On a related note: How To Increase Market Share Using Medical Claims Data http://ow.ly/OAfVP

Petra Jongmans thanks, will look at that!

Which market are you looking at? have a lot of experience in UK and have done a number of projects for companies along these lines for economic data, cost savings, service redesign and clinical? rob@rdhealthcare.co.uk

Petra Jongmans thanks for these practical tips! Sounds good. Will have a look at the website asap!

I have used marketing training bulletins (internal) and Clinical Highlights (external) to communicate clinical evidence. Marketing Training Bulletins are created as a sort of memo and can provide background on the study as well as a table of claims from the data along with the company positioning and messaging for each claim. Clinical Highlights are a brief (1 to 4 page) summary of the important aspects of a clinical trial, written in your own style. They can include things like trial design and results but may focus on a specific aspect of the results that you want to convey (complete with graphs and charts). Be sure to add a citation for the original publication within the document. Take a look at our website (www.tactilemedical.com) for examples of Clinical Highlights.

Hi Petra I have managed sales and product teams in five leading medical companies and have used clinical evidence to help sales people gain new and improve sales. I run my own consulting company in Australia but handle the Asian Pacific market and would be interested to help. Please email me at tony.northwood@bigpond.com

Ee Bin Liew do take care that the terminology, language and the claims are absolutely consistent between the sales/marketing material and the actual evidence. that'll help to ensure you're always on the right side of everyone!

Cheers,
Ee Bin

Isabell Schwenkert Petra, it depends on what sort of clients you are dealing with. In my experience clinicians prefer the actual scientific paper to some meta information on a powerpoint, so the crucial thing is to have the relevant literature at hand. EndNote is a very useful tool for builing a literature database for your company because you can add files to the records and also enter user-defined keywords. The downside is the cost of the software. I would also highly recommend to have someone scan the relevant journals and PubMed on a weekly basis. I would do a key word search for pubmed, but really look at the new issues of the relevant journals each week if you can pinpoint them down to about 5 or so.

Petra Jongmans Hi all,
Thanks for the great suggestions. I thought it would be nice if I share what we are already doing so far. We write internal and external literature reviews per product line, but so far this consists of rather dry summaries with no 'take home' message. We also have topic related summaries, but in the end it's all about how you get your sales force and product managers to really read the literature and understand what the key messages are. Hence my question in this discussion. We are now setting up more interactive sessions where people will need to prepare and discuss an article, but I think, reading the suggestions, we can still improve our process. We do already check pubmed on a weekly basis and our Clinical Affairs team has a very strong knowledge of the literature. Now we just need to spread that knowledge :-)

Isabell Schwenkert Hi Petra, I would recommend to focus more on the customers, ie what is it exactly that they typically want to know from the sales force. And then deliver exactly that to sales in an easily manageable format. If a customer has specific question sales can always arrange a phone call with the clinical team. In my experience it is often even better to bring in the expert, simply because it is something new that keeps the customers interested. We used to do biannual sales trainings though, but mostly focused on new developments in the field.

Pat Ridgely, MD In addition to the very good suggestions so far, I'd be sure to include implementation tips wherever possible and appropriate. Clinicians are getting more and more used to having the key clinical take-aways listed for them, and an important next step is to show how those can be implemented in a practical way. This can be especially important for clinicians who are not in a large academic health center. Case studies of such implementation can make a real difference.