The Perils of DIY ePI
Earlier today, my colleague Jackie spent much of the morning on calls and in Teams meetings with various very perturbed (not at Jackie) people who work for one of the world’s largest drug companies. From what I heard, there were countless members of the brand’s agency teams present, each billing by the hour, and everyone was very tense. There were also some “internal experts” on the call, and it seemed like almost everyone was unhappy with them. Not one of those people was having a good day. Why?
Because they had just launched a new line extension of a popular, multi-billion-dollar product, but without the benefit of having people familiar with compendia, EHRs, or electronic product identity, helping them. It had not gone well. The problem? The brand team relied on advice from an internal “expert” who thought that shaping the product’s electronic product identity involved “just filling out a few forms and sending them to the compendia” so that the product “showed up in the EHR”. I don’t think any of those people think that now.
What’s going wrong? Well, it’s going to be difficult for prescribers to tell the new product from another, similar product the company offers, and that’s not at all what they wanted to have happen. Given that lack of (apparent) differentiation, wholesalers may not order the new product in large quantities because it sure looks a lot like the existing product. And payers? Mo one even wants to think about that right now, because a big reason for launching the new product was to help capture share in a segment not reached by the existing product, but that’s going to be very tough if no one is willing to reimburse for the new offering.
So, if this is what can happen if you don’t get your electronic product identity “right”, and this is such a big company, you might be asking, “How could that happen?!”
Well, if this were a home improvement project, we’d call it a DIY blunder caused by an over-confident homeowner. Without going into detail, a person or two inside the company had completed all the compendia forms for another product in the past, nothing had fallen apart, and they decided that this whole compendia / EHR / product information for health IT thing was simple. And that product launch, frankly, was. But this one, while looking deceptively similar, carried with it a whole different set of issues that didn’t surface (to a relatively inexperienced eye) until it was too late. That’s when the panic started, and that’s how we got pulled in.
To be frank, we’ve seen many products launched with “DIY” ePI and compendia efforts, without major issues. We’ve even seen quite a few products launched with absolutely no effort to shape the ePI or send anything to compendia, and it looked like everything was great. Things might have been better, but if the company doesn’t even realize what they might have achieved, maybe that’s OK for them. But it’s exceedingly rare for a company to launch all their new products or line extensions on their own, without some outside help, and not lose out on some significant opportunities that would help them sell more and have less customer confusion. And sadly, things sometimes go really bad, and one or more of us gets pulled into a problem like the one Jackie’s trying to help a very expensive, very nervous team, resolve. I have no doubt she’ll help them make some big improvements, but no one can make things as good as they could have been, with better planning. That’s a shame (and probably a lot of lost sales). Too often, that’s the result you get with “DIY”.