Refreshed and re-energised after returning from Reuters Pharma 2024 in Barcelona, Nick Bartlett, Head of Consulting at Uniphar, brings you key takeaways from the workshop he led about shaking up disruption in pharma, European go to market models and embracing change.
The Uniphar team joined over 1200 industry leaders to discuss innovation in healthcare and tackle some of the new (and old) problems that are holding back engagement with healthcare professionals.
Whilst there, we shared our expertise encouraging attendees to Embrace disruption now to successfully model your G2M 2028 strategy.
Unarguable truths
Our workshop delved into the near future of European healthcare and explored key themes that will demand enhanced collaboration between medical, access and commercial to unlock our customers’ brand potential.
We established the unarguable truths that are eroding the effectiveness of current GTM models: Increasing cost of innovation, rising health inequities, ageing population, and increasingly complex financing models.
Dimensions of change
These were followed by the dimensions of change – the four key themes that will determine go to market models in the next five years.
- Evolving market dynamics – Implementation of the EU-wide HTA regulation begins in January 2025, expanding across medicines and IVDs by 2030. JCAs will enable the harmonisation of processes and accelerate patient access across EU Member States.
- Patient empowerment – Only 45% of healthcare practitioners believe biopharmaceutical companies provide a high level of patient focus today.
- Collaboration and partnerships – More than 50% of the top-ranked capabilities essential for future success as identified by market access colleagues, involve collaborating and co-creating with both internal and external stakeholders.
- Data, tech, and innovation – 42% of pharmaceutical companies are currently stuck in the interested phase, rather than rolling out AI for customer engagement.
Disruption in pharma
When plotting the three largest disruptive factors facing pharma launches in the EU over the next five years, and how these create barriers for go to market planning, the common consensus was:
- The Tech Revolution: AI and the need for agility in adoption.
- EU Legislation changes impacting interactions.
- The evolution of HCPs, their behaviours, and their relationship with patients.
This forged the path for participants to join forces to uncover some priority initiatives to address these barriers and make change happen; rethinking European G2M models, with simple disruption at the fore.
Injecting some energy
With the main conference focused on serious, considered and difficult to deliver presentations of data, methodologies and platforms, the air of innovative swagger needed to be ignited.
Disruption requires innovation and energy so the Uniphar team instantly injected some energy, sharing stories of stuck programmes and underwhelming strategies which got people in the right place for challenging the norms.
With over 50 participants from 30 pharma companies and an impressive breadth of roles showed that people were keen to break out of the inherited and cyclical styles of planning and also, want to meet like-minded peers to gain a sense of confidence in pushing for change.
Sharing new ideas
I loved those groups looking for that one, absolute impact factor that would rip it all up. What one change would force every EU based business to have to be disrupted? The breakout groups highlighted how little scenario planning goes into go to market models and live plans, and how static and brittle they are in the face of global disruptive forces such as economics, technology and politics.
As healthcare service champions, look across the portfolio of global companies we work with, spot trends that are holding the industry back and tackle, nudge and crash into them with a positive attitude. A positive attitude to taking a risk (whether they are only perceived or real), to saying no, to investment and to innovation.
The speed of the ideas and requirements put forward showed to us that there is a general sense of frustration that pharma can’t get out of its own way and that there is an awareness that we could – and should – be doing better.
How Uniphar can accelerate change
Uniphar is a large but largely unknown global healthcare services organisation. Now is the time to be vocal about the future of go to market strategies and show how we’ve adapted our business to fit tomorrow’s world and we’re sharing our learnings with innovative and disruptive companies.
The Uniphar team has unique expertise that sits across the lifecycle of a drug or therapy, we unlock access to innovative therapies and optimise value for brands globally.
For more information visit https://uniphar.com/commercial/
