New year, new opportunities, new agendas

Citation

Mukherjee, A. (2009), "New year, new opportunities, new agendas", International Journal of Pharmaceutical and Healthcare Marketing, Vol. 3 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijphm.2009.32403aaa.001

New year, new opportunities, new agendas

Article Type: Editorial From: International Journal of Pharmaceutical and Healthcare Marketing, Volume 3, Issue 1

Welcome to the first issue of International Journal of Pharmaceutical and Healthcare Marketing (IJPHM) 2009. The new year promises to be a landmark one for healthcare in the world’s largest healthcare market – the USA. As Charles Dickens famously said, these are the best of times, these are the worst of times. The 44th US President Barack Obama has identified health care reforms amongst the top priorities of his new administration. Much is expected of this new initiative. On the other hand, we are in the midst of an economic turmoil which presents additional challenges to the financing and modernization of healthcare. Restructuring of the healthcare system is also expected in much of Europe and in the UK, as well as in the emerging countries such as China, India, and Russia. Marketing will not only be necessary for pharmaceutical products and healthcare services, but also of new ideas and initiatives as well!

The new year brings new opportunities for an international pharmaceutical and healthcare journal like IJPHM to participate in the global dialogue on healthcare reforms. Marketing and public policy experts will debate the pros and cons of a plethora of competing policy prescriptions: universal healthcare, government-mandated healthcare, government-subsidized healthcare, private-public partnership, consumer-driven healthcare, single-payer healthcare, affordable healthcare, etc. They will have to grapple with the paradoxes of healthcare such as the need to ensure the availability of affordable drugs for global consumers while maintaining the “patent rents” system through handsome returns for pharmaceutical companies; or to encourage pharmaceutical companies to develop vaccines for third world diseases while lifestyle drugs popular in western societies provide attractive revenue streams. The divergent perspectives of various stakeholders such as healthcare educators, leaders, managers, clinicians and other caregivers, consultants and policy makers, more often than not, are based on and lead to one common idea.

There is also emergence of new research agendas that will dominate the scholarly discussions and debates. For example, healthcare and pharmaceutical managers would need to worry about emerging diseases such as the avian flu and emerging public health models such as the “One world, one medicine, one health.” The drying up of new blockbuster drug pipelines and the emergence of medical tourism would present new challenges and opportunities.

As in the past two years, IJPHM will again be featured in “Meet the Editors” sessions in several prestigious conferences in 2009, such as the American Marketing Association Conference in Tampa, the Business and Health Administration Association Conference in Chicago, and the Society for Marketing Advances Conference in New Orleans. Further, we will soon announce the most outstanding paper and the highly commended papers for 2008. Usage statistics reflected in the online download frequencies of IJPHM articles recently compiled by Emerald shows an enviable total of 8,360 downloads in 2008, a significant increase from the 2007 download total of 3,689.

The five articles in this issue explore different aspects of the pharmaceutical and healthcare sector, reaffirming the eclectic nature of the journal with current and relevant research questions and a diverse range of research methodologies and statistical techniques.

This first issue of the new year offers information and analysis that will make an impact on the future of healthcare research, practice, and policy. President Obama has proposed a massive effort to modernize health care by making all health records standardized and electronic (Goldman, 2009). Digital personal health record (PHR) is his “big idea” as part of his effort to tackle rising healthcare costs and, in more general terms, to revive the economy. This issue opens with a paper on PHRs. Whetstone and Goldsmith, in their article “Factors influencing intention to use personal health records” identify innovativeness with regard to healthcare, confidence in the privacy and security of the records, and perceived usefulness of PHR as the key antecedents of consumer adoption of a PHR. Using a convenience sample of 542 US college students, the authors provide useful insights into the new technology adoption process.

The next paper addresses the challenge of measuring service quality in pharmaceutical supply chains. Ahmed, Awan, Raouf, and Sparks, in their paper “Development of a service quality scale for pharmaceutical supply chains” propose a scale with four dimensions and ten measurement items based on a survey of 413 pharmaceutical retailers in two cities of Pakistan. Churchill’s procedure is used to develop and purify the scale and the confirmatory factor analysis using structural equation modeling produces acceptable goodness-of-fit statistics. Overall, the scale performs well on measures of reliability and validity. The proposed scale can be applied to measure service quality in the distributor-retailer interface of pharmaceutical supply chains.

The third article in this issue raises the quintessential question: how do I choose my physician? Colley and Madupu address this question in “How did you find your physician? An exploratory investigation into the types of information sources used to select physicians.” Based on focus groups and personal interviews with baby boomers, they observe that consumers use internet to select physicians in addition to using traditional word-of-mouth. Also, consumers tend to spend more time and effort, refer to more sources and prefer objective sources of information when searching for information for someone else (e.g. loved ones) vis-à-vis for themselves.

The fourth scholarly piece in this issue is a case study. Michels, Kurz-Levin, and Schmitz outline the growing phenomenon of off-label drug use in their case study titled “Off-label drug use: price analysis for Avastin^® in ophthalmology.” When drugs approved for systemic use are used locally in small quantities outside the approved indication (off-label drug use), the drug price per treatment can potentially decrease. The authors from University Eye Hospital, Zurich and University of St Gallen use van Westendrop price sensitivity measurement (PSM) method to find an optinal price range for Avastin^® formulation, an anti-VGEF cancer drug used off-label for wet/neovascular age-related macular degeneration, the leading cause of legal blindness in western countries. Based on responses from German specialist physicians and benchmarked against competition, the authors derive the optimal price, the indifference price, and the acceptable price range. Interesting implications are offered for the pharmaceutical industry in terms of both threats and opportunities from off-label applications of drugs.

This is followed by an insightful practitioner perspective article by Glass and Poli titled “‘Pressure points’ on pharmaceutical industry executives: what lies ahead?” The authors outline some of the recent trends in the pharma industry as perceived by senior industry executives, using a modified Delphi approach. The six “pressure points” identified in the article are: society’s perception of pharma, availability of safe new drugs, politics and legislation, regulatory environment, drug innovation and diffusion, and global financial results.

We conclude with a review by Kishwar Joonas of the book Global Pharmaceutical Marketing: A Practical Guide to Codes and Compliance authored by Judith Grice.

I trust this issue will continue to inform, challenge and stimulate your research ideas. I must again acknowledge the scholars who have taken a keen interest in choosing IJPHM as an outlet for their research. Special thanks to the members of the Editorial board and our pool of ad hoc reviewers for their outstanding contribution to the journal. Finally, this journal could not have achieved much without the outstanding contribution of Emerald’s Publisher Martyn Lawrence and Assistant Publisher Mary Miskin. Join us this new year as we present more findings and strategies that you can use in your own research or in your search for applied solutions.

Avinandan Mukherjee