Most companies, governments and not-for-profits view public relations as a promotional or crisis communications tool.

Media, the primary information source for most of us, too often distort or exaggerate news to make a story more exciting so they can keep and grow their readers, listeners and viewers.

We, the public, act based on our fears and hopes. We want the surety of a test for prostate or breast cancer.  We are terrified that a vaccine may damage our healthy children – or in the case of a large part of Nigeria’s Muslim population several years ago – we are afraid that a vaccine – for polio in this case – is a weapon of the West designed to kill off our children.

Is it possible to keep our freedom of expression while creating requirements on how public health information is shared? Can we as a society recognize that a logical presentation of information is not nearly as effective in changing or reinforcing behavior as communicating in ways that recognize the role of our fears and hopes? We have already seen that an impassioned mother is more powerful than the NIH for many parents when making a decision on vaccination.

What will it take?

What is Medical Value?

Ten Years Ago

It used to be that when you publicized your organization’s pipeline candidate or marketed medicine, you described the therapy’s medical value by discussing the safety, efficacy and the medical (and/or quality of life) need for your therapy.

For hospitals and physicians, medical value has been measured by the amount of care provided to patients with reimbursement based on volume of services.  Cost containment measures around services and line items — like drugs –  have become more severe as healthcare costs have outgrown the ability of governments and payors to meet them.

Your organization may be among the voices protesting that this line-item approach is often counterproductive, actually raising the overall costs to the system in the long run.

Five Years Ago:

With the shifting focus to managing chronic conditions, medical value evolved to include a more comprehensive understanding of patient value. Now, in addition to pointing out safety, efficacy and medical need, pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies and healthcare providers began creating and promoting online patient communities, health education programs and a variety of other innovative outreach vehicles to help improve patient compliance (taking prescriptions correctly and consistently) and lifestyle choices.

Today:

The definition of medical value is changing, again, with many calling for adoption of Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter’s proposal to base medical value on patient results or the “health outcome per dollar of cost expended” (NEJM 12/23/10), a proposition that has understandable appeal to governments and regulators.  For another take on Porter’s recommendation, go to this guest post by Nathan Favini at KevinMD.com.

What does the new definition of medical value mean for you and your company? A lot. Research presented last November at the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR) showed that NICE recommendations for new drugs dropped from one in three in 2007, to one in 10 in 2009.  I will speculate that many of these rejections were based on NICE’s opinion that the rejected drugs’ benefits were viewed as not providing enough medical value to offset the additional cost to the healthcare system of paying for them.

What are companies – and their communications and PR groups – doing differently to demonstrate the medical value of their therapies by today’s standards? Pharmaceutical Executive magazine (Feb 2012) gave a good example in their tribute to their Brand of the Year Award winner, Abbott’s Humira (adalimumab), a blockbuster monoclonal antibody for inflammatory conditions.

*First, Abbott conducted long-range efficacy studies to provide evidence to make the case for clinical differentiation and value-based reimbursement, by showing how Humira reduces inflammation, stops disease progression and yields broader health system savings through improved quality of life.

*Second, Abbott worked closely with regulators to identify in advance what evidence was needed to drive positive decisions as they extended Humira’s franchise into new indications.

*Third, Abbott engaged the patient community, translating health economics, clinical benefit and safety issues into simple messaging that focused on inflammatory disease as a disability that can be successfully managed. Key to the company’s patient engagement: Abbott understood that quality of life is the lead concern for these patients.

*These three paragraphs are an almost verbatim transcript from Pharmaceutical Executive. If you don’t already subscribe, it should be up on their website soon.

Do you see the definition of medical value continuing to evolve? What do you think these changes will mean for the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries? For governments and patients?

Can you share more examples of a brand strategy to demonstrate medical value?

Getting Started

Your biotech is about to go public. Your company has just gone through a merger or acquisition. Your organization has experienced a major crisis. Whatever the reason, you need to create — or recreate — your company brand.

How do you create a brand with staying power that reflects who you really are and what you really offer? Like most things, it involves a lot of upfront work. The great brands are profoundly connected to their markets and stakeholders.

You want to be sure that your brand team is immersed in these three things

Your market

Your current stakeholders’ beliefs and behaviors

Your company’s goals

Know Your Market –

If you have a marketing department or other marketing support, they should be a great resource for you. If not, make the commitment to put in the research time. Investing your time now will save you and your organization more time, money and headaches down the road.

Who is your competition and what are they doing? What are their reputations? If they have marketed products, what is their market share? What is in their pipelines?

What is the economy like in your sector and/or therapeutic areas? What are the payment trends and who is making those decisions? What are the regulatory guidelines?

Who are your key players? Physicians? Patients? Investors? Regulators? Are their needs being met in the current market? What do they wish were different or better about your sector or therapeutic areas?

What strengths does your organization offer the market? Are they unique? What is your promise to your key players? What are your weaknesses, especially compared to your competition?

Once you have found the answers to these questions, go back and do the whole thing again projecting five years ahead.

Know Your Current Stakeholders’ Beliefs and Behaviors –

Do research and conduct stakeholder interviews so that you can answer these questions for each group:

What is their:

• Current belief — about their condition if they are patients, about the current treatment options if they are physicians, about the sector and/or your pipeline if they are investors?
• Current behavior — what does a patient do after diagnosis? How are physicians making their treatment choices and why? Are investors investing in your sector or are they waiting to invest and why? Do they see the circumstances changing and when?

Now is the time to conduct some soul searching with your company management and thought leaders.:

Which of your stakeholders’ beliefs and behaviors do you want to be different?

• The beliefs you would like your stakeholders to have
• The behaviors you would like your stakeholders to exhibit
• The importance of the desired changes — which of these changes are very important to your company and which are just a ‘nice to have?’

Define Your Goals –

Revisit your stakeholders’ current issues and wishes and articulate them. For example, an oncologist’s wish could be expressed this way: “I wish there was a way for me to know which therapy my patients will respond to best, so that I could do more to help them before their cancers progress.”

Next, revisit the desired beliefs and goals your company has for your stakeholders. Staying with the oncologist example: Your company may want oncologists to see them as an ally. Is there a way to demonstrate your company’s ability – or strong intent — to help oncologists do more to help their patients? Do you have a diagnostic or screening test? Are you working to develop diagnostics for your therapies?

Now the work of creating your company brand can truly begin.

If this post has been helpful to you, please let me know.  You will be helping me to decide if I should continue describing how to build a company brand in future posts. Thank you.

If you are responsible for public relations and communications for a pharmaceutical or biotechnology company, it’s challenging for you to make the time to stay on top of the changes in our practice, let alone to analyze and adapt them appropriately for use by your organization.

Your company should be cautious about changing the way they communicate and most are.  However, too many companies see the risk in making changes more clearly than they recognize the risks in not making them.

It is your responsibility to counsel your management so they can make informed choices to manage new risks and seize new opportunities as they communicate in support of your company’s goals and reputation. With so many changes happening so quickly, it can be hard to know where to begin.

Going back to the first point in this post – your lack of available time – here are three things you can do in 2012 to visibly give your company’s communications more impact and to strengthen and protect its reputation.

One –  Media Relations

You can update your media relations practices to help journalists, most of whom are now covering beats solo that used to be covered by two or three reporters.  Save your time and theirs by making information on your therapeutic area/s and the drug discovery and development process easily accessible from the media page of your website. This information will also be helpful to employees not directly involved in R&D, Medical or Marketing. After all, informed employees are your company’s best brand ambassadors.

Two – Thought Leadership

You know the areas where your company is a thought leader.  You can make that thought leadership more visible to the outside world by identifying one or more individuals who are experts in your scientific platform/s or technologies. Ask them to make a small time commitment, for example, one hour a month, to comment on news articles, post opinion pieces or help reporters seeking an expert source. If you are not already subscribed to HARO (Help A Reporter Out), founded by Peter Shankman, you can do that in 2012. It is a valuable source of opportunities for your experts with top tier media outlets. Another resource that looks like it has potential is www.expertengine.com, developed by Jeremy Potter of Journalisitics.  Once your experts are in place and prepared, you can include them in this new database, which is still in beta, by the way.

Three – Social Media

Social media is nothing more, or less, than a venue where your organization interacts with its stakeholders. I have heard pharmaceutical PR executives reject social media outright, seeing it as high risk with very little benefit, a minefield of adverse event reporting and potential FDA violations.

If this is your company’s view of social media, you can take a first, reputation-protecting step in 2012 of monitoring what is being said about your company and your products online. This is also a good time to form a team with your Legal and Regulatory departments to research social media policies, track other companies’ case studies for best and worst practices and discuss what you would do if you had to address a crisis online.

The FDA has issued an initial social media guidance for pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. I highly recommend Wendy Blackburn’s take on how to apply this guidance. Her post includes a link to the FDA document.

If you are looking for a way to stay current on social media in healthcare public relations, Wendy Blackburn’s blog ePharmaRx is a  good resource. Steve Woodruff’s Impactiviti is another helpful, targeted blog. To see how public relations practitioners are using social media in other sectors, Deirdre Breakenridge is invaluable. She literally wrote the book on it – “PR 2.0,” and has another book coming out soon “Social Media and PR: Eight New Practices for the PR Professional.”  You can follow Deirdre on her blog PR 2.0 Strategies.

Branding Your Potential

Branding has traditionally been the realm of marketing communications. When we think of brands we think of products.   Companies use their brands to tell us who they are.  Look at Johnson & Johnson. Look at Apple.  Branding is just as important, however, for a company or region that is marketing, not a product, but its potential.  If I go by our clients, more and more biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies, academic institutions and economic development groups are recognizing this.

It is always exciting for me to work with my research & development clients to articulate who they are. Once they have done this they are able, authentically and consistently, to distinguish themselves from other organizations and regions.  Our goal is to empower them to describe their ‘best selves,’ to communicate that self through the themes they are most passionate about, and to do it in each organization’s unique voice.

How do you develop an intangible brand?

First, you need to ask yourself two questions:

• Are you willing to put in the work, thought and time to develop a brand that can evolve with your organization over the years?
• Can you put yourself aside and focus, first, on the needs and desires of your current and potential stakeholders?

If you can answer ‘yes’ to both of these questions, you are halfway there.  I’ll be exploring this topic further in future posts.