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Latest Executive Roundtables

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1rem

 podcast, Jennifer Butler, chief commercial officer of Pleio, discusses:

The threat of misinformation to public health and how emotional appeal plays a part.

Where patients are turning for trustworthy health information.

Strategies that can be used to verify information.

Pharma's role in helping to ensure patients have access to health insights they can trust.

Why the industry is turning to peer-to-patient platforms, trusted patient communities, and pharmacies to educate patients.

What kind of role regulatory agencies should play in the battle against misinformation.

Podcasts

Jennifer Butler, chief commercial officer of Pleio, discusses misinformation's threat to public health, where patients are turning for trustworthy health information, the industry's pivot to peer-to-patient strategies to educate patients, and more.

The Misinformation Maze: Navigating Public Health in the Digital Age

 Podcast, CEO and Founder of Sooth, Ian Baer, is back to discuss:

Why people trust friends and influencers over companies

Ian Baer, Founder and CEO of Sooth, discusses how the growing distrust in social media will impact industry marketing strategies and the relationships between pharmaceutical companies and the patients they aim to serve. He also explains dark social, how to combat misinformation, closing the trust gap, and more.

Navigating Distrust: Pharma in the Age of Social Media

CMS’ draft guidance on real-world data study protocols marks a significant move toward transparency and rigor in Medicare coverage decisions.

Making Real-World Evidence Work for Medicare: What CMS’ Draft Guidance Gets Right and What Needs Work 

Polypharmacy, biosimilars, and GLP-1s among the evolving trends likely to play out in the pharmacy benefits space.  

The Shifting Pharmacy Landscape in 2025

Kimberley Chiang, vice president of biopharma commercial solutions at CoverMyMeds, discusses how the industry leverages data and technology to identify and address affordability issues before they become a barrier to patient access.

Proactively Identifying & Addressing Affordability Issues with Predictive Analytics

 video interview, Kimberley Chiang, vice president of biopharma commercial solutions at CoverMyMeds, discusses "The 2025 Medication Access Report." She highlights gaps in data-sharing and cross-functional collaboration as major bottlenecks that cause delays, rework, and increased patient burden. Chiang shares that only 3% of patients utilize support programs due to a lack of awareness. A large majority of the report's respondents plan to expand funding for patient support programs within the next 5 years due to large number of new therapies expected to come to market.

Pharmaceutical Executive: How can the industry leverage data and technology to proactively identify and address affordability issues before they become a barrier to patient access? What role does predictive analytics play in this?


 The ability to be proactive in identifying and addressing those gaps requires a centralized data system and a greater ecosystem. The ability to leverage data requires that data to be comprehensive. Predictive analytics will run on strong data models, and in order to have those, you need a seamless experience.

How do we capture data along the patient journey, and how do we ensure that predictive analytics will help us analyze that data? It all starts with the ability to streamline the data. If we don’t begin to bring data sources together in real and important ways, we will not be able to properly allocate our resources and spending in pharma. There will be some forecasting and assumptions, but with some real-world data (RWD) integrated.

Think about the addition of an integrated data model with RWD and what that could do for better predictive analytics. Our assumptions would be lowered, and our predictions would be better. We would have optimized predictability for where the funding needs to be directed.

The second piece of that is you have better clinical outcomes if you can identify in advance. You will not have patients walking away from their prescriptions, which continues to be a challenge. We are also seeing significant increases in claims denials. About 73% of claims are denied. What do we do when claims come back denied?

With predictive analytics, there are affordability and co-pay types of expansion. There’s also focus and energy around overturning claim denials. How do we ensure that the claim was denied for righteous reasons? The ability to have all of the data integrated and run it through predictive analytics alongside RWD would help us improve clinical outcomes. Those patients will not be denied medication that they need and rightfully deserve.

Doing all of this more efficiently will remove costs from the ecosystem. There is significant fragmentation in all of the processes. To bring all of that data together to understand the market access for a single brand launch, bio-pharmas must piece together all of that information. Bringing data together and using predictive analytics with strong data models will help these companies do so more efficiently. It will take costs out of the system and speed patients onto the right medications. Healthcare providers will also spend less time waiting for the patient to get approved.

Videos

Jen Butler, Chief Commercial Officer for Pleio, shares some  best practices on finding trustworthy and verified information about a new prescription or medical device.

Verifying Information about New Prescriptions or Medical Devices

 video interview, Jen Butler, Chief Commercial Officer for Pleio, discussed the significant threat of misinformation to public health, citing a 2021 report by former Surgeon General Murthy. She highlighted that 70% of false news is shared more often than true news due to its emotional appeal. Butler emphasized the importance of verifying health information by directly contacting trusted sources like Cleveland Clinic, Mayo Clinic, and Kaiser Permanente. She also noted the role of pharma in supporting patient communities and the need for media and health literacy. Butler also suggested that peer-to-patient platforms can enhance patient engagement and adherence, particularly for chronic conditions.

Can you share some insights on best practices about a new prescription or medical device?

The practice is again traditional and very basic, but I'll go into a little bit more explanation behind it is. But go to your trusted healthcare provider with a new medication and therapy and questions. That's absolutely the number one golden rule. But that's not always accessible to everybody, right? And your time with your healthcare provider is sometimes limited, but you just want to make sure that you're validating the new therapies, new approaches, beyond what you're hearing in whatever TikTok or AI generated content that you're reacting to.

I'll use GLP-1s as an example, because I think the recently, and what I didn't mention earlier in this is, GLP-1s is kind of that next surgence of massive misinformation. This amazing miracle drug that will have a huge impact on public health, but we have to make sure that the right patients are receiving the right diagnosis with the right medications. There's a lot of you know, I went on TikTok just to look at the fact there are over a dozen categories of GLP-1 discussions going on in videos and ways to find out information. There's also information out there that could be misleading regarding where to access GLP-1s and the compounding GLP-1 sites that you can now access the medications from and get it so far more easily, but not recognizing that there's false claims out there that these compounds are have FDA approval, and these are really important facts, again, versus the opinions of others that might be on these that need to be verified.

 actually just published in January on their health forum a letter acknowledging that this is becoming a concern as well, with patients going through the compound sites, again, just being aware and educated as a patient, as you said before having kind of that consumer education approach as a patient. I mean, patients are people, consumers. We're consuming healthcare. We need to make sure that we're putting the right approaches in place. So, I mentioned

. They're a great resource as well, tons of research. Health literacy might be a little bit elevated in some of the research that they put out there, but you can, at least get extracts and summaries as well of their research reports.

In this Pharmaceutical Executive video interview, Jen Butler, Chief Commercial Officer for Pleio, shares some  best practices on finding trustworthy and verified information about a new prescription or medical device.

Verifying Information About New Prescriptions or Medical Devices

Ian Baer, Founder & CEO of Sooth, explores the contributing factors growing distrust and uncertainty surrounding social media.

Main Contributors of Social Media Uncertainty & Distrust

In this Pharmaceutical Executive video interview, Ian Baer, Founder & CEO of Sooth, explores the growing distrust and uncertainty surrounding social media and its impact on the pharmaceutical industry. Key contributors to this distrust include the spread of misinformation, the rise of AI-generated content, and the politicization of social media platforms. The conversation highlights the challenges faced by pharma companies in building trust with patients in this environment, including the need to combat misinformation and navigate the complexities of social media platforms.

He emphasizes the importance of building partnerships with trusted voices, such as medical influencers and patient communities, to effectively communicate with patients. It also underscores the need for transparency and authenticity in pharma's social media presence, including acknowledging and addressing patient concerns and responding to negative feedback.

The conversation concludes with a discussion on the evolving role of social media in healthcare and the potential for private communities and personalized sharing to play a greater role in the future.

What do you think are the main contributors behind the uncertainty/distrust in social media?

This has been building for a while, right? I think the last two political presidential election cycles have created a different awareness about social media, how content gets created, the nature of influence, the way data is used. Certainly, the whole Cambridge Analytica scandal from years back created a lot of alarm among people when they looked at content that was posted in social media and left them questioning, 

‘is this fact? Is this fiction? Is this opinion? Do I trust the source it's coming from?

’ Of course, now, with the advent of AI, you even have, 

‘do I trust that the source is actually who the source claims to be?’

There's just so much of a swirl. Unfortunately, where five or six years ago, none of the social media platforms had a very strong political bent one way or the other, now we have platforms that lean more in one direction and more in another direction. The whole notion of it being an echo chamber, it gets greatly increased, yet you have a lot of factors at play. The weirdness is, at the same time, people still trust friends and family and influencers in social media more than they trust companies in social media.

It's a really odd state of affairs and a picture that's continuing to resolve as certain things proceed here in the US. Whether it's some of the legislative things being discussed, what's going to happen to TikTok, we’ve got a lot of winds blowing here.

In this part of his Pharmaceutical Executive video interview, Ian Baer, Founder & CEO of Sooth, explores the contributing factors growing distrust and uncertainty surrounding social media.  

Healthcare Access

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