Patient Advocacy Excellence: Optimizing Group Structure & Staffing

STUDY OVERVIEW

Alliances with patient advocacy groups play an important role in educating the marketplace about new and existing therapies. With the increased need for an effective pharma advocacy function, it has become critical for pharma advocacy groups to evolve and better align their group structure and operations to the overall organizational goals.

Best Practices, LLC conducted this research study to identify the geographic and functional factors that drive advocacy group structure as well as advocacy reporting relationships and how groups align themselves with internal customers. Additionally, this study presents different organizational models for pharma advocacy groups and current trends in staffing and budgets for pharma advocacy groups. Advocacy leaders can use this research to compare their organizational structure and resourcing with those of leading organizations.

KEY TOPICS

• Advocacy Models: Key Trends and Drivers of Sub-Group Group Evolution
• Advocacy Group Models and Structures
• Advocacy Group Staffing Benchmarks: Key Trends In Resourcing Advocacy Groups

• Functional factors that describe how your advocacy organization is designed
• Geographic factors describing how your advocacy organization is designed
• Approaches used to align advocacy staff with internal customers
• Effectiveness of different staffing approaches for serving internal customers
• Approach to integrating U.S. and international or global advocacy structures
• Level of the person leading advocacy group
• Leadership group that advocacy reports to
• Number of employees within advocacy group, worldwide and U.S. only
• Advocacy staffing per $1 billion in revenue
• Percentage of advocacy employees internal versus outsourced
• Budget allocations for advocacy
• Percentage of worldwide advocacy budget allocated to major geographic regions
• Percentage of budget allocated to labor and non-labor categories
• Sources of advocacy group's funding

SAMPLE KEY FINDING

Functional Drivers of Sub-structure Optimization: Therapeutic area is the dominant factor influencing functional structure evolution. As organizations grow larger and more complex, business units become a significant design factor in helping to organize the mix of product types. With business units in place, lifecycle, economics, and marketplace factors can help guide how intensely Advocacy serves a unit, product, therapeutic issue, partner or region.

METHODOLOGY

Participants in this benchmarking research included executive respondents at 11 leading bio-pharmaceutical and healthcare companies. Field interviews and analysis were conducted to produce valuable research insights and findings. Research participants included Executive Directors, Medical Executives, Directors and Product Managers. More than 80% of benchmark partners were directors or above – and most worked directly in Advocacy groups or functions.

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.