Moving from making decisions FOR patients to making decisions WITH patients

PFMD member Anton (Tony) Hoos, Head of Medical for Amgen Europe discusses how developments in patient engagement are transforming drug development and access to medicines for patients in a video filmed at the DIA 2016 conference:

“Throughout the years I have worked in the pharmaceutical industry we have made decisions for patients.  We are now starting to make decisions with patients. I see stakeholders moving towards this goal – to give patients better access to the medicines they have told us they need to bring them back good health or to reduce suffering.
In the past we would come to patients when we had a specific question or need. What I see emerging is a change from the question “Why do I talk to patients” to “How do I talk to patients”.
We have moved from a place of point-to-point involvement to one of continuous involvement which means we start early in drug development, continue throughout development and ultimately throughout the whole drug development lifecycle.
I think what we have seen so far is many individual initiatives that have not talked to each other and that sometimes have duplicated their work. With PFMD our ultimate goal is to bring access to patients in a much more efficient way by bringing all the different stakeholders together in a collaborative platform as equally-valued partners.
Before we can that patients are integral partners in medicines development, we need a clear picture of the engagement landscape – this is currently missing. Crucially, PFMD has launched an ambitious but achievable initiative to map and describe all the different initiatives across the globe. This will provide an informed starting point that we can learn from and augment to prevent duplication of effort and wasted resource. It will help stakeholders to work together to reach  a consensus about what the best tools are to achieve meaningful patient engagement. Our end goal is development of a  practical meta-framework for patient engagement that is applicable for all stakeholders and lead to better access to medicines for patients. That really excites me.”
Watch the video to find out more.
PFMD welcomes membership from institutions, organisations and enterprises that support a better future for patients. Join us and help shape the patient engagement landscape.