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How Merck's bet on patient-driven insights paid off [Medical Marketing and Media](Medical Marketing and Media Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) In 2011, when Sachin Jain's Merck medical information and innovation (M2i2) team partnered with PatientsLikeMe to create an online research community around psoriasis, the pharma giant had lofty ambitions. It hoped to build what Jain describes as "a new kind of online evidence network" that would educate community members and tap into their real-world health outcomes to inform drug development. It expected to positively impact patients' lives. Merck didn't immediately realize either of those goals. After a year, Jain says, fewer than 2,000 psoriasis patients had aligned themselves with the community. Faced with two options- continuing down the same path or approaching the patient-partnership model from a different perspective-Merck chose the latter. "I came to the team at PatientsLikeMe with a challenge," recalls Jain, Merck's chief medical information and innovation officer. "Show me that PatientsLikeMe can affect how we think about launching a drug that matters to Merck and do it within the year." PatientsLikeMe was up to the task, tapping a wealth of network and historical data on insomnia and sleep deprivation. After merging the PatientsLikeMe information with its own data, Merck was able to view sleep deprivation "through a new lens, diving into the unmet needs of a large community of sufferers," Jain says. In the wake of the Merck/PatientsLikeMe collaboration, Jain is happy to share the lessons his team learned about how pharma can most effectively interface with patients. The first one, unsurprisingly, is to partner wisely. "Innovation is complicated both for large enterprises like Merck and for small companies trying to understand how these enterprises work. We wrote our contract to allow for trust and flexibility on both sides." While internal teams might be tempted to tiptoe around legal and regulatory concerns-"especially those who operate in organizations with a lot of red tape," Jain clarifies-he strongly recommends that companies hoping to build and/or work with patient communities "don't go stealth." Only by embracing compliance early on in the process can an organization duck legal, privacy and safety concerns further down the road. Merck's experience with the psoriasis project informs lesson number three: Be prepared to pull the cord early. There's no shame in failure; if a project fails to gain traction early and shows few signs that it will be able to make up the lost ground, end it sooner rather than later and chalk it up as a learning experience. "It's okay to pause and regroup," Jain says. That regrouping might well lead the organization where it wants to go, as it did with the Merck/PatientsLikeMe collaboration. That's why Jain reminds patient-minded organizations that "pivots aren't just for startups... We turned the psoriasis project in a completely new direction in a short period of time." Finally, and this goes without saying in reference to projects like this, Jain encourages pharma teams to "go all-in," to commit the resources and support that most programs need to flourish. "My team and I have taken personal ownership of this new project to advance our efforts within Merck, assuming the personal risk that our data-driven insights could potentially influence the development of new treatment," Jain says. "By vocally advocating for the partnership and its benefits at company-wide meetings, we demonstrated the commitment we had to the PatientsLikeMe relationship-and the patients they represent-both internally and externally." The above is a revised version of a piece that appeared on mmm-online.com in July. (c) 2014 Haymarket Media, Inc. |