Written by William Hirst • Published on 20th June 2024

As much as we like to say that our reputation is undeserved, the truth is that everybody hates pharma. But why should we care? Given that we’ve managed to deliver a fair few life-saving medicines, we feel we have a moral justification for our actions and can collect our monthly paychecks with an easy conscience.

Except, those arguments have quickly become outdated. It is getting difficult to make them with a straight face. This is because technology has fundamentally altered the pharma-customer relationship. No longer is it caregivers and HCPs who are making the only treatment decisions. Increasingly they are being made by patients, empowered by advice they find online. This is especially the case with younger generations, who are taking treatment decisions into their own hands.

Pharma is yet to realise that it’s no longer a pure-play B2B industry. In 2024 it’s leaning more towards B2C. And like other B2C industries, we must appeal to consumers (a.k.a. patients) if we are going to survive. However, unlike other consumer-facing businesses, we’re dealing with life and death. This dynamic makes trust a much more essential asset, one that comes with exponential upsides when it’s maintained, and devastating drawbacks when it’s not.

As an industry, we must understand that our future success will depend on the status of our relationships with patients. Achieving this is a difficult task. It will require an overhaul of many of our structures, priorities and workflows. But the reality is that we have no choice: we must aim to gain the benefits of good patient relations and avoid the consequences of getting them wrong. 

Getting it right

The most obvious benefit to improved pharma-patient relations is in patient outcomes. Given the increasing sophistication of many advanced medicines, engaging patients for long periods of time is a growing challenge. But patients will stick with our programmes so long as they believe we can deliver and have their interests at heart. As pharma moves away from big-population products, this becomes more important: specialty medicines are a different beast to old school blockbusters. The rising reputation of medical departments—the more trustworthy face of pharma—is a symptom of the greater capital we place on trust as patients and HCPs seek more focussed attention around treatment plans. 

Our research opportunities also increase the closer we work with patients. We stand to gain unprecedented insights from a mass of patient data so long as patients will share it with us. For example, breakthroughs in AI, especially generative AI, are already transforming our approach to RWD. The story is similar with clinical data, which can now be cleaned and gleaned at the blink of an eye, increasing our ability to make informed decisions fast.

Getting it wrong

But this isn’t just about the opportunities. The consequences of a continuing erosion of pharma-patient relations are severe. If the current fleet of companies can’t scrub their reputations, they will have to make way for fresh-faced upstarts that build themselves up on patient trust. Our decades of expertise and specialism count for a lot, but as the organisation of patient lobbies increases at the same time as patients realise their power to withdraw their cooperation, we could soon find ourselves with stunted pipelines, isolated from the patient populations we’re trying to serve.

Doing nothing 

It’s easy to dismiss these criticisms as hyperbole. We’re still the ones making the medicines after all: patients are hardly going to stop taking and wanting them on principle. It’s possible that the next generation of breakthroughs will bounce through the pipeline all the same. But even pharma is only as good as its ability to innovate, and innovation is much more likely to be found at companies who work with patients. Established pharma companies are still best-placed to develop world-leading medicines; they still have the reach and the expertise to make a real impact; and they are still the ones that are likely to make the best life-saving medicines. It’s in everybody’s interest for them to succeed. If they fall prey to younger companies, it will be patients who miss out. If we get to that point, we will have lost our moral justification for not bothering about our reputation.

Different market, different pharma 

Many are coming to the simple realisation that our industry is in dire need of broad and fundamental change. This is especially the case with patient interactions. The pharma of the future will look very different to today, but getting there will require an overhaul of go-to-market strategies and a reset of fundamental priorities. This transformation is possible and widely desired, but it requires a collective action to enforce. 

Solutions to this problem cannot be found in a blog post or in any of the miles of articles and whitepapers published daily across our industry. It’s something that those working in our industry must discover for themselves. What we need is to craft a new paradigm for serving patients. That’s no easy task, but it’s one we must have the courage to confront. Many in our industry have committed to building this paradigm. In Europe and the USA, a gang of disruptors are assembling, driven by the need for positive, patient-first change, and you can be one of them. 

Take the first step to building the new paradigm by joining the waiting list for Pharmageddon Europe.

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