2020 has been a challenging year for all industries. For pharma and its HCP customers even more so. All eyes are on the companies developing vaccines and drugs for treatment of COVID-19, while doctors have closed their doors for pharma reps. Long established processes have been disrupted and complex market strategies have been rendered useless. Each pharma no matter big or small, innovative, or generic, had to improvise and come up with contingency plans to save the year. Some have been slower waiting for the old ways to come back, others have been more agile experimenting with digital and expanding boundaries, most are in the middle digitally curious but not risking too much.
Special issue, focusing on the generic versus branded debate that has opened up post the government mandate that Doctors should online prescribe generics.
If a business fails, it was an idea that didn’t work. If treatment fails – it must be a botch up. A broken gadget may be beyond repair, but not a patient in a doctor’s hands. From such ungraded expectations stems the potential for things to take an ugly turn.
An unwanted profession dealing with an unwanted condition, namely Ill health:
If possible, we would wish away death and diseases, hospitals and doctors. A hospital is not a holiday resort, but it too costs money. And the scenario of an adverse outcome like death simply becomes unacceptable.
The pharma industry in India is entering a very interesting variant of the post-digital marketing era. The term “post-digital marketing” is used to depict a state where the lines between physical and digital blur considerably for a customer. However, in the context of pharma, this means a state where the industry has stopped questioning the need for digital and has begun to implement very interesting digital marketing initiatives.
Every month, MedicinMan in partnership with IMS Health, brings our readers the latest industry numbers related to sales and revenues of different companies, brands and therapy areas in the Indian Pharmaceutical Market.
We will need to find a way to bring together the capabilities of the Medical Rep, the changed scenario of the visit and the ways we can reach doctors into one single strategy rather than looking at the physical and the digital parts separately. Our medical reps will continue to be the core of our promotion, and our digital strategy will need to empower them to not only do a better call but also support their efforts by building processes that will help them beyond the few minutes that they spend in the Clinic. Marketing budgets will have to move away from conventional investments and also think beyond hardware to increase digital engagement.
It is the twentieth anniversary of the new patent act in January 2025. The post-patent (P20) era is a story of resilience, determination, and charting a course that set global ambitions, a story of finding opportunity in adversity. It is a story for case studies in business schools, in international studies, in global health efforts.
One interesting fact: most medical colleges and linked public hospitals in major cities were designed in the British era, with an open ward design. A medical administrator, tongue-in-cheek, put it succinctly: “When these hospitals were designed, nobody would have imagined that doctors will face violence”.
Time for design thinking in public healthcare delivery!
Healthcare systems around the world differ – public, private or a mix of both public and private (like in India). With all the variance in healthcare delivery models, the risks to healthcare professionals remain universal: needle injuries to litigations to episodes of threats/ violence