The article, “Transforming Business: The Silver Lining of the Sunshine Act”, discusses Qforma analytic platforms that accelerate the adoption of important technology advances enabling sales and marketing teams to engage more efficiently and effectively.

The Sunshine Act legislation requires most manufacturers with products covered by Medicare, Medicaid and CHIP to disclose virtually all payments to physicians and institutions. With the Sunshine Act legislation as the catalyst for change, the article details the opportunity to re-examine the value of customer relationships and increase the effectiveness of physician level resource allocation.

Read “Transforming Business: The Silver Lining of the Sunshine Act” Article

Learn More about the Sunshine Act ]]> http://qforma.com/blog/2012/04/qformas-cco-reveals-silver-lining-of-sunshine-act-in-upcoming-edition-of-mddi-magazine/feed/ 0 http://qforma.com/blog/2012/04/qformas-chief-commercial-officer-to-present-at-cbis-2nd-annual-west-coast-forum-may-8-2012/ http://qforma.com/blog/2012/04/qformas-chief-commercial-officer-to-present-at-cbis-2nd-annual-west-coast-forum-may-8-2012/#comments Fri, 06 Apr 2012 04:24:07 +0000 Lisa Haley http://qforma.com/?p=2885 Qforma’s Chief Commercial Officer, Al Reicheg, will be a presenter at CBI’s 2nd Annual West Coast Forum on Interactions with Thought Leaders and Key Opinion Leaders, May 8th and 9th in San Diego.

The Sunshine Act legislation requires most manufacturers with products covered by Medicare, Medicaid and CHIP to disclose virtually all payments to physicians and institutions. This presentation will examine new approaches that accelerate adoption of products and enable our sales and marketing teams to engage more efficiently and effectively by understanding the impact physician influence networks have on the practice activity of a community.

Learn More about the Sunshine Act

Presentation:

Let the Sunshine In: Transitioning & Thriving in the Age of Transparency

Key topics:

• The world has changed. Information is disseminated in the blink of an eye. How has this affected your brand or product?
• What are professional influence networks? How do we know they exist? Why are they now the de facto media for information exchange?
• Influence Network Analytics platforms are maximizing the impact of spending strategies by leveraging advantageous network structures in every community.

About the conference

CBI’s 2nd Annual West Coast Forum on Interactions with Thought Leaders and Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs)
Sunshine Act • Database Mapping • Alliance Development
May 8-9, 2012
San Diego, California
Visit the conference website

The Physician Payment Sunshine Provision is scheduled to go into effect, probably sometime this year. In approximately one year, the first disclosure reports mandated by the provision will be due, requiring all pharmaceutical companies, device manufacturers, hospitals and related healthcare organizations to disclose payments exceeding $10 per program or $100 per year (including travel expenses) provided to physicians and teaching hospitals.

While tools exist to help ensure compliance, for marketers there is a gap in this tool kit. Internally, physician level expenditure transparency may put marketers in the hot seat, defending spend decisions to senior management who are looking for measured value from KOL professional relationships and programming. Demonstrating the value of speaker bureau initiatives comes down to one thing – positive ROI. With the Sunshine Act as the catalyst, Brand managers can effectively evaluate their speaker bureau and reassess approaches to engaging thought leaders to generate the value expected.

It is much less about the notoriety or influence of a speaker and more about the relationship between the audience member and the speaker.

Generally, the industry accepts that physicians seek the opinions of KOLs. This acceptance combined with the unacceptable ROI of some programming initiatives has prompted innovation leading to more sophisticated approaches to speaker bureau optimization. The accepted approach is simplistic – identify national or regional opinion leaders with perceived influence, include them as speakers to influence others. While this approach does deliver influence, does influence alone induce an actual change in behavior?

Studies now show that when it comes to actual behavior change, it is much less about the notoriety or influence of a speaker and more about the relationship between the audience member and the speaker. It may be obvious, but when contemplating a decision or a change in our behavior, we often look to others for guidance. Our networks structure who we ask: who knows whom; the strength or magnitude of the connection between individuals and the individual’s experience.

Reassessing speaker valuation and applying a more effective network approach to KOL and audience selection enables programming resources to be measurably optimized; resulting in positive ROI.

In the November/December issue of PharmaVOICE magazine, Kelly Myers outlines “The Top Trends Impacting Salesforces”.

1 The importance of identifying and targeting undervalued physicians. As academic and legislative policies continue to restrict traditional KOL marketing strategies, Community Opinion Leaders (COLs) are the soundboard for your brand. These COLs, although usually not high-decile prescribers themselves, impact the practice decisions of many other physicians in their expansive physician social networks.

2 Leveraging these physician social networks for precision program implementation. Todays brand teams are being asked to do more with less. Armed with a concise picture of networks of influence amongst physicians. Brand teams can identify and engage hard-to-reach physicians via touch points of accessible physicians within their inner physician social network.

3 Understanding and capitalizing on the “shared-decision” model of modern health-care. Payers play an increasing role in the treatment decisions of chronic-care conditions. Disease states where expensive prescription therapies are not perceived as having a significant benefit over alternative or existing products will bear the brunt of the shift. Cosmetic treatments and lifestyle drugs will increasingly be dictated by patients seeking cost effective out-of-pocket therapies.

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The Healthcare IT panel was one of the most interesting discussions at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference. With the adoption of EHRs, there is now a push to make data useful in lowering healthcare costs and increasing quality of care for patients. The primary question the panel addressed was, how will the U.S. afford healthcare during the next 25 years as baby boomers move through the system? How can we best use all the clinical data EHRs will create?

The discussion also highlighted significant opportunities for data analytics organizations. EHRs are and will continue to gather an extraordinary amount of data. “EHR-2″, as characterized by one speaker, will be the task of making the data meaningful to health care providers, payers and patients – data analytics applied at the point of care.

Topics discussed by the panel included:

• Using analytics to remove variation of care
• How will the industry move from transaction based medicine to medical management (ie discounted fee for services vs. population health management)
• There are 3 things needed to make the shift to medical management: 1) IT infrastructure; 2) data tools to measure quality and efficiency and incentives; and, 3) change management services
• Technologies can be adopted rather quickly, but changing physician behavior will be a very slow process; new providers coming out of medical school will adapt more easily

Trends:

• Shifting risk to providers
• Value based purchasing
• Coordination risks
• Integration across the care continuum

Its been a fascinating conference. The insights gleaned are many and there is cautious optimism in every break-out room. There is also confirmation from all parties here that thriving will require the industry to embrace more sophisticated sales enablement technologies — a space, I’m pleased to say, Qforma plays in quite successfully.

Here are some of my conference observations:

Observation 4: Until now, the industry has successfully relied on blockbusters to fill pipeline gaps in performance. Now, with patent expirations and arrid pipelines, the drag on growth is significant. There is acknowledgement and understanding that double digit growth is not on the horizon.

Observation 5: Many are betting on emerging markets as a continuing growth driver. That said, there is agreement that with the opportunity emerging markets offers, also come challenges. Primary challenges are–less predictable markets, pricing uncertainties and reimbursement issues.

Observation 6: As growth for health care manufacturers has slowed, sales and marketing costs are being squeezed. Technologies that optimize resources and sales and marketing enablement tools are paramount. It is not business as usual and checking the standard sales and marketing checkboxes is a path to obsolescence. Trends being discussed include the varying options for outsourcing sales and marketing capabilities.

Observation 7: Payers are interested in big pharma’s ability to focus more on outcomes than on selling pills. This expectation is driving a call for a more holistic approach to commercialization models.

Day 1 – Conference Observations

Observation 1: There is continued confirmation that health care is evolving from fee for service to a population health model. No matter how the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act plays out, the momentum of the shift to a population health care model is likely to drive change.

Observation 2: Historically, health sciences industry has viewed cost benefit of medical innovations from a global perspective. This global perspective may be shifting to more focused cost-benefit measuring the local, regional and national cost-benefits individually, as well as measuring this at the individual hospital or practice levels.

Observation 3: From the payers’ perspective, there is much discussion on universal access vs. cost savings. Health plans are examining an approach that will provide more access to healthcare while lowering costs. The approach leverages smaller networks of physicians i.e. aligned providers, who work together and influence each other on a regular basis to provide quality care for patients. These smaller working groups seem to better improve care delivery. The goal of this approach is to impact the cost of care while still providing health plan members with choice.

It has been our mission, over the last decade, to reach clients who embrace innovation.

It was particularly gratifying to observe our customers leverage innovative technologies to create powerful new strategies in 2011. That kind of success is possible in cultures where innovation can thrive.

Our clients believe as we do, that reasonable risk should be encouraged and partnerships are valuable.

So, as we celebrate 2011 and look forward to the future, we salute innovation. May 2012 bring another year of personal and professional success for all of us to enjoy.

Happy New Year!

- Kelly, CEO

Customers also looked to us for help as they developed more valuable engagement strategies via physician peer networks. They also sought assistance in applying more sophisticated analytics to get a comprehensive understanding of multiple variations in treatment patterns, practice behaviors and physician network behaviors in various geographies.

With the pharmaceutical industry facing reimbursement cuts, record-breaking patent expiries and increased regulatory hurdles, its not a matter of bracing for more change, but rather embracing change in 2012.

Exporting data from multiple Qforma solutions, including our local physician influence insights, MobileMETRx enables our clients to take immediate action as new opportunities and challenges present themselves,” said Al Reicheg, Chief Commercial Officer at Qforma.

Qforma’s MobileMETRx service integrates with customers’ existing mobile platforms, web applications or databases in defined data formats, with delivery protocols, update schedules and other special requirements.

Services like this are a much-needed solution for field personnel who have limited access to key data,” said Kelly D. Myers, CEO of Qforma. “By providing real-time market insights directly to their mobile devices, our service streamlines the complex information that must be conveyed, and increases the effectiveness and efficiency of their programs and activities.”