There has been a fundamental shift in the customer engagement models in the pharma industry over the last decade.
This shift has very much happened in the mature markets, but is still underway in some of the emerging markets. What is this shift? Traditionally, pharma companies have been focused on healthcare practitioners as the primary customer, and all commercial models have been geared towards engaging with this primary customer with some resources focused on gaining reimbursement or wider access for their products. But over the last decade or so, what we have seen is the emergence of three categories of stakeholders and there has been a reprioritization amongst these categories as well.
The first of these categories is healthcare systems. These are payer and provider organizations, typically government owned or sponsored, and these are the ones that are governing the delivery of care, as well as making decisions around approval and reimbursement of new drugs that are launched. We have seen that these stakeholders are very much data driven and looking for evidence for reimbursing and providing access to therapies.
Pharma companies have adapted and are now focused on approaches to partner with healthcare systems and achieve or work towards common objectives.
The second category is still very much HCPs. They are still an extremely relevant customer for the pharma industry. But even within the healthcare practitioners, there is a slight nuance. There are now two subcategories that pharma industry focuses on. The first of these subcategories is thought leaders or KOLs. These are usually senior healthcare professionals that advise these healthcare systems on decisions around approval and reimbursement.
And the second subcategory is the traditional prescribers or HCPs. Here, the pharma company still continues to engage with this set of stakeholders, but there is a focus towards optimizing resources. And particularly after COVID, we are seeing more use of omni channel and hybrid engagement models to optimize the engagement with this subcategory of HCP.
And finally, the third category is patients. Patients, as a stakeholder for pharma companies, have been talked about for a long time, but over the last decade, we have seen the emergence of patient centric care and thinking within pharma companies and resources being dedicated towards that.
Going forward, we do believe that pharma companies need to take a partnering approach towards these stakeholders, understand what their objectives are, and work towards achieving these common objectives with these set of stakeholders.