Survey of Patient Groups Reveals Some Improvements in Pharma's Reputation

Today, the organization PatientView released the 7th edition of its Corporate Reputation of Pharma report. The report is based on the findings of a survey conducted from November 2017 to February 2018 that explored the views of 1330 patient groups worldwide on the reputation of the pharmaceutical industry.

The respondents, from 95 countries and with interests in 73 specialties, discussed the performance of top pharmaceutical companies across key factors that influence corporate reputation. The factors evaluated in the report included effective patient-centered strategies, providing high-quality patient information, ensuring safety, supplying useful and high-quality products, being transparent about pricing, sharing results of clinical trials, disclosing funding, acting with integrity, and engaging patients, among others.

The report found that 43% of patient groups that responded to the survey thought the pharmaceutical industry had an “excellent” or “good” corporate reputation in 2017, compared with 38% the previous year.

The groups also rated pharma as having improved its performance during 2016 in 3 areas:

• Patient centeredness: 35% of groups believe that the industry was “excellent” or “good” at putting patients first compared with 26% in 2016.
• Integrity: 31% described the industry as having “excellent” or “good” integrity compared with 28% in 2016.
• Providing services: 27% found the industry to be “excellent” or “good” at providing services beyond medication itself compared with 20% in 2016.

However, patients’ view of pharma was more negative in some other key respects. For example, 48% of patient groups surveyed in 2017 believed pharma was “excellent” or “good” at being innovative, which was down from 59% in 2016, and 57% of patient groups saw pharma as “excellent” or “good” at producing high-quality products, which was down from 64% in 2016. Notably, the most recent 2017 data show the lowest-reported percentage of groups who believed in pharma’s ability to manufacture high-quality products since 2011.

The 46 pharmaceutical companies that were evaluated included biosimilar developers Amgen, Boehringer Ingelheim, Gedeon Richter, Merck, Novartis, Pfizer, and Teva, among others.