Key performance indicators (KPIs) provide quantitative representations of progress and success in any strategy or endeavor. They allow for easier comparison and analysis of data. They also provide insight into essential questions, such as “Is our market access strategy succeeding?”
For pharmaceutical companies creating rare disease treatments, choosing the right KPIs can ensure that the company’s market access strategy succeeds. Closely-monitored KPIs, backed by sufficient data, can also reveal untapped opportunities for market access — allowing organizations to reach their goals.
KPIs to Track Market Access Strategy Success
Nearly any data point can be used as a KPI if it is defined in a way that allows for clear tracking and analysis of related data. In market access strategy, however, some KPIs are more valuable than others.
Top KPI categories related to market access strategy success include:
Launch metrics. These metrics track the success of a pharmaceutical product launch, writes Lorna Hewin, launch excellence lead at Innovative Edge. They include:
- The number, source and quality of leads generated.
- Engagement types and sources with all digital content, including website traffic and page views.
- News coverage, including articles in trade journals, and information shared among patient advocacy groups.
Product adoption. How are your products penetrating the market? How are they used? What opportunities arise for new approaches to your market access strategy? Answer these questions by tracking KPIs such as:
- Patient uses of the medication and the purposes of such use.
- Patient adherence and dropoff rates when using the medication.
- Retention and growth centered around patients, patient advocacy groups and providers.
Patient engagement. Patient engagement is essential to success but difficult to track, write Karen Robinson and Oleks Gorbenko of Oxford PharmaGenesis and Ipsen, respectively. KPIs that can help measure patient engagement include:
- Metrics tracking patient adherence to treatment protocols.
- Measurements of patients’ increased knowledge about their disease and treatment options.
- Satisfaction rates with patient support programs.
KPI choices should be tailored to each market access strategy. The metrics chosen should reflect the information that pharmaceutical companies and marketing teams require, as well as the vital aspects of placing a drug on the market and ensuring that it reaches patients who need it.
How to Track KPIs Efficiently
Clarity in choosing and creating KPIs is a must. “There is a clear disconnect between accepted marketing measurement theory and the definition and use of KPIs and metrics in practice,” write Vanessa Burrow and Stephanie Hall at healthcare consultancy Uptake Strategies.
Good KPI tracking demands access to high-quality data. Simply having more data isn’t sufficient; drugmakers need data that is relevant to their needs and reflective of the true impact of their marketing efforts.
Some KPIs, such as revenue and market share, lend themselves easily to expression in quantitative forms. Others are more challenging to quantify.
By partnering with a digital platform focused on the patient journey, pharmaceutical companies can gain access to quantified information related to patient adherence, payer participation, distribution issues, provider engagement, side effects and other events. This information can be used to better understand whether the team is meeting its market access KPIs — and to spot avenues for change if goals are not being met.
Drug manufacturers who choose and track effective KPIs gain a deeper understanding of their market access strategy’s performance. This understanding allows them to spot and seize opportunities to refine their strategy and reach their goals.
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