Case Studies...

Astra Zeneca

Astra Zeneca - Emotive drivers of health care professionals

Astra Zeneca wanted to understand what drives health care professionals in their work, in their prescribing patterns and in their interaction with Astra Zeneca reps. Ultimately the study was to enable the Astra Zeneca reps to better serve their customers by creating dialogue with them in their own language for in the context they were in. Prescribing nurses for example might be writing out prescriptions but in a different context to hospital doctors or GPs.

Our Discoveries:

A number of drivers and language patterns emerged from this substantial study. For example all professionals were motivated towards patient health and away from drug side effects, towards gaining knowledge and away from wasting precious time. When prescribing drugs hospital doctors, nurses and psychiatrists were more people-focused than pharmacists or GPs. Patient care and compliance was important to all.

Our recommendations for Astra Zeneca were:

To focus on relationship building with the health care professionals (HCPs) but with a clear outcome in mind for AZ.

To focus on helping HCPs prescribe rather than just selling them relevant drugs.

To support the personal development of the HCP's and help HCP's to fill their knowledge gaps.

To establish a 'role' in the HCP team (i.e. become part of the team not an intruder from outside).

To support the HCP's in improving patient compliance (helping them to ensure their patients were actually taking the prescribed drug).

To focus on the HCP doing their best for the patient.

Our project partners, Excel Communications, followed up our study with a major training programme for Astra Zeneca.