Picture taken by Qforma’s own Tony Giancola

On May 4th, Roger Jones, Qforma’s Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer, presented the Qforma award for outstanding computational thesis or dissertation to Kurt Brian Ferreira. Kurt, a graduate from the University of New Mexico, was honored for his dissertation titled, “Keeping Checkpoint/Restart Viable for Exascale Systems.” His dissertation evaluates “extreme computers” and details how to keep them running to meet the demands of the future. Kurt is employed by Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, New Mexico doing work related to his thesis. The “Most Outstanding Computational Thesis” award was established by Qforma in 2010 to foster educational excellence in New Mexico. The University of New Mexico School of Engineering nominates and selects award winners.

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

We are pleased to announce that Mark Feeney has been appointed Vice President of Client Services. Mark brings Qforma clients more than 20 years of experience in the life sciences industry, including expertise in advanced analytics, sales force effectiveness strategies and territory optimization initiatives.

Joann Flynn has been selected to lead Qforma’s Business Development Operations unit as Senior Director of Business Development Operations and Employee Development. Joann has more than a decade of pharmaceutical and healthcare experience. She has held various leadership positions at such companies as inVentiv Health, Publicis and Vox Medica, and has a proven track record of success in operations, training and sales.

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.

Ian McGuinness
VP, Business Development
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Q: What was your big break?

• My big break was the opportunity with Hired Brains as I finished school, to do something very different in the area of data analytics, from continuing along my planned financial career path. Consulting in the area of Business Intelligence, I developed technical skills through work in the energy, insurance, and CPG sectors that I have built on through my career, and first gained exposure to BioPharma.

Q: What’s the best and/or worst part of your job?

• The best part of my job is that I get to work with bright people solving complex problems in Life Sciences, and knowing it will ultimately have a positive impact on patients’ lives. Healthcare is changing dramatically and we are sprinting ahead to innovate new solutions for our customers every day. I’m no fan of airport delays.

Q: Who is the person you admire most in your area of work?

• Leroy Hood, M.D., Ph.D., President of the Institute for Systems Biology, is one person. He’s a tremendous researcher of fundamental biology and genomics who has paired the science with commercial success in a number of Biotech startups. Check out his lecture My Life and Adventures Integrating Biology and Technology.

Q: What’s the view like from your office/work area?

• I just traded a SoCal beachfront view of the Pacific Ocean for the beautiful skies over Santa Fe, NM. It’s fun to experience the window in time that goes with watching the seasons change.

Q: Where did you go to college? Did it help you prepare for your career?

• I concentrated on Political Science at the University of Chicago and loved the school. My critical thinking skills are infinitely better for having studied there.

Q: What books are you reading?

• I’m working my way through the physics and time trilogy by Roger Penrose. Mark Twain’s collected letters and stories are fun while on the road. Reading the Tintin books right now with my sons at night makes my day.

Q: What was your greatest professional challenge?

• Really, I think it was freelance consulting early in my career. Not often getting to stay with a project long enough to understand the anthropology and landscape of a company. It was frustrating.

Q: Where will you be in five years?

• Close to 40. Seriously, probably deeper into Biotech via greater commercialization of genomics and personalized medicine with the move towards biomarkers.

Q: If you were to write a book, what would the title be?

• Wow, I guess, maybe “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Numbers”

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.

Download Article as a PDF Here

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.