Stakeholder Deep Dive: Is There More Than A Doctor In The House?

A recent Snowfish post discussed the virtues of stakeholder engagement and the advantages afforded to companies who invest in mapping their own stakeholder landscapes. While we touched upon the endless number of stakeholder categories, the nuances within them was way more than a single article could handle. We will be publishing a series of posts which will take a deeper dive inside these categories to understand the individual entities which make up the fabric of a strong network.

The first broad group is the providers. They generally include the places that people go to get care along with the individuals that work within these organizations. They deliver care for a particular condition and are often instrumental in providing or referring for a particular therapy. They may conduct research related to the disease or therapy. They may treat patients fitting a particular profile. In fact providers were THE original “key opinion leaders (KOLs)” and “centers of excellence (CoEs) and mainly limited to physicians, researchers, and research institutions. Everyone else was considered an “influencer” of the physician or only tangential to the elite institutions.

Non-physicians stakeholders are no longer “influencers” only

Indeed those “influencers” have been realized to be way more critical than originally thought and are important facets of the provider stakeholder category. This multifaceted group has grown to include nurse practitioners, nurses, disease state educators, disease navigators, pharmacists, and even administrators, medical directors, quality improvement/assurance, and ethics professionals. Taking it down to more granular level, the majority of these groups of professionals may be divided into general versus specialist.

Clinical settings are as diverse as the clinicians that work in them.

Depending upon the therapy and target population, clinical settings may be quite diverse. Outpatient clinics, group practices, and pharmacies join conventional hospitals and research centers on the list of potential stakeholders. Also of consideration are nursing homes, assisted living facilities, rehabilitation centers, and mobile health teams. These may be general or specialty focused, urban or rural, private or public, standard or innovative care model.

Identifying the right provider stakeholders

In the vast universe of providers there is only a subset that would be considered true stakeholders for a given disease. Thorough research of the stakeholder category and specific target groups coupled with the objectives for the therapy lend itself to developing the profile of the individuals and organizations to include. This is followed by mapping of the providers using critical inputs which should include factors related to expertise, and focus in the particular disease state.

Objective measures such as disease state specific clinical articles, trials, treatment staff, guidelines, affiliations, membership, etc. should be incorporated. In addition, subjective measures such as hospital survey rankings, KOLs, Medicare rankings, press releases, should also be used. The net result is a very select list of providers for engagement.

Given how care has evolved, it is clear that provider stakeholders are no longer limited to physicians and hospitals. Many other professionals and organizations must be engaged. The complexities of the provider landscape can only be addressed through a systematic mapping and targeting of the most important stakeholders and entities within them.

Snowfish has pioneered this unique approach of building custom stakeholder landscapes designed to meet the needs of the particular product and disease state area. From individuals to policies, entities are assessed across multiple groups allowing companies are able to plan their pre-launch and launch activities on a very detailed level. To learn more, please feel free to contact us at snowfish.net.