Up Close With Blane Walter, ceo, inVentiv Health

By Jon Brulloths

R. Blane Walter
Chief Executive Officer, inVentiv Health
Mr. Walter was named Chief Executive Officer of inVentiv Health in May 2008, and is responsible for providing the
company’s strategic vision, overseeing the four major operating divisions, and developing integrated solutions to meet client needs. Mr. Walter's previous positions at the company included serving as President of inVentiv Health and as President and CEO of the inVentiv Communications division.

About inVentiv Health
inVentiv Health is a leading provider of commercialization services to the global pharmaceutical and life sciences industries, including all top 20 global pharmaceutical companies. inVentiv’s services are organized into four key business divisions: inVentiv Clinical, inVentiv Communications, inVentiv Commercial, and inVentiv Patient Outcomes.

PM360: What are the key drivers of inVentiv Health’s growth?
Blane Walter: Our clients are looking for ways to lower costs, increase flexibility, and to change their business models. They are
facing extraordinary challenges with getting products into market. Our role is developing solutions to help them meet these challenges, which in turn is driving a lot of our growth.

What is inVentiv’s role in this process?
We are helping our clients to identify capabilities that they previously owned internally and demonstrating that we can perform those functions on an outsourced basis with the same level of quality but at a much lower cost, and with greater flexibility. Because clients are recognizing the value of outsourcing, we’re benefitting with strong growth in the clinical, commercial, communications, and patient outcomes divisions of our business.

How do you see these drivers changing in 2009?
We foresee a continuation of 2008’s trends. We think that, as the industry undergoes more pressure, those trends (a further increased need for more flexible outsourcing capabilities, as well as the ability to integrate around our customer) will remain prevalent and the solutions our clients need will represent a significant growth opportunity for inVentiv this year.

How is your ability to achieve inVentiv’s vision impacted by the current world economic difficulties?
Our vision is to be the insights driven global healthcare leader that offers dynamic solutions to deliver customer and patient success. That vision was relevant a year ago and will become even more relevant going forward as we work with our clients to face the current challenges in the marketplace.

What is your strategy in the face of these world economic difficulties?
We’re focusing much of our time and energy to execute flawlessly for our customers. We maintain leadership positions in each of the core service areas that we offer, yet we also are focused on integrating our core services to develop innovative solutions that can have a more powerful outcome for both our clients as well as their patients. We think there’s an opportunity to help our clients achieve their goals in more creative and relevant ways to their business.

Can you go into further detail about how you are integrating inVentiv's services?
For example, in our Communications division, customers are asking us to pull together a lot of different services such as advertising, PR and interactive to create demand for the products in the marketplace around a singular message. By integrating these services, we can deliver a more focused campaign, while also enabling our clients to spend their marketing budget more efficiently.

In the Patient Outcomes area, we’re helping patients stay on therapy longer with a whole host of tools that include education, relationship marketing, patient assistance and prescription reminders. Our clients recognize that it’s not just important to acquire new patients, but also to keep them on therapy—and these integrated adherence programs are helping to drive positive change in their behavior.

What kind of results are you achieving so far?
In 2008, we’ve more than doubled the number of integrated opportunities that we won in 2007.

What kind of opportunities did the non-U.S. markets offer to your core divisions?
We recognized almost a decade ago the importance of being able to provide our services on a global basis to our clients. Pharma has seen much of their growth is coming from outside of the U.S. So we’ve been increasingly scaling up our global advertising and PR networks to make sure we can offer clients great connectivity and focus. The clinical part of our business has been growing globally as well, as clients look for ways to identify additional patients for clinical trials and work to reduce their R&D costs.

What other areas has inVentiv targeted as growth opportunities?
Our Patient Outcomes and Clinical divisions will represent two of our fastest growing segments. These are becoming increasingly important areas to our customers as their patients take a more active role in their own health management.

What is Patient Outcomes doing to address clients’ needs?
We’re focused on identifying the barriers to patient success. We’re designing new tools and programs, and providing services to help minimize those barriers. One example in that segment is a business called Adheris, which has a network of U.S. retail pharmacies representing about 55 percent of the market. We work with those pharmacies and our pharmaceutical partners to deliver patient-specific communications to their homes on an opt-out basis. These programs allow our clients to educate consumers after they’ve received a prescription about the disease for which they’re being treated, and the importance of staying on therapy. Those programs have been very successful.

How does the Patient Outcomes focus relate to that of the Clinical group?
On the clinical side, our clients’ primary objective is to make sure that their clinical trials produce the right kind of information that can be both helpful to doctors, and to their patients, to understand the efficacy and safety of the products. Through our Clinical division, we’re able to design effective trials, conduct them with great rigor and integrity, and then maximize the understanding of the pharmaceutical compound and communicate that to the regulatory body. Increasingly we’re seeing a lot of our pharma clients recognizing the importance of linking their patient outcomes strategies with their clinical development strategies, or developing them in parallel.

What is the Sales segment outlook for the next year?
The strength of our Commercial division has always been our exceptional sales teams, and our related services such as training and recruiting. What we have done recently is to expand our focus into digital selling solutions, such as e-detailing and closed loop marketing, which can be valuable in supplementing the efforts of sales representatives, or to connect with healthcare providers in places where there's not a need for a full-time representative. Our Strategy & Analytics group is another very powerful tool within the Commercial division because it allows us to really understand marketing mix allocation, territory alignments, and marketplace response predictors.

What kinds of products stand at the fore of the coming trend of successful innovative speciality biotech/biopharmaceutical development and device manufacturing?
I think that half the pipeline right now is focused on speciality drugs, with specific focus on novel cancer-fighting agents. The other thing that we’re seeing, with the growing availability of biomarkers, is an increased coupling of diagnostic testing together with pharmaceutical products, and the ability to get to better patient identification and selection. That’s something new in our marketplace. Ultimately, it will help our customers, both physicians and patients, to better understand what products are going to be more successful for them.

Social media is a web-marketing channel of unknown efficacy, yet it receives a lot of attention. What is your perspective?
I liken it back to when DTC was introduced into the marketplace—it’s both a challenge and an opportunity. On one hand, it’s a new way to connect with patients, healthcare providers and with the entire web community, which is exciting. But at the same time, it’s forcing our clients to give up some degree of control their brands. Marketers used to have a lot of control over their message; a brand was essentially whatever we told our customers it was. Now companies are realizing that we can’t necessarily dictate the message like they used to, and that the brand is really becoming what our customers say it is.

Since we’re on the subject of media, what do you like to read?
I am an avid periodical reader. I try to read two or three newspapers a day, including usually the local paper, and the Wall Street Journal. I read a lot of Business Week, Time, and I certainly read our industry publications. These are interesting times.

Yes they are!
So I think that it’s an opportunity for the first movers to redefine themselves, and I try and read as much as I can to make sure I’m as informed as I can be.