Some doctors, psychologists, and eating disorder experts worry the new weight loss medications, originally developed to treat diabetes, could become a problem long-term. Most people are likely to regain lost weight if they don’t keep taking the drugs for life, and the psychological toll of that rebound could be damaging, psychologists predict. Even weight loss companies like Jenny Craig wonder if the drugs could be bad or good for business.
Category Archive: Focus on patients
As health insurance premiums and copayments have increased, patients are changing how they choose treatment options.
About two-thirds of HR people from organizations that offered wellness initiatives indicated these efforts were “somewhat effective” or “very effective” in reducing healthcare costs. The return on investment (ROI) related to employee wellness programs typically includes the overall healthcare cost-savings achieved and productivity increases due to reduced sick days employees take.
According to the new University of Colorado Boulder research, patients-turned-social-media-influencers routinely offer prescription drug advice to their followers and often have close ties with pharma. If they’re paid, they are DTC; you had better let your audience know they are compensated.
While social media “buzz’ can alert marketers to issues with their products and marketing, it should not be used alone to measure your campaign’s effectiveness. The conversations around the new weight loss drugs are happening almost in real time, and it’s not good.
DTC marketing via TV is a great way to inform patients that a new treatment is available for health conditions with large patient populations. But what happens when your patient population consists of 200,000 people? Will DTC work? Yes, it can, but only if you understand your audience in-depth.
What happened to journalists that actually think? The latest is “fewer than one-third of the most common drugs featured in direct-to-consumer television advertising were rated as having high therapeutic value.” Really? Did they ever think patients have a choice about what’s considered “therapeutic value”?
The FDA has approved an Alzheimer’s drug that slowed the rate of cognitive decline in clinical trials without using an advisory committee. The high drug cost — priced at $26,000 per year, Eisai said — combined with strict restrictions on reimbursement by US government-funded health schemes will severely limit the number of patients able to access the medicine, at least for now. What is going on here?