Axtria participated as Gold Sponsor at the Pharmaceutical Management Science Association (PMSA) Annual Conference 2014. Axtria’s Principals have supported the PMSA for two decades, including over 15 presentations / symposia / poster contributions over the past decade. The event is attended by industry thought leaders, senior life sciences professionals and business consultants from commercial operations.
Axtria staff Razek Karnoub and David Wood presented a poster session “Refocusing Personal Promotion and a State Space Approach”. The presentation talked about applicable ways to focus on promotional resources for a product competing in a highly fragmented market with multiple branded, generic, and non-pharmaceutical treatment options. Essentially, we were able to show that our client’s product really competed only with the other branded products . . . with very little gain of volume against generics. (Note: the usual data sources that could show this . . . switching behavior using anonymized patient-level data . . . were not usable in this case.) Our approach used an innovative model reminiscent of Markov chain structures to demonstrate that physicians’ choice of our client’s brand was made only among the branded products, with only minimal consideration of generics.
The implications of this for our client’s brand were significant: we needed to change focus to reduce emphasis on high-volume doctors with primarily generic prescribing, and focus narrowly on physicians with a high level of branded prescribing. This was particularly critical given that one of those branded competitors was scheduled to lose exclusivity in 18 months, and thus would likely become even more difficult to convert. The required change in targeting (and acceptance of a smaller total market opportunity) was difficult to accept, but has improved brand performance moderately.
Click here to download the poster presentation.
At the PMSA Annual Conference 2014, Axtria team led several other presentation sessions including “20 Tweets in 20 Minutes” by Patrick Brundage, “IC Design for Effective Alignment with Call Planning” by Asheesh Sharma, and “Measuring the Value of Providing Call Plans to Field Sales Teams” by Chet Baboor.
About David Wood
David brings more than 35 years of experience in mathematical modeling of business problems, with over 20 years in sales and marketing analysis for Life Sciences companies. At Axtria, David serves as a Senior Principal, with emphasis on projects in mathematical modeling of sales operations and multi-channel promotion analysis.
Prior to Axtria, he was a Sr. Vice President at marketRx, where he did significant work in all forms of sales and marketing optimization in the health care, pharmaceuticals, and managed care industries, with scores of engagements including sales and marketing structure, site location, and multi-channel marketing.
David served as Executive Director for Strategic Planning Consulting at Health Products Research (now part of inVentiv Health). In addition, David has done substantial work in the development of Yield Management for the commercial airline industry (at Sabre Decision Technologies), and has worked in finance, energy and natural resource economics issues.
David holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, in Operations Research.
About Razek Karnoub
Razek is a Pharmaceutical industry professional with experience spanning several commercial analytics roles. Razek has worked in multiple Pharma companies in the areas of payer analytics, promotion optimization/sales force planning, inline and new products forecasting. Razek has experience in multiple therapeutic categories and geographies as well.
Previously, Razek was a director at Pfizer Inc.’s Payer Analytics Group. Razek has also worked as a project manager with Merck & Co. Razek has a PhD in Operations Research from North Carolina State University.