At the risk, dear blog followers, of making you want to gouge your eyeballs out if you hear one more story about healthcare reform, I submit yet another. Like the uncle who came to visit for the holidays but still hasn’t left, healthcare reform still dominates the national conversation. And so I offer you The Latest Thing to Be Worried About: the coming shortage of doctors and what it means for pharma.
Surely you’ve read about this in recent months:
- 25 to 46 million new patients going into the healthcare system1
- A predicted shortage of 50,000 primary care doctors2
- Dire warnings of overflowing waiting rooms and long waits to get appointments
This crisis will be with us for awhile—a student entering medical school today would not complete his or her primary care training until 7 years from now. This has huge implications for patient care and physician workload.
So what does this mean for pharma? As doctors face this bolus of patients coming through their exam rooms, will they make time to talk to sales reps? Will they have time to listen to anyone from pharma? More patients mean more prescriptions, but access to primary care doctors (already suffering) may fall off a cliff.
Add this to the mix: A recent Med Ad News article3 cited studies by HCI that showed that in 2001, 50% of physicians surveyed considered sales reps a “highly important source of information on new medical developments.” By 2009, that number had dropped to only 17%. If fewer doctors think reps are worth seeing and if their waiting rooms are soon to be overflowing with newly insured patients, how will product managers determine and defend the marketing mix?
As a marketer, it seems that you have 3 options:
- Keep doing things the way you’ve always done them and hope for the best.
- Crawl under your desk and suck your thumb.
- The only real option: Accept the new realities of the healthcare marketplace and start making radical adjustments.
You can’t stop the tidal wave of patients about to hit physician offices. But every crisis creates opportunities. Busy doctors need good educational materials and product information more than ever—your company just needs to make them realize this fact.
How? By addressing their needs in an honest and transparent way. Do this by meeting doctors and patients where they are—give them the information they really need and deliver it in the ways they want to get it. Break the mold and let’s get moving!
References:
- Jurek, Alex. Doctor shortage would pull plug on health care reform. INDenverTimes. October 9, 2009. http://www.indenvertimes.com/doctor-shortage-would-pull-plug-on-health-care-reform. Accessed January 12, 2010.
- Stern, Andrew. ANALYSIS-Shortage of doctors could damage healthcare reform. July 23, 2009. http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN21255541. Accessed January 12, 2010.
- Detailing’s decline: calls for media mix re-evaluation. Med Ad News. 2009;28(12):19.
- Ed Leon, Senior Program Director, S+R Medical Communications
Right. And patients don’t want their doctors getting their information from reps at dinners, vacations, pharma-funded CMEs, etc. Patients also don’t want to see reps in the waiting rooms of their doctors; it makes us not trust our doctors and not trust the treatment advice that they give us. It also irritates us because who is to say whether we couldn’t get an earlier appointment because reps were taking up so much of the doctor’s time? Reps should go away. They do nothing for the doctor-patient relationship. They only hurt it.
Joan,
You bring up another important aspect of this whole issue–potential antagonism by patients. But the pharma company still has a responsibility to communicate product information to physicians and patients–how will they do this in the future? I wonder if anyone else has thoughts about this?
Ed Leon