Why adding outside digital talent won’t help big pharma

Pharma companies have been hiring senior digital executives from CPG companies.
One executive is not going to change big pharma’s culture.
Digital is a way of thinking and the whole organization has to be aligned in digital thinking.

Personal responsibility for our poor health

Less than 3 percent of Americans meet the basic qualifications for a “healthy lifestyle.
Approximately 97.3% of Americans admit to not exercising, having a poor diet, smoking, and gaining weight.
20% of deaths result from being a couch potato for those age 35 and older. Plus, 80% of American adults don’t meet basic physical activity requirements.
A new study goes one step further, finding that a sedentary lifestyle is worse for your health than smoking, diabetes and heart disease.

Employee’s are once again getting hit with more of the costs of their coverage in the form of higher premiums and higher deductibles.
Health care premiums continue to take up more of employees’ paychecks.
Just over a quarter of all covered employees are enrolled in policies with a deductible of at least $2,000, up from 22 percent last year and 15 percent five years ago.
Worldwide obesity has nearly tripled since 1975, according to the World Health Organization. In 2016, more than 600 million adults were obese — or about 13 percent of the world’s population leading to a jump in cancer cases and other costly health conditions. Continue reading →

Even with health insurance, more than a third of the respondents in a recent survey had spent all or most of their savings while sick. They are often faced with deductibles and co-payments; treatments their insurance won’t cover.
Among people with health insurance, more than 20 percent had trouble paying for basic necessities. More than a quarter had bills in collection, and 13 percent had borrowed money as a result of their illness.
The annual cost for a family to get health coverage from an employer plan rose 5% to $19,616 this year, according to recently released data from the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation.
Workers contributed $5,547 for family coverage, on average, in 2018, up 65% since 2008, and $1,186 for single coverage.
About 25 percent of adults in a recent poll said that they or a family member have avoided seeking medical attention because of the cost.

List price could prohibit some patients from filling their Rx’s.
Insurance and pharma companies could have taken a preventive step to head off list prices in drug ads.
PhRMA’s credibility is zero when it comes to patients.

The Trump administration is moving forward with new rules that would require drug companies to disclose their prices, rejecting the industry’s efforts to preempt those regulations
The “list price” of prescription drugs doesn’t mean anything to patients.
Alex Azar is “sticking it” to PhRMA, pharma’s trade organization.

Nearly 80 percent of the patients who looked up things online before seeing a doctor reported that their searches actually improved their experience. (Source: Anthony M. Cocco, a doctor at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Melbourne, and the lead author on a recent scientific study about the search habits of people before they show up in an E.R.)
In one study, researchers found that only one of the top 54 results for “endometriosis” — the subject of over 4.5 million searches annually — led to a page that contained what was deemed to be accurate information about the condition.
The study’s author recommends skipping the kind of scientific papers you might find on Google Scholar or PubMed; they often contain unusual cases and bewildering terminology.

The poor reliability of online health information

Many popular YouTube videos about prostate cancer contained biased or… more>>
Pharma isn’t doing well on social media

Pharma’s use of social media is sporadic and poor. Patients… more>>
Office visits to primary care physicians declined 18 percent

Office visits to nurse practitioners (NPs) and physician assistants (PAs)… more>>
The focus on drug prices ignores the real issue for healthcare costs

The overall diabetes rate in the U.S. adult population is… more>>
How is Pfizer employee morale?

41 of Pfizer’s drugs have been picked for a price… more>>
How to screw up a clinical trial

Amarin’s clinical trial of fish oil may be tainted because… more>>