Excellent article in today’s Financial Times about the impact the rapidly declining cost and increasing precision of clinical informatics is having on prescribing decisions and the Pharma model of simply marketing a drug based on FDA data. The article describes how health plans are developing better post market and predictive decision-making models on who gets what within the framework of disease managment. And it will soon be possible to integrate clinical data with some genomic data as well. Where is Pharma on all this? According to the FT article: “in a world where whoever controls the gold often rules, drugs companies no longer have a firm grasp on the most precious commodity: information.” See the article below..
I have been saying for years that Pharma has to get into the trenches and start looking at how their products actually work and where they work best to stay in the game and stay ahead of the price control crowd. What they spend on traditional marketing should be spent on developing sophisticated data mining and data analysis systems…it would deliver better value to both company and customers alike.