Consulting and outsourcing giant Capgemini has announced its seventh annual Vision & Reality study: Customer Value Integration – How to Re-Tune Pharma’s Commercial Model in Light of Changing Stakeholder Influence, which reveals that pharmaceutical companies can remain profitable and maximise customer value in today’s market by aligning their efforts to address the shifting power between physicians and patients through better collaboration with industry stakeholders and influencers such as physicians, payers, insurance companies and government bodies.

Capgemini surveyed more than 100 pharmaceutical and payer executives from Health Management Organizations (HMOs), insurance companies and government bodies worldwide, facilitated an advisory board session with leading physicians, and conducted research to assess how pharmaceutical companies are responding to the changing stakeholder landscape. While business transformation in the industry is inherent to adapt to this shift, responses to survey questions suggested a perception gap between how executives view the market evolution and how they respond to it.

The study suggests that the power of the physician has declined in comparison to the increasing influence of patients and payers over the last decade. Today’s prescription decision-making process involves a complex set of interactions between stakeholders and influencers that the pharmaceutical industry needs to address. The combination of these stakeholders varies significantly depending on the therapeutic area and product lifecycle maturity of a drug and the previous “one size fits all” model is too slow and inefficient to address this shift. While traditional stakeholder,, such as physicians, still exert an influence and assume an important role for prescription decisions, new and influential stakeholders are beginning to re-shape how prescriptions are made.

“While pharmaceuticals are finding it difficult to adapt to this fundamental shift in stakeholder influence, customer value integration – that is to say identifying customer needs and expected value then aligning a company’s core competencies to meet those needs - is a fundamental shift that will reshape the face of the industry in the next three to five years,” said Omar Chane, vice president of the Life Sciences Practice at Capgemini. “While the industry has been trying to address the shift in the market through adjustments of key capabilities, the pace of change is going to increase, and the industry is going to witness a more fundamental structural change.”

The study includes insights into the degree of change in the pharmaceutical industry and the barriers to effectively deal with this change:

* 51% of participants viewed the changes in the pharmaceutical marketplace as structural, while 38% found them incremental, and nearly 11% described them as temporary.

* 79% of participants suggested more payer / pricing pressure as one of the top three market forces driving the change in the industry. The other market forces most commonly cited include more government influence (55%), and increasing regulatory requirements (47%).

* 63% of participants named organizational adaptation as one of the most important capabilities pharmaceutical companies need to develop to respond to new market challenges. The wish-list of capabilities also included market analytics and segmentation capabilities (47%) and customer needs assessment know-how (43%).

Each year since 2001, Capgemini’s Life Sciences practice examines a specific topic that is both timely and urgent for the life sciences industry.