The Pharmaceutical Industry: Specifi city, Challenges, and What You Can Learn from this Topic - Innovation and Marketing in the Pharmaceutical Industry - page 15

1.3.2 Patient and Physician Behavior

How do consumers assess their own risk and that of others? Are their own risk esti-
mates biased upwards or downwards, merely inaccurate or normative? How do
biases in underestimating or overestimating risk affect consumers' behavior, and
what are the implications of under- or overestimation of risk on pharmaceutical
companies, medical establishments, the economy, and society in general? These
represent the critical questions needed to gain understanding of patient behavior.
These and more are addressed in the chapter by Raghubir and Latimer .
Patient adherence represents another important issue in the pharmaceutical
industry. Consistent with the accepted defi nition of adherence as conformity to, or
adoption of marketers' recommendations about medication acquisition (purchase)
and correct usage, Ilyuk, Irmak, Kramer, and Block discuss factors that lead to
poor adherence. These factors are categorized as: medication-related, patient-
related, prescriber-related, pharmacy-related, and condition-related. Focusing on
medication effi cacy, they review different biases and heuristics that infl uence
patients' perception of it.
Miron-Shatz, Doniger, and Hanoch provide a related and complementary
review of factors affecting adherence to governmental warnings against the use of
household products previously perceived to be safe. Their discussion starts by
examining the psychological decision-making literature on such factors as trust of
the source issuing the warning and safe experience with the risk-causing agent.
They then go into the basic requirements of awareness and understanding of the
message, review the marketing literature on message design, and discuss natural
cognitive and emotional consumer biases that may reduce adherence and how these
may be counteracted. They proceed with an evaluation of the specifi c case of the
2008 US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) warning against administration of
over-the-counter cough and cold medication (OTC-CCM) to children under the age
of 2 years (FDA 2008 ), and conclude with recommendations for optimizing the
design and dissemination of similar warnings in light of the literature reviewed.
Arguing that preventive vaccines differ from therapeutic pharmaceuticals in a
number of ways, Angelmar and Morgon suggest that consumers' and other par-
ty's behavior in this context are quite different, and hence they deserve special
attention. They provide a review of the vaccine industry including its structure,
entry barriers, and threats from substitutes. They then discuss the behavior of the
parties involved (i.e., patients, physicians, and payers), and highlight the marketing
implications.
A recent patient-related phenomenon is the emergence of the empowered patient,
a topic Camacho addresses. He reviews key trends that precede patient empower-
ment such as modernization and self-expression, demographic and lifestyle changes,
technological evolution, and regulatory changes. He then analyzes the consequences
of the patient's new role for the patient-physician relationship and for pharmaceuti-
cal marketing. Parallel to new trends observed in patients' behavior, we also witness
new trends in physicians' behavior.