Healthcare Articles

What is corporate affairs?

Corporate Affairs is a growth area in the healthcare sector. Increasingly companies are hiring corporate affairs managers to set up departments, or restructuring their traditional functions to include defined Corporate Affairs responsibilities. There is an increased understanding of the importance of corporate affairs within the healthcare industry, and an increased focus by senior management to allocating resources to this area.

Corporate Affairs is essentially about Communication.

Communication at all levels and about all relevant issues is fundamental to a company's competitive advantage. There are many changes in the emerging healthcare market and companies need to be aware of them. Through having active dialogue with the key groups that affect the business, companies are able to influence outcomes in their favor. This is achieved through having an in-depth understanding of the group's needs and perspectives and effectively managing the relationship through communication.

An important function for the corporate affairs professional is to read the signs of the times correctly and think in terms of change. In so doing they study future trends which affect the interests of the company and advise how to make choices in the present which will create future benefits for the company.

The responsibilities of corporate affairs professionals include researching communication needs, addressing attitudes, determining shifts in attitudes, recommending policies and initiatives and then measuring the effectiveness of these initiatives. Through monitoring the issues and tracking the changes they are in a position to report on potential or real change and provide suggestions on how to deal with the change.

To be successful in corporate affairs, individuals need certain skills. Importantly, they need superior communication skills, both written and oral. They will use these communication skills to maneuver through delicate situations, to inform stakeholders both internally and externally and to ensure that their messages are clearly understood. Corporate affairs professionals also need to be able to form and sustain cross-functional informal networks. Much of their work needs to be done without formal authority and they need to be able to move quickly through an organisation from discussions with the Director of Manufacturing, the Medical Information Manager, Sales Managers and Representatives and obtain the support of these people for an agreed course of communication. To do this they need superior influencing skills and the ability to make quality decisions quickly.

Information Technology is playing an increasingly important function in corporate affairs. The value of information is rapidly changing and a company's strategic advantage will be its ability to obtain high quality data from the marketplace, make sense out of it and then turn it around for commercial advantage. As such, there will be a closer alignment of the medical information function with corporate affairs; ie delivering the right information to the right people as knowledge. Corporate Affairs will, therefore, be taking a leadership role in various E-health initiatives including the Internet, Intranets and Virtual Private Networks to make knowledge available to key stakeholders (patients, interested parties and business partners).

The backgrounds from where corporate affairs professionals might come include: medical information, advertising, medical writing, drug safety and pharmacovigilance, medical affairs, health outcomes, medical/marketing, sales, marketing and business development. These people have the relevant backgrounds to deal with such issues as product introductions and recalls, manufacturing and supply issues, clinical safety concerns, and a range of other business issues.

Corporate Affairs, therefore, manages communication with a range of audiences including: Community, Government, Media, Employees and Investors. Their role may include managing crises, introducing new products, negotiating prices, managing media placement, writing the company newsletter and updating the investment community on the R&D pipeline.

As part of their responsibilities, corporate affairs professionals in the pharmaceutical sector have a close alignment with the health outcomes function.

One project that Corporate Affairs may manage is the company's Advisory Groups comprising doctors, patients, and a range of healthcare professionals. The role of these advisory groups change depending on various business needs but would include such aspects as: identifying existing databases of resource consumption and costs; identifying cost-drivers as well as subgroups of the patient population with significant costs; looking at competitors; exploring paramedical treatment patterns eg physiotherapy, home nursing; defining patient success outcomes and identifying critical data gaps for survey/collection; preparing protocols and survey questionnaires to address these gaps; discussing where the product fits into the management of the patient's disease; reviewing the choice of comparators for clinical trials; suggesting any disease relevant health status questionnaires to incorporate into clinical trials so that good cost data is obtained in local populations to support later cost arguments; and discussing leading developments in the field. In this way the company is kept up to date with how the community perceives and uses their product and can address any issues proactively.

Another important function for the corporate affairs professional is to stay close to pricing issues that affect the company and to assist management in influencing outcomes.

As an example, within the healthcare arena, we will be seeing a move away from government funded PBS reimbursement to co-payment and consumer payment. With these emerging arrangements there will be a stronger need to provide economic data to the decision-makers (ie the patients and care-givers, and the insurance companies) in a way that they can understand the information and make quality decisions. Within this changing healthcare environment the corporate affairs function is to track the changes, understand the perspectives of the other groups, and have active dialogue with them in order to influence their actions in favour of the company.

Another change will be the information needs of the reimbursement authorities. The current system involves submitting health economic information and negotiating a one-off price for the product. However, in an environment of cost sensitivity to new products, government will be seeking additional information on the effectiveness of various treatments. For instance, if a patient has been taking an expensive product for a defined period and it is not working then why should society continue to subsidise this treatment. Resources would be better spent elsewhere. In the future, decisions will be made to stop patients receiving reimbursed products if they are not working. Companies will, therefore, need to be gathering real-time data from the marketplace regarding the effectiveness of their products in various consumer segments and then analyzing and communicating this information to key decision-makers if they wish to maintain the reimbursement status of their products. To do this effectively, corporate affairs professionals will be working at all levels - from patient support groups, GPs, specialists and government - to monitor the issues, report on attitudes, gather data, coordinate various studies, communicate the outcomes and ultimately ensure the commercial viability of the products.

These are just a few of the many functions that involve Corporate Affairs.

Corporate Affairs needs to constantly monitor the external environment and be aware of emerging issues. We have seen various initiatives such as the Practice Incentives Program, the Disease Management Program, Coordinated Care Trials and Therapeutic Group Premiums and will be seeing different initiatives in the future. Commercial success will involve getting close to the decision makers and their issues and then influencing the outcomes of these issues in a manner that is favourable to the company.

Corporate Affairs professionals focus on proactive and meaningful relations with the Community, Government, Media, Employees and Investors and any other groups that can potentially impact on their organization's ability to operate favorably. They manage issues to create competitive opportunities.

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By Dr Glenn Carter, Managing Director of Pharmaceutical Professionals, a Sydney professional services company.

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