Scope  

With the introduction of the National Healthcare System (Gesy) in Cyprus, the entire spectrum of the pharmaceutical offering has changed. A significant number of patients and respectively outpatient medicines have shift from the ‘Public hospital’ to a new unified healthcare system.

With this shift to the unified healthcare system which became competitive in all aspects, the need for better organization of the physicians’ support is gaining importance and special actions are required to effectively and efficiently reach the right healthcare providers with the right support from the right team of medical reps.

A one-size-fits-all support approach is not fulfilling healthcare providers expectations, and sales reps’ experience alone, is not enough to determine the optimal engagement plan across channels for individual clinicians. Simultaneously, investing in more face-to-face visits is costly and may not effectively contribute to success, therefore a more targeted approach is required to go to the right physicians, with the right frequency and the right message.

Developing a vision to transform the interaction model with health care providers starting with the segmentation of this universe and enriching this with digital communication is the way for success.

A 360-degree view of the active physicians’ universe

Sinopsis has collected and is maintaining the complete database on all physicians enrolled in Gesy, which is publicly available in OAY physicians lists. This provides a comprehensive database of prescribers universe with details on the active physicians’ number, their market context, and their characteristics. The prescriber universe is maped along three dimensions:

1. Prescribing Speciality
2. Account – Practice type (Public/private hospital, clinic, private practice)
3. Locations

Design a Physicians Segmentation model

Physician-facing medical representatives remain the dominant means for communicating the manufacturer’s messages, but medical reps find it increasingly difficult to meet with physicians under the appropriate time required to deliver targeted information, especially under the restrictions occurred due to the Covid pandemic.

The common element for success is the use of an institutional and disciplined approach to segmentation. Carefully constructed physician segments, along with the corresponding promotional messaging, can be the key to success.

A company’s engagement strategy is only as successful as the accuracy of its physicians’ segments. A number of tools exist for segmenting customers that constitute markets. Segmentation is both a science and an art.

At the most basic level, physicians can be grouped based on the analyst’s intuition or based on hard facts. To this end, cross-tabulated data provide a highly effective first-stage look at customer groups and often serve as a first step in segmentation analysis.

Sinopsis is proposing a sophisticated approach on Physicians segmentation driven by a combination of statistical techniques which include Factor Analysis and Latent Class Cluster analysis.

1. Factor Analysis: is used first to classify a large number of attitudes of attributes into groups, reducing the list down to a smaller, more manageable set of key themes. Through a combination of statistics and product category knowledge, an optimal number of factors are identified. Once factors have been developed, respondents are individually scored across the factors based on their responses to the attributes within each factor. Respondents are assigned to the factor where they score the highest—each factor represents a market segment. This segmentation technique is highly reliable. Factor structures and resulting segment structures are stable and consistent over time, across multiple waves of data collection.
2. Latent Class Cluster Analysis: uses a probability model to find the cluster solution that best fits the data. The model is able to predict patterns in the data based on several variables. It determines the relationships between dependent variables and an independent variable such as prescribing For each survey respondent, latent class cluster analysis delivers the probability of belonging to each cluster (or market segment). Respondents are assigned to the cluster to which they have the highest probability of belonging. Similar to Factor Analysis, latent class cluster analysis produces stable segments across multiple data sets.

Targeting and segmentation exercises allow you to detect the concentration of a particular market, gain a view on the potential difference between the various segments and understand your brand penetration in each one.