HEALTHCARE

1. CHALLENGE 

Federal regulations imposed strict new restrictions on the way pharmaceutical companies operate with doctors and hospitals, constraining their traditional sales and marketing activities. A new way of creating value was necessary.

2. CONVENTION

The traditional approach was to increase spend on marketing, increase the number of sales rep visits, disguise give-away’s to doctors as ‘education events’, offering free samples and financial incentives for switching of patients therapy. The key measure of success in the industry was “increase in number of scripts by drug” - with the greatest focus on high prescribing doctors.

3. CONSTRAINT

This resulted in many doctors refusing to see Pharma Reps completely and those who did see them, being overloaded with sales people. Eventually the increasing size and distractions of sales reps and suspicious financial incentives resulted in tighter federal government regulations and controls. 4. RA APPLIED: The goal of requisite agility was to use the ways doctors were successful with patient health outcomes as the basis for the design of organisation, its measures, tools and accountabilities. In order to sense what was going on and make sense of sense-making by physicians and patients, we began worked with the client to design and deploy a national study of how doctors diagnosed and made clinical decisions and how these diagnostics affected appropriate use of medicines and health outcomes. This was used to redesign both marketing and sales to align with newly segments of doctors.

5. RA IMPACT

Redesigning the organisation around doctor/patient segmentation removed 60% of excess, non-value-added activity. This translated directly into millions of dollars in savings. More doctors were open to visits from sales reps as they were now aligned with their values and value creation. Inappropriate usage of drugs were reduced. Government regulators reported higher compliance and greater public trust, which improved the organizations branding and share price.