"Pharma 3.0"? Let's try with "Pharma 2.1" first!

Economical experts, analytics and bureaucrats have a lot of time to speculate about the trends in economy and business models. Here is a nice example of such speculations: emerging of Pharma 3.0 business model:

… industry players concur that they are facing a number of pressure points — changing market realities such as pricing and regulatory pressures, thinning drug pipelines, efficacy issues, shifting demographics, globalization and more. Such macro changes have forced pharma companies to move away from their monolithic blockbuster business model, dubbed “Pharma 1.0”, to become more innovative, collaborative, diversified, global and value-driven, – the model we call “Pharma 2.0”.

Today, most pharmaceutical companies are in the midst of their transformation to 2.0. The strategic choices underlying this transformation have been built on the individual companies’ view of the changing business environment, their core competencies and their potential competitive advantages.

As the industry is in the midst of this Pharma 2.0 journey, new and sweeping trends have emerged that are again transforming the business environment. Changing incentives are reshaping the health care ecosystem with an emerging need to deliver a sustainable value proposition centered on health outcomes. This shift will require the industry to revisit its business model with a move towards Pharma 3.0 -- business models focused on health outcomes. Pharma 1.0 and Pharma 2.0 were focused on developing and marketing drugs; Pharma 3.0 is a reconfiguration of the model with a focus on health outcomes where the traditional product – a drug – is only one part of pharma’s value proposition.

Well, two very important issues are missing here:

1.       Basically NOBODY cares in outcome of treatment – only patients are interested in getting improvement of their health. Pharma business (which is in general monopolized by a dozen of giants called Big Pharma), as any other business, is out there to make profit – not to satisfy customers. Just read carefully in the open sources about the clinical trials scandals and registration of new medicinal products to understand the REAL state of things.

2.       Even more – we have a conflict of interests here: efficient treatment reduces the market and, consequently, the profits of the enterprises.  

Read also my suggestions about the subject here.

The idea of Pharma 3.0, as communism and other utopias, probably looks nice but absolutely unreal.  The authors should train with model Pharma 2.1 a little bit before launching the concept for Pharma 3.0.