and how they fit into a broader disease management strategy needs to be communicated to all stakeholders, and all stakeholders need to understand how diseases really affect people so that they can use new treatments to full effect and so that they can continue to strive for necessary therapeutic and care developments.

Put this way it is clear that to achieve goals of improved quality of life and extended health, we need to think beyond important product-focused activities, such as publication planning, sales aids, and exhibitions, to ensure that communications program also include broader disease-focused initiatives. These types of initiatives can include disease impact research, quality of life campaigns, support for the development of fair and balanced practical treatment algorithms, patient adherence programs, non-promotional scientific meetings, and health professional CME offerings.

It is perhaps appropriate at this stage to make it clear that we want to distinguish these types of meaningful and important disease-focused activities from 'disease mongering' or unjustified 'disease creating' or 'awareness' activity, which is, understandably, the focus of much negative press. Indeed, the BMJ has described such practices as "the selling of sickness that widens the boundaries of illness and grows the markets for those who sell and deliver treatments." This isn't the aim of the disease-focused activities as discussed in this article. Instead, here we are emphasizing the need for education and thought sharing to ensure that all stakeholders fully understand the potential benefits of treatments and how to utilize new therapies to achieve their potential.

The 'win-win' of disease-focused activities
Disease-focused activities achieve a number of goals. Importantly, they allow you to demonstrate your commitment to a specified therapy area, identifying that you know that advances in healthcare are about more than just drugs. Through this work you can engage with opinion leaders and patient groups and associations, becoming exposed to a new network of advisors and advocates. In a competitive environment, disease-focused activities can allow distinction from your competitors, potentially facilitating a market-leader position. Through these activities, you will learn more about the disease and what is needed in the future, and ensure that you remain at the heart of advances, and focused on developments.

But these activities do not just help achieve industry objectives; they are also beneficial for external stakeholders. Disease-focused activities can help physicians fully understand the impact of diseases on patients (research often shows that physicians misunderstand the health and psychosocial impact of some illnesses on patients, underestimating certain issues, and overestimating others). It will help them understand your product's place in therapy, which will ensure the most appropriate use of your products, maximizing patient outcomes. Additionally, such activities can help healthcare professionals to remain up to date with therapeutic advances, and to achieve more established, better recognized care paths. Finally, they can support patient-centered care initiatives, and empower patients to continue to seek help when treatment is unsatisfactory and quality of life suboptimal.

Wide-ranging use
Disease-focused activities are important in all healthcare areas, but they may be particularly useful in certain circumstances, for example, if there are one or two specialist therapeutic areas in which you have not only a multiple-product pedigree but also an active research program. Chronic diseases, such as diabetes, psoriasis, and HIV/AIDS also readily lend themselves disease-focused initiatives. Here, disease activities can help healthcare professionals fully understand the social and personal challenges of these types of condition. They can also encourage long-term treatment adherence, support access to medicines and facilities, and identify and target unmet support needs that will ultimately improve outcomes.

As a medical communications company, we have helped design and deliver many different types of disease-focused activities. One of the largest with which we've been involved is the Diabetes Attitudes Wishes and Needs (DAWN) program, a collaboration between Novo Nordisk, the International Diabetes Federation and an international expert advisory board. Diabetes is a life-long illness which relies heavily on patient self-management. In this condition, like many others, the best drugs in the world will never be sufficient unless patients and healthcare professionals understand why they are needed and how to take them. The DAWN initiative started in 2001 with the DAWN study, a major international survey to assess the attitudes, wishes and needs of people with diabetes and those who treat them. The results of the study identified that many people with diabetes do not have good quality of life, and that management strategies need to take into account the psychosocial impact and burden of the disease. Five areas for action were identified based on the results of the study, including enhancing communications between people with diabetes and their medical team, promoting active self-management, and overcoming the emotional barriers to effective therapy. Since then the ongoing DAWN program has supported a multitude of initiatives worldwide directed towards achieving these goals, and ultimately to providing better, more appropriate and more effective care that meets the needs of people with diabetes. It has evolved over the years to include additional surveys (e.g., focusing specifically on Youth needs), and more extensive professional networks. A bi-annual summit brings together important facilitators of change to share progress and to plan future initiatives on a global scale, which can then be tailored by local DAWN advisory boards to suit national needs. Importantly, DAWN, and other well-planned programs like it, are typically well received and have been shown to improve patient outcomes as well as to meet Pharma objectives.

Of course disease-focused activities are not without negatives. They can be expensive, yet it is not always easy to directly quantify return on investment. Additionally, target audiences can be cynical of industry-sponsored activities even when motives are justified. Nevertheless if your aim is to achieve your products' potential and to improve people's lives then they are an essential part of any communications strategy.

Reference:
BMJ  2006;332:871 (15 April), doi:10.1136/bmj.332.7546.871