How to get more out of ‘Pharmaceutical Marketing’?
Pharmaceutical marketing is the business of advertising or otherwise promoting the sale of pharmaceuticals or drugs. Marketing to health care providers takes three main forms: provision of drug samples, sponsoring continuing medical education (CME) and activity by pharmaceutical field force.
FForce, a sales force automation and effectiveness (SFA & SFE) platform has the facility to keep record of all the marketing activities of Pharmaceutical companies.
The SFA application can manage the entire inventory management process starting from the distribution of drug samples to field force, samples received/returned by them to sampling done to the physicians.
The Camp and Clinic module of FForce manages the campaign activities of Field force.
For promoting the sale of drugs, field force often performs campaigns with various physicians.
These campaigns are often held at some specific venue or at physician’s clinic. They attempt to identify the set of physicians most likely to prescribe a given drug. Historically, this was done by measuring the number of total prescriptions (TRx) and new prescriptions (NRx) per week that each physician writes. Commercial vendors collect this information. The physicians are then “decile” into ten groups based on their writing patterns. Higher deciles are more aggressively targeted. Some pharmaceutical companies use additional information such as:
- Profitability of a prescription (script)
- Accessibility of the physician
- Tendency of the physician to use the pharmaceutical company’s drugs
- Effect of managed care formularies on the ability of the physician to prescribe a drug
- The adoption sequence of the physician (that is, how readily the physician adopts new drugs in place of older treatments)
- The tendency of the physician to use a wide palette of drugs
- Influence that physicians have on their colleagues
The entire process of campaigns is recorded through application along with the estimated and actual costs which helps management for better marketing activities