How Covid-19 crisis triggered digital innovation in pharma industry?

One of Life Sciences companies’ challenge in this context is to maintain their own teams’ activity and efficiency. Sales and commercial activities represent a big share of the pharma companies annual spending. Beside the development of new molecules to tackle the virus, or actions to maintain the manufacturing one of the most urgent challenge in the case of Covid-19 was to maintain commercial activities between reps and HCPs. The traditional face-to-face was still the most common way to approach the HCP, scientific call, pharmacy call, medical congress, department meetings. All of these activities are not possible anymore as the HCP and hospitals access is highly restricted and the reps themselves are staying at home.

During the first weeks of Covid-19 epidemic in China, the medical reps were working from their place using WeChat and phone calls to reach the HCPs that most of the time were not answering. The reps commonly used CRM pharma tools made for face-to-face activities, in addition to the engagement challenge, no reporting was done as the tools are not adapted, leading to a lack of medical data to enrich the HCP 360° view and for the management to take the right actions.

Another challenge was to complete the team’s trainings. Following the epidemic outbreak, the Chinese government asked the companies to focus on improvement and employees trainings rather than usual operations. However, most of the training materials are not easily accessible, plus the training sessions are usually done face-to-face or on the field with a medical rep (coaching call).

Allowing the rep to interact with the HCP, making sure that this operation does not take too long for the HCP that it is relevant and user friendly, plus making training materials and programs possible on remote basis are the main challenges, caused by the Covid-19 in pharma companies, along manufacturing and drug development.

To do so, digital tools dedicated to sales reps, operational managers and marketing teams are essential. Firms need to make sure employees can still receive relevant trainings and education. Data from sales field need also to be relevant and precise for operational management purposes. The current crisis is an opportunity to innovate with remote tools in order to maintain effective communication between employees, managers, prospects and customers. This requires innovative and flexible suppliers to take action and adapt in a short lead time.

The concept of providing a relevant customer experience is neither new nor exclusive to the pharmaceutical and medical device industry. HCPs are now much more digitally native and willing to engage with new channels. China is the fastest growing digital country in the world with 61% of HCPs willing to participate in remote virtual engagements and over 75% recommending on-demand interactions versus a scheduled meeting (Source : PharmaFuture). User friendliness is a must (HCP is busy and has less and less time to spend with detailers).

The Covid-19 outbreak made all these principles a reality. Healthcare professionals are focusing on their patients, they don’t have time anymore for F2F meeting and a standard commercial pitch. To catch HCPs attention during this period there are 2 keys. User friendliness, HCPs will not download the right application on their phones or browser on their computers, in case video conference is used, a simple click touch be necessary to switch from a link to the video conference and screen sharing. If the tool used by pharma companies to interact with HCPs is not simple and user friendly, the reps would rather keep calling over the phone or WeChat to discuss with the HCPs. The second key aspect is the quality of content, if HCPs were OK in the past to spend some time hearing the same information 4 times a month it is not possible anymore. Communication with the pharma companies should bring added value to the HCPs “help me helping my patient”. This can be possible if the rep has the right tools, allowing remote communication but also HCP profiling and tagging based on the feedback provided. Once the HCP 360° view correctly fed, the marketing department can personalize the content and the activities plan not only per segmentation and targeting but also per tag category.