Capturing chronic care marketshare

DENVER — Capturing more than your fair share of chronic care marketshare is not only a key pursuit across the back-bench, but also for purveyors of OTC medicines, noted Nielsen analysts Monday morning during an Insight Session called “Consumer Driven Healthcare at Retail: Three Ways to Answer the Call” at NACDS TSE.



“[There are] a lot of top-line growth opportunities when focusing on the needs of the chronic sufferer,” said Jeff Gregori, VP consumer and shopper analytics at Nielsen. “You see how the impact of their secondary and tertiary conditions really drive what they buy.”



And the evolving healthcare paradigm, which is facilitating more and more chronic care services in the retail pharmacy setting with the advent of retail clinics, also is helping to drive more of those chronic disease sufferers through the pharmacy door.

Gregori outlined three ways retailers and their supplier partners can better serve chronic care patients — identify who that shopper is, including where they shop, what they buy and their key need states; develop a marketing and retail activation plan that collaboratively meets common goals and objectives; and measure the success of those plans in order to tweak future initiatives.



According to Nielsen research, some of the largest chronic care conditions index very heavily across the OTC aisles. For example, the 37% of U.S. households with someone who suffers from acid reflux have a spend index of 119. The 16% of households with someone who has osteoarthritis have a 129 spend index across OTC and the 14% of households with a diabetic possess a 135 spend index.



In fact, those three specific conditions represent a significant opportunity in capturing the whole patient — patients diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes average 5.6 total prescriptions, acid reflux sufferers 3.7 and allergy sufferers 2.7, according to Nielsen.



Specifically among diabetics, the spend index for a category like adult incontinence is 138, which represents a $3,000 opportunity for every 1,000 buyers in that category. Blood test products also index high across the diabetes demographic, representing $4,300 in OTC opportunity for every 1,000 buyers.