Healthy Skepticism Library item: 8945

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Publication type: news

Cox TP.
Forging Alliances: Advocacy Partners
Pharmaceutical Executive 2002 Sep 1
http://www.pharmexec.com/pharmexec/article/articleDetail.jsp?id=29974

Notes:

These are the publicly available sections of a 3 page article. Full article available for purchase from Pharmaceutical Executive.

Full text:

Successful partnerships with third-party organizations such as patient and caregiver advocacy groups, professional associations, and thought leaders are powerful medicine for pharma companies.

When the process works, those relationships provide vital support-both for a company’s business objectives and for the advocacy partners’ missions and goals.

This article discusses the public relations discipline of ally and advocacy development as an important business tool and explains how, when done right, building effective alliances with patient, caregiver, and professional groups and experts is a win0win proposition.

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“Family caregivers often balance full-time jobs with caring for older family members,” says Bill Sheldon, president of Eisai and chair of the advisory council. “By helping community groups enhance or create volunteer caregiver programs, we can increase the pool of skilled volunteer caregivers in communities to improve the quality of care for older adults-and the lives of their families. It was the right thing to do.”

Since January 2001, the manual has been available free of charge to qualified nonprofit organizations-those that already have an administrative and program structure in place and a system for recruiting, screening, training and supporting volunteers and have or, are ready to establish, a program for training volunteer support caregivers of older adults. Thousands of copies have been distributed and requests are still coming in. The entire manual is also available online.

For setting that new standard for excellence in training, earlier this year Eisai and its nine advisory council partners received the American Society on Aging’s Brookdale Award for Best Practices in Human Resources and Aging. “Candidates for employment are impressed with a company that would take on something like that on,” says Sheldon. “So, it also has helped in our recruitment efforts.”

Managing the Advocacy Network Traditionally, pharma senior management has not supported the creation of centralized systems for reporting, maintaining, and sharing information about advocacy relationships across functional areas.

Managers in marketing, sales, policy, government affairs, and public relations have tended to build proprietary networks to meet their functional needs. Each has been reluctant to share allies with others in the company because of their need to maintain control and protect those relationships. As a result, many advocacy relationships overlap, causing inefficiency and double dipping.

But a new trend is emerging. As more companies embrace a team spirit, they also are recognizing the value of public relations and advocacy development across functions and the need to centrally manage and share information about those partnerships. Pharmacia created a global web-based management tool called G.R.O.U.P (Global Resource on Organizations United with Pharmacia) that stores advocacy information from of all of Pharmacia’s divisions in one place.

“We track events, funding opportunities, and key contact persons, have a link to each organization’s website, and a notes sections where we document each transaction, interaction, and activity. That information is available to everyone in the company,” says Berry, who manages the database. In the near future, more pharma companies are likely to use similar management tools for reporting advocacy development. Greater collaboration, transparency, and efficiency also should make for stronger third-party alliances and public relations at a time when the pharma industry needs all the friends it can get.

Partnering with advocacy groups and thought leaders at major research institutions helps to

recruit participants for clinical trials
speed the development and approval process for new therapies
inform healthcare providers, patients, and their caregivers about new and safer options for treating chronic and life-threatening diseases
diffuse industry critics by delivering positive messages about the healthcare contributions of pharma companies to legislators, the media, and other key stakeholders
influence changes in healthcare policy and regulations to expand patient access to, and coverage for, earlier diagnoses and treatments.

Vocal Power Advocacy groups and thought leaders are critical to pharma companies’ success because they are the credible voice of patients, caregivers, and healthcare providers. Effective pharma partnering links company messages with those of influential organizations and individuals when all find common ground. Without such allies, a skeptical journalist may see a company’s messages and information as self-serving and describe them as such to their audiences.

Add PR To Partnership

All pharma activities-product launches, clinical trials, CME programs, disease awareness, and patient screening and education initiatives-benefit from having respected third-party advocates as members of the pharma marketing team.

Journalists want to interview credible people such as celebrity spokespersons and patients who can publicly discuss their personal experiences with a disease and its treatment, as well as advocacy experts and physician thought leaders who can report clinical trial results and describe in lay terms why a new drug makes a difference.

Those partnerships are based on mutual trust and respect. Jeffrey Winton, vice-president of global public relations for Pharmacia, talks about its advocacy partners: “Although they work with us, we don’t always see eye-to-eye on everything. They are their own people. We don’t try to dictate what they say to whom. As a result it’s given us greater credibility. Once you start watering down the messages that those groups and experts want to tell, you might as well forget the value of working with them.”

An Early Model For years, pharma companies’ connections with patient advocacy groups were limited to corporate financial contributions to create goodwill, with no expectation of a measurable return for the company and no real role, as a partner with the donor company, for the advocacy group to play. Most corporations were uncomfortable with the idea of “partnering” with advocacy groups, because they often saw them as activists, unsympathetic to the profit interests of big business.

Of particular concern to pharma companies were the vocal activism and agenda of the AIDS groups. Until the early 1980s, pharma companies created relationships primarily with professional groups representing physicians, and rarely communicated directly with patients.

Finding a fit

The AIDS community-desperate for access to treatment and promising new drugs-effectively amplified their voices and actions to force change. Pharma, healthcare providers, insurers, and government finally responded by including those groups in a continuing dialogue about every aspect of care. They’ve been at the table ever since.

Soon thereafter, breast cancer groups began to organize and politicize their issues. They modeled their efforts after the AIDS groups to achieve share of voice, disease awareness, research funding, patient education programs, and coverage for diagnostic testing and treatments. At that time, only a few forward-thinking pharma companies recognized the potential return in building true alliances with patient groups. (See PE, “Discovery! Oncology,” June 2002 and PE, “HBA’s 2002 Woman of the Year Leads Transformation,” April 2002.)

That model was again used in the late 1980s by Schering-Plough to create the national Prostate Cancer Awareness Week campaign, supported by S-P’s marketing efforts for Eulexin (flutamide), a prostate cancer therapy.

Partners in that program included Cancer Care, the National Cancer Institute, AARP, the American Foundation for Urologic Disease, the Association of Community Cancer Centers, and the National Association of Community Health Centers. At a time when diseases of the male sexual anatomy were not discussed publicly, their common objective was to inform men age 40 and older-and their families-about the importance of annual testing for prostate cancer, one of the most curable cancers when detected early. During the campaign’s three-year run, awareness spread. The topic was no longer taboo, and more than 250,000 men received well-publicized free screenings at clinics across the country.