High Impact Educational Patient Aids Not Your Father’s Pharma Sales TchotchkesClick Here for Additional Resources
A conversation with Jeff Baker (see bio), President and CEO, Noble, about the new world of physician “tchottchkes” that pharmaceutical companies give to physicians as aids for patient education. We will discuss the impact of PhRMA guidelines on physician gifts and the trend towards educational items such as Abbott’s Trilipix-branded display of model blood vials to show physicians, patients, and pharmacists what blood actually looked like with varying levels of triglycerides.
Aired LIVE on: Tuesday, August 7, 2012 Listen to internet radio with Pharmaguy on Blog Talk Radio
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BackgroundWhen the conversation in a doctor’s office turns to lipids, patients are well aware of the dangers of high cholesterol but spend considerably less time thinking about high triglycerides. Indeed a recent Google search of “cholesterol awareness” turned up nearly 9 million hits while “triglycerides awareness” yielded just over 5 million.
Danielle Marifern, Senior Product Manager at Abbott who worked on Abbott’s Trilipix, a drug indicated to help reduce high triglycerides in people at high risk of heart disease who have abnormal cholesterol levels, wanted to boost consumer awareness about high triglycerides. To help include triglycerides in patient-physician conversations, she brought in Noble Rx Marketing from Orlando, Fla., a firm that specializes in high impact educational products.
Noble’s solution was to create a display of model blood vials to show physicians, patients, and pharmacists what blood actually looked like with varying levels of triglycerides. Of course, that created a problem for Noble since there was no medical literature, illustrations or references to tell them what these vials should look like.
So Noble’s designers took to the labs and performed their own clinical trial. As Noble CEO Jeff Baker likes to put it, they learned that after the blood was centrifuged, the plasma of healthy blood “looked a bit like chardonnay while the plasma of blood with high triglycerides looked like tapioca pudding.”
Ms. Marifern reported that the program was an astounding success. “Physicians told us these vials were exactly what they needed to educate patients and more importantly, get them to understand that they needed to treat their high levels of triglycerides along with their cholesterol,” she said. Also, Abbott responded by awarding Noble’s work with its Marketing Campaign of the Year award.
Questions/Topics Discussed
- When Abbott challenged you to help raise awareness for triglycerides, what led you to create a display of blood vials?
- How did you go about conducting a clinical trial to determine what the varying levels of triglycerides looks like in a vial of blood?
- What are the challenges in creating educational solutions in the regulated environment of Pharma?
- Can you walk us through your process for developing and producing high impact educational products, starting from the initial concept all the way through to the finished product?
- Can you give us some examples of other products you’ve created besides the blood vials? Anything you’re working on now you can discuss?
Guest Bios
Jeff Baker is Noble’s co-founder and CEO. His vision and deep-rooted values have grown Noble into an award-winning product development company known for innovation and family-first values. From local outreach to team-building, Jeff’s principles can be seen at all levels of Noble today. Noble’s unique approach to patient and HCP education has resulted in unsurpassed growth within biotech and pharma manufactures. Jeff Baker co-founded Noble with his wife in 1994.
Additional Resources
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