Working With Patient Advocacy Groups: Managing Advocacy Relationships

STUDY OVERVIEW

Collaborations between bio-pharmaceutical companies and patient advocacy groups play an important part in patient education. The success of a partnership between pharma and advocacy organizations hinges on the strength of the relationship. Thus, it is essential for companies to understand the approaches and tactics that lead to effective long-term relationships with advocacy groups.

Best Practices, LLC designed this benchmarking study to help companies identify key benchmark metrics, executive insights and recommendations that can be used to start and maintain an effective relationship with patient advocacy groups. The study additionally provides insight into current trends and challenges in patient advocacy.

KEY TOPICS

• Starting and maintaining effective relationships with advocacy groups
• Effective practices for working with potentially hostile patient advocacy groups
• The role of thought leaders in advocacy relationships
• Building trust through transparency in interactions
• Current trends and challenges in patient advocacy

• Approaches deemed effective for educating the marketplace for socially sensitive conditions
• Critical issues affecting collaborations with advocacy groups regarding controversial therapies
• Factors in marketplace requiring greatest consideration for patient advocacy
• Patient advocacy challenges anticipated to be most important in next three years
• Most painful lesson learned regarding patient advocacy relationship
• Top success story related to relationship with advocacy group

• Meet in person with the leadership of advocacy groups in order to establish personal rapport and move beyond separating issues. When first contacting an advocacy group, it is best to have a face-to-face meeting with the group’s leadership to demonstrate that you value the relationship. With hostile groups, it may be necessary to identify more moderate group members from among the leadership and reach out to them first.

• Use key opinion leaders with advocacy relationships to help make introductions and provide insights into an advocacy group’s needs and objectives. A useful relationship-building tactic is to invite external advocacy group leaders to address a product team or franchise leadership group to articulate the advocacy group’s priorities, goals and concerns.

Insights are drawn from survey responses from a total of 58 research participants at 43 pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical device companies. In-depth interviews were conducted to gather more detailed information pertinent to this study. Approximately half of the benchmark class (28 participants) consisted of executives representing top 50 bio-pharmaceutical companies.

If you purchase Best Practice Database document(s), you will have 30 days from the date of purchase to apply some or all of the cost of the document(s) toward the cost of a Full Access Individual, Pharma, Group or University Membership. Write us at DatabaseTeam@bestpracticesllc.com or call David Guinn at 919-767-9179 if you have any questions.