Chris Wright
Managing Principal, U.S. Pharmaceutical Practice
ZS Associates
Excellence in HealthcareChris Wright, with the help of his team at ZS Associates, believes he can save the pharmaceutical industry $2 billion.
For decades, the big pharmaceutical companies have tracked which doctors prescribe which drugs, and in what quantity. Using that aggregated data, the industry has assigned their sales representatives to target doctors that are disproportionately prescribing a competitor’s drug in hopes of getting them to prescribe their medicines.
The problem with this approach, Wright says, is that a doctor’s decision to prescribe one drug over another sometimes has more to do with an insurance company’s pre-arranged price in that market, rather than a doctor’s lack of knowledge or personal preference. So, despite a drug representative’s best efforts to convince a doctor to switch drug brands, it’s often a near-impossible sell.
“The exact same medicine does not stand the same chance of being used in some towns or certain parts of the country because of insurance companies. The deck is just stacked against the sales team. When a patient throws up their arms because the co-pay is so much higher for one blood pressure medication verses another one, doctors stop prescribing the more expensive version.”
Until Wright began tracking these issues in detail, the pharmaceutical company’s district sales managers didn’t have the data to understand why their sales representatives weren’t having luck with doctors that seemed to be such great prospects. Starting about two-and-a-half years ago, Wright’s team began tapping its pharmaceutical client base to better understand where certain drugs were being prescribed—i.e., where insurance companies had cut better deals for one medication over another.
Wright’s group now collects data from roughly half of all pharmaceutical sales representatives in the U.S. By being able to help clients better target doctors in insurance-friendly areas and retreat from less friendly markets, ZS Associates estimates it has saved its clients about $1 billion. Sharing the market data, which it updates twice per year, with the other half of the market should save the industry an additional $1 billion.
“It used to be true that only half of advertising works,” Wright says. “At ZS, we now know which half.”
—Jess Scheer
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