Currently, launch teams are great at measuring activity – how busy they are – but struggle to demonstrate how that activity relates to actual outcomes like patient impact. You might have heard these activity metrics referred to as ‘vanity metrics’. They’re easy to track so they get counted, and metrics such as MQLs generated and HCP attendance rates give teams a tangible sense of achievement, without ever connecting all that activity to what is meaningful to patients. To credibly connect launch activity to patient impact, you need an entirely new metric. That’s where the Target Population Output (TPO) methodology comes in.
What are TPOs?
Target Population Outputs were first proposed by Troels Sørensen and colleagues at Novartis, and published in collaboration with the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Health Systems Innovation Lab. TPOs were presented as “novel tools for disease modeling and business forecasting”, and are simply defined as “the % of individuals with a specific condition at a specific stage in a healthcare journey within a health system.”
You can think of a patient population as the total number of individuals with a specific condition. As patients move along the healthcare journey, that number diminishes at each discrete stage. Patients drop out of the healthcare journey at particular ‘leakage points’, often preventing them from reaching the desired outcomes. TPOs allow launch teams to identify these leakage points.
“TPOs measure the number of people with a condition at specific stages in the healthcare journey, and are used to assess the impact of strategic [public-private partnerships] at population level.”
How TPOs help pharma teams measure outcomes
By applying the TPO methodology, teams can identify the ‘barriers’ in a particular healthcare journey where the highest percentage of patients drop through the cracks. These are the leakage points we discussed a moment ago. If teams can build an evidence base that their launch activities help to close these leakage points and move more patients along the healthcare journey, then that’s demonstrating tangible patient impact. But the activities launch teams are involved in rarely impact TPOs directly. That’s the tricky part.
“Each TPO is specific to a population rather than a drug or treatment; it is selected to overcome a specific healthcare journey barrier.”
Connecting TPOs to launch activities
Common launch activities such as medical education and sales force training are rarely tied to moving patients along their healthcare journeys, and teams find themselves hard-pressed to prove impact. To achieve “proof” – or as close as one can get – there’s an intermediate stage where the influence of those activities can be witnessed directly. ‘Leading indicators’ like HCP intent and sentiment are the canary in the coal mine for launch teams, indicating that something your team did had a real impact and is about to effect change.
While the launch activities themselves can’t directly influence TPOs, stakeholders – HCPs, key opinion leaders, etc. – can. If launch teams can link their activities to shifts in stakeholder intent and sentiment, and show that those shifts are in turn influencing TPOs, then they can build the chain of evidence from activity to outcome. The chain that links launch activity to patient outcome: the holy grail for pharma teams. For this reason, stakeholder metrics are the missing piece of the puzzle that allows launch teams to connect activity metrics with TPOs.
Putting it all together
“TPOs are cross-functional targets and so medical and commercial need to collaborate on aligned tactics.”
Understanding the connection between the three measurement levels, activity metrics, stakeholder metrics, and outcome metrics (TPOs), is simple enough, but many pharma teams stop there. That’s because the leading indicators that demonstrate a shift in stakeholder behavior are often siloed within medical affairs, while other functions have different ‘sources of truth’. Until now, pharma organizations haven’t had access to a practical, straightforward, and compliant way to share insights between medical affairs, commercial, and market access functions.
Within3 Launch Intelligence™ acts as the single source of truth across all functions, compliantly surfacing insights at every stage and giving teams a clear line of sight into the metrics that most directly influence patient impact.
That’s a real change in what launch teams can see. To find out more, talk to our team today.
