Today’s guest entry is by MBA participant, Vivien Tan (Singaporean). Her team members from the ICP are Felipe (Brazilian/German), Gianpaolo (Italian), Antoine (Belgian) and Mirela (Romanian) with Faculty support by IMD Professors Ralf Boscheck (German) and Goutam Challagalla (American/Indian).
QALY, ICER, EQ5D, PHQ9, BTP, these are some of the many new acronyms that I have heard and grown familiar with throughout the past weeks on the International Consulting Project with a big Pharma company. As I did not have previous healthcare experience, this project brought me the closest I have ever been into this industry. Being able to observe how Pharma is tackling major healthcare trends today, has brought me new excitement and insights!
The project is a nice extension from my previous research for The Promise of Health presentation at IMD’s annual Navigating the Future conference, I have the opportunity to work on a project directly related to value based healthcare, the buzzword in healthcare today. As part of the ICP project, we are working closely with the market access team week after week, understanding how to design a go-to-market strategy for a new compound. Knowing that our work will impact both the top and bottom lines of the product really adds to the pressure!
Beyond this, our team has also had the opportunity to meet and interact with various parts of the organization, from speaking with scientists in R&D, regulatory affairs on how to get the product registered, to strategic marketing that prepares the ground for launch before traditional marketing takes over. These are the traditional business functions of Big Pharma, but we also interacted with the heads of new initiatives who were looking at building up the capabilities of healthcare systems in low income countries and finding new ways of communicating with patients and physicians. But nevertheless, one common thread existed throughout our conversations, which was “we need to do what is in the best interest of our patients” and digitalization featured as a key enabler in this.
Overall, it has been a power-packed 5 weeks thus far and we look forward to squeezing in even more learnings in the remaining time.
Off to prepare our final presentation, till next time!
Signing off,
Vivien Tan
