What Role Can Pharma Play in Achieving Health Equity for All?

In this Pharmaceutical Executive video interview, Angela Tenuta, President, Full Service Agencies, at EVERSANA INTOUCH, explores the findings of their study What Matters Most: The Trends That Will Shape Pharma Marketing In 2025. Tenuta emphasizes the importance of embracing AI as an innovation and highlights specific examples of how AI is being used to improve efficiency and effectiveness in marketing campaigns. The discussion also discusses the ethical considerations associated with AI, particularly regarding patient privacy and data security. The conversation also touches on the growing importance of direct-to-patient (DTP) models and the challenges and opportunities associated with globalization in healthcare, emphasizing the need for cultural sensitivity and adaptability in global marketing campaigns to effectively reach diverse audiences.

Can you provide some specific examples of how pharmaceutical companies are working to address equitable access to medicines in low- and middle-income countries?

Globalization of health care is something we've truly seen evolve quickly over the past couple years, healthcare systems worldwide are facing numerous challenges, rising expenses, etc., and I do think COVID taught us a lot about how quickly we could pump out solutions to the scale that we were able to do their traditional care pathways really suffer from fragmentation inefficiencies, etc. So, it's thinking of these out of the box ways that's really starting to get progress made. And I'll give you two examples, kind of my favorite two examples right now.

The first is Gilead purpose program. It's really comprehensive HIV prevention trial. They're coming out with a prep medication, and they're doing their clinical trials worldwide, advancing access to the developing world. I think a lot of inequities started with trials. Started with trials being among a very targeted small group of population, so watching that from the sidelines, seeing how they're implementing licensing and generic manufacturers and really trying to figure out a lot of the streamlining of delivery at the same time as they're running the trial. That's one we should all be keeping an eye out.

One sure a little bit to our own heart here at Arizona InTouch, we've partnered for many years with The Chrysalis Initiative, which is a foundation aiming to improve breast cancer outcomes for black women in the US, because we can talk about third world countries and Second World Countries in access, but there's still an access problem even within our own country. And Chrysalis was founded by a very empowered young mom Jamil Rivers with breast cancer, who decided that she was not getting the same care as white women in the same board were getting. So, she set out to change it really relentlessly, kind of a she started with an ambassador app program where black women with breast cancer could connect to people who had experienced breast cancer, could connect to the inexperienced and tell them some of the things they should be looking for and the types of medications they should be on. Don't just take what your doctor gave ask if there's questions for things better than your basic chemo, for example, and she's now elevated that to coming into hospitals and auditing, auditing their EMR to see what types of treatment paths they're giving to various types of racial groups, and surprising them that it is not as fair as they thought it was at the beginning.

So those types of things, from your grassroots to your huge, big pharma Gilead ways, I think all of us have to really take under consideration with everything we're doing.