The global markets challenge the position of the pharmaceutical human businesses with different demands, like ways of pricing, patient orientation and ESG (environment, sustainability, and governance) to name a few. Some of these are kind of developments to which the industry has the competence to adapt easily, as history has witnessed.

What is new is the fact that the industry finds itself in an accumulation of characteristics acquired in its development since its origine. It has brought the industry in the current beneficial shape, its volume and routines of doing business. But that is up to now.

Recently we were asked to give a lecture on health care innovation at the Nyenrode Business University in the Netherlands. See here the slides that we used. “Do you an innovation wehn you seen one?..”

In health care, patients are often left alone with their therapies. Currently, we see service and marketing in health care efforts using the internet to fill the patients’ most obvious needs. Information services, indication backgrounds, drug information, patient stories, communities around peers, compliance guidelines are all services brought to the patient on a one-to-one basis.
From a health care perspective, these efforts are innovative, but do not present a structural attempt to systematically arrange all or several of the elements that caring for one’s health condition may include.
Setting up and delivering an integrated context for servicing patients’ needs and demands will be more beneficial to patients in coping with their condition, as well as to the stakeholders relating to them in pursuing their health care business.
Originally posted on “Value innovation in medical and life sciences” ; July 30th, 2010

What you may like to prevent just by using social media in health care.
Here’s a Dutch father complaining about the reimbursement of a continuous glucose monitoring system in a national newspaper. For the control of his daughter’s diabetes, who has also a Down syndrome, he is only reimbursed for a normal glucose meter, not the wished for continuous glucose monitoring system.
The father states that the health care insurance company informed him, unsolicited: “We want you to know that continuous monitoring can not be reimbursed.” That’s what it was. He is amazed that the Down condition of his daughter is not a concern to them whatsoever? Shouldn’t it have been taken into account?
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Origonally posted on “Value innovation in medical and life sciences” ; September 27th, 2009