Opinion

A leading category manager who purchases a $4 billion category of business shared with me during a recent interview that he believes less than 5% of the companies calling on him “truly create meaningful value” and actually “get it.” He went on to share that, “they don’t understand or appreciate my definition of value.”

The new world of targeted, specialized medicines — many of them bioengineered and many of them aimed at smaller and smaller segments of the population — isn’t just on its way. It’s here. And it’s going to radically change the practice of pharmacy.

Here’s an eye-opener: Specialty drugs will likely account for 50% of all drug costs by 2018, up from 28.7% of total prescription drug costs in 2012.

These are the days of the empowered patient — the patient who asks questions; who wants to know about how to prevent the diseases that ailed their parents or how to live more successfully with the conditions they have; and who seeks and finds health information from doctors, nurses, magazines and most especially from the teeming trove of online health sites.

It’s often the case that those in the midst of revolutionary times don’t really see how fundamentally the world around them is changing until long after the changes have occurred. So let’s start by declaring that the revolution has begun: Genomic research will dramatically transform both the practice of pharmacy and the way patients are treated with medications for many diseases.

In my last UpMarketing post, Dart and science, I described how combining quantitative and qualitative research with good old-fashioned gut instincts can drive results. This post examines a related topic: big data. Everyone’s talking about the mountains of data at their fingertips, just waiting for analysis and action.

Last week, I wrote about medication therapy management and a new bill in the House of Representatives to expand the pool of patients who qualify for MTM programs through Medicare. This week, I’m writing about — wait for it — medication therapy management.

A 12-to-1 return on investment. That’s what researchers in Minnesota estimated public and private health plan payers can get when they pay pharmacists to provide medication therapy management.