MedSpan Musings — Tips for better market research

When conducting market research with the hospital pharmacy department, ensure that the right section is informing your actions.

While some hospital pharmacies limit their scope of practice to their individual hospital, others are responsible for the purchasing and management of drug therapies throughout the integrated delivery system.

• Pharmacy directors — Sets policy for operations, contracting, inventory management, and intra-delivery system distribution. The pharmacy director typical is a voting member of the P&T Committee, thereby influencing product selection.The pharmacy director tends to be the most knowledgeable among his or her staff regarding billing, coding and reimbursement for drug therapy. However, in our experience, the level of expertise in these areas varies between hospital pharmacy directors.

  Integrated delivery systems may have one pharmacy director for inpatient care and another for outpatient care. They report to a Vice President of Pharmacy. Standalone hospitals tend to have one pharmacy director.

• Clinical pharmacists — Are often stationed throughout the hospital. Share drug insights with other clinicians. Develop drug monographs for the P&T Committee. Each clinical pharmacist specializes in one or more disease categories (e.g., cardiovascular disease) or hospital patient care unit (e.g., emergency medicine).
• IV operations managers — Oversees compounding processes and clean rooms. IV operations managers are important respondents for studies involving IV therapies.
• Pharmacy buyers — Work directly with wholesalers and drug companies to execute the delivery system’s day-to-day buying practices.

Payer 101: The respondents you need for your payer market research study

At MedSpan Research, we’re proud of the expertise we’ve gained over the past 17 years in an important but not well understood sector of the healthcare industry: payers. Today, we’ll continue with the Payer 101 series that we started in September by covering the key types of payer respondents to include in your next payer market research study.

To recap, the term ‘payer’ is broadly defined as any entity that reimburses the use of healthcare services or products. The term commonly refers to health insurance companies (otherwise known as health plans) as a whole, or to a key decision-maker at a health plan, such as a medical director. In the first post in our Payer 101 series, we focused on the former definition. In this second part of our series, we’ll go into more detail about the latter.

Applying Mental Health Parity in 2014

This week we’ll take a closer look at the November 2013 final ruling of the Mental Health Parity Act which becomes effective this month. While the Act is not new, these guidelines will decisively affect how it is implemented throughout the country.

Differentiating a Core Hospital-based Therapy

In this case study we examine which product characteristics are most influential towards brand selection for our client’s product and which enhancements could drive brand preference towards their product.

Pricing Study for a Novel Medical Device

In this study, we were able to provide valuable insights to a start-up medical device manufacturer to help them decide what price premium to charge for their first product.