Strategic Medical Publications Management (PH163)

Pharmaceutical Publications Report Sample

The following excerpt is taken from Chapter 2, “Medical Publications Budgets, Team Output and Performance Measures.” It discusses manuscript production per year for high- and low-output teams. Cutting Edge Information defines “high-output” as producing more than 20 manuscripts annually and/or a combination of manuscripts and abstracts of 50 or more. Low-output teams produce less than 20 manuscripts annually and/or a combination of manuscripts and abstracts of 50 or more.

Publications Team Goals for Writing Manuscripts

Whereas companies use abstracts to engage physicians and generate interest in their scientific work, manuscripts present a new set of goals and objectives for medical publications teams. The primary objective for both abstracts and manuscripts is to reach as many relevant physicians as possible; after that, goals diverge. Abstracts and manuscripts are completely separate publications for Company D’s team. Company D always begins a project by developing a manuscript, which may then generate several abstracts. The time it takes to generate a manuscript can vary, so sometimes Company D will present abstracts at congresses before the manuscript is published.

Company B’s objective for writing a manuscript is to publish in a journal enough physicians will read as part of their continuing education. But a secondary objective is to provide the company’s MSLs with the manuscript to discuss with physicians and key opinion leaders. As an added bonus, the company also provides its manuscripts to the marketing and sales teams to use after the data has been published.

Manuscript Production Metrics for High- and Low-Output Teams

Manuscripts are the heart of activity for medical publications teams. The number of manuscripts produced determines almost everything about how the team is structured, funded and staffed, as well as how the company sets the team’s strategy going forward. For the purposes of this research, Cutting Edge Information analyzed companies’ data by separating teams into high- and low-output segments. These segments are primarily derived from the number of manuscripts each team produced. And the differences in these teams’ output is significant.

On average, high-output teams develop approximately 40 manuscripts annually, far more than their low-output counterparts. The data in Figure 2.39 [Figure included in the full report] show the number of publications for high-output teams in 2009, 2010 and 2011. According to the data, the average number of manuscripts produced each year has basically remained the same. Some high-output companies, such as Companies 3 and 7, have increased their number of manuscripts each year, while others, such as Company 13, have steadily decreased their production. The main factor influencing whether companies increase manuscript production is product lifecycle. When investigational drugs complete Phase 3, the company suddenly has a vast new database from which it must publish. Thus, companies can see rapid rises in manuscript production over a short time. At the later stages of the product lifecycle, especially within the last two years of its patent protection, few, if any, opportunities exist to publish new data. Accordingly, companies with aging portfolios can expect to see a drop in the numbers of manuscripts produced.

Similar factors affect low-output teams’ manuscript production. However, the data in Figure 2.40 [Figure included in the full report] show that 2011 was the year in which low-output companies produced the highest average number of manuscripts at five. Companies 20 and 12 each produced 10 or more manuscripts in 2011. Otherwise, none of the low-output companies profiled in this study produced more than nine in either 2010 or 2011. Company 12 begins developing publications to support products that are about to launch, which means that the spikes in manuscript production at Company 12 are in line with the company’s submissions for market approval. But the company also struggles to obtain resources for the publications team, and an interviewed executive reported that the team had missed its target number of manuscripts in part because of a lack of resources.

The following is excerpted from Chapter 3, “Creating a Strategic Publications Plan, section 2, “Journal Selection.” It includes an in-depth discussion of the key external and internal criteria for selecting the right journals.

Internal Evaluation

With an accurate understanding of journal landscape for a particular therapeutic area in hand, the medical publications team must begin to evaluate the aforementioned internal factors, its team objectives and corporate goals. The publications team has to determine target audience, strength of data and speed of publication. Ideally, the medical publications team will address these internal concerns before a project begins and create a target list of journals for the manuscript upfront. Once the manuscript is completed, these factors can be revisited, and the journal targets are adjusted as appropriate.

Audience: Who Should Read the Manuscript?
Answering “Who should read this?” allows the publications team to narrow the pool of potential journals. In some ways, this is the easiest question to answer, but it is also the most important. After all, it would not make sense to submit a manuscript for a cardiology product to a neurology journal. Clearly, the manuscript should be read by physicians with an interest in cardiology. Using journal circulation data (perhaps with the help of an external database), the publications team can highlight journals with distributions to cardiologists. Identifying the therapeutic area of a product does not mean the target audience is identified, however.

The next question publication teams must address is how specialized of an audience to target. Obviously, a cardiologist might have an interest in data on a cardiology drug, but also primary care physicians who can deal with heart disease with their patients. In other words, teams must decide whether the manuscript’s topic would appeal to all physicians, physicians in a single therapeutic area, or specialists within a therapeutic area.

Teams should also lean on the authors for their opinion. Authors have been asked to develop manuscripts for a reason — they are experts in the field. They may sit on editorial review boards for journals within their specialty area or be a peer reviewer at another journal. As such, they will certainly have an opinion on which journal gives the manuscript the best chance of being read by the target audience.

Usually the target audience discussion has been somewhat shaped by the scientific gap analysis and the educational needs assessment that led to the creation of the project. Those questions shape the manuscript’s topic. Just as important, however, is who asks the questions. This helps to identify the target audience. If most of the questions coming from meetings, congresses and MSL visits revolve around the pharmacokinetic profile of the product, then the manuscript should be submitted to a pharmacology journal.

One executive cautions that just because a journal is more specialized, that does not mean it is easier to get published. While the medical publications team may have found the journal with the perfect readership to reach the target audience, that specialty journal may be difficult to get into. For this reason, teams must evaluate the next factor, strength of data, to calculate the probability of acceptance into their first-choice journal.