What You Measure Shapes Your Future: The Strategic Power of Metrics in Commercial Healthcare
TI
What You Measure Shapes Your Future: The Strategic Power of Metrics in Commercial Healthcare
In the world of commercial healthcare, metrics are more than just numbers on a dashboard—they are strategic signals that direct focus, allocate resources, and influence behaviour. Whether you're tracking sales performance, patient engagement, or market access milestones, the metrics you choose to measure will inevitably shape your organisation's priorities and define its long-term trajectory.
This isn’t just about short-term results; it’s about creating alignment between what you measure today and the outcomes you want to achieve tomorrow. By understanding the behavioural science behind metrics and avoiding common pitfalls like vanity metrics or misaligned KPIs, healthcare leaders can unlock the true power of measurement.
The Psychology of Metrics: Why Measurement Drives Behaviour
The Hawthorne Effect: Observation Changes Behaviour
The Hawthorne Effect demonstrates that people change their behaviour simply because they know they’re being observed. In commercial healthcare, this plays out when teams adjust their actions based on what is being tracked. For example:
- If you track the number of healthcare professional (HCP) visits, sales teams may focus on quantity over quality, leading to superficial interactions.
- If you instead measure time spent discussing clinical evidence, representatives are incentivised to prioritise meaningful engagements that build trust and drive prescribing confidence.
The lesson? What you measure creates implicit incentives—whether intentional or not.
Cognitive Biases and Metric Fixation
Metrics also have the power to shape decision-making—sometimes in unintended ways. Two common cognitive biases often come into play:
- Availability Bias: Teams gravitate towards easily measurable outcomes (e.g., website traffic) while ignoring harder-to-quantify but critical factors like patient adherence or HCP satisfaction.
- Anchoring Bias: Once a baseline metric is set (e.g., “10% market share”), it becomes a default goal—even if it no longer aligns with broader strategic priorities.
Over time, this can create metric fixation, where organisations focus narrowly on improving specific numbers while losing sight of bigger-picture goals like patient outcomes or equitable access to care.
Avoiding the Peril of Vanity Metrics
Vanity metrics—those that look impressive but offer little actionable insight—are a common trap in commercial healthcare. Examples include:
- Social Media Metrics: Tracking follower counts without considering how these audiences convert into meaningful engagement with your brand.
- HCP Reach: Measuring the number of HCPs contacted without assessing the depth of those interactions or their impact on prescribing behaviour. It’s the classic quantity over quality.
Instead, leaders should focus on impactful metrics that directly align with strategic goals. For example:
- Replace “number of HCP visits” with “percentage of HCPs who change prescribing habits after engagement.”
- Swap “website traffic” for “time spent interacting with educational content.”
By shifting from surface-level indicators to meaningful measures, organisations can ensure their efforts drive real-world results.
Leadership’s Role in Metric Stewardship
As a leader in commercial healthcare, your role isn’t just to track metrics—it’s to curate them carefully and ensure they align with your organisation’s vision and values. This requires balancing four key dimensions:
- Relevance: Are your metrics aligned with long-term strategic goals?
- Balance: Do you track both leading indicators (predictive measures) and lagging indicators (outcomes)?
Ethics: Could your metrics incentivise harmful shortcuts (e.g., aggressive sales targets leading to non-compliant practices)? - Adaptability: How often do you review and refine your metrics to reflect market changes?
For example, a pharmaceutical company might pair a leading indicator like “HCP engagement scores” with a lagging indicator such as “adherence rates among patients prescribed the therapy.” This ensures alignment between short-term activities and long-term patient outcomes.
Case Studies: Metrics Driving Real-World Impact
Case Study 1: NSW Health's Osteoarthritis Care Program
NSW Health implemented a value-based healthcare approach for their osteoarthritis chronic care program by developing new metrics to measure patient outcomes and experiences, as well as tracking clinical variations across the system.
Key positive outcomes:
- 4% of hip patients were removed from the surgical waitlist
- 11% of knee patients were removed from the surgical waitlist
These results demonstrate how changing metrics led to better health outcomes and more efficient use of healthcare resources.
Case Study 2: Impact of Field Specialists on Patient Outcomes
Pharmaceutical companies are introducing field specialists to improve patient care and health outcomes. These specialised sales representatives focus on:
- Helping patients access support programs
- Ensuring patients start prescribed therapies
- Boosting prescription fulfilment rates
Key Challenge: The FDA estimates that 20–30% of new prescriptions are never filled. Field specialists aim to reduce this gap.
Approach:
- Setting clear prescription targets
- Measuring field specialists' impact on these targets
- Considering factors like market access, formulary status, and socio-economic variables
Companies are now using advanced analytics and AI models to assess how field activities influence fulfilment rates. This case study shows how shifting focus from traditional sales metrics to patient outcomes can align commercial goals with improved healthcare delivery.
Case Study 3: Community Family Practice's Balanced Metrics Approach
A federally qualified community health centre implemented a comprehensive approach to metrics by gathering data from multiple sources including preventive service delivery, chronic disease management, patient experience, and electronic health record use.
Key aspects and outcomes:
- Quarterly meetings with all practice sites, patient representatives, and community partners to review and reflect on metrics
- Use of appreciative group exercises to imagine and plan for more effective service delivery
- Investment in new staffing to address social, behavioural, and environmental determinants of health based on metric insights
The Path Forward: Building a Living Measurement Strategy
Metrics should never be static—they must evolve alongside your organisation’s goals and market dynamics. Here’s how commercial healthcare leaders can create a dynamic measurement strategy:
- Audit Your Current Metrics Identify vanity metrics that don’t drive meaningful action. Ensure all KPIs align with long-term objectives like patient outcomes or equitable access.
- Balance Leading and Lagging Indicators Leading Indicators: Predictive measures like “HCP engagement scores” or “time-to-market timelines.” Lagging Indicators: Outcome-based measures like “adherence rates” or “patient-reported satisfaction.”
- Leverage Technology for Real-Time Insights Use AI-driven tools like Fred IT’s MedView platform to track prescription patterns across urban and rural areas in Australia and New Zealand. Implement dashboards that integrate data from multiple sources (e.g., CRM systems, digital platforms) for a holistic view.
Embed Ethical Safeguards Regularly review KPIs to ensure they don’t incentivise unethical behaviour (e.g., aggressive sales tactics). Incorporate equity-focused metrics such as tracking access among rural or Indigenous populations in ANZ. - Foster Cross-Functional Collaboration Engage teams across sales, marketing, medical affairs, and compliance to co-create KPIs that reflect shared goals.
In commercial healthcare, what you measure today defines where your organisation will excel tomorrow. Metrics are not just tools for tracking performance—they are powerful drivers of behaviour, strategy, and culture.
By understanding the behavioural science behind measurement, avoiding vanity metrics, and aligning KPIs with long-term goals, leaders can ensure their organisations remain focused on what truly matters: improving patient outcomes, building trust with HCPs, and driving sustainable growth.
Measure wisely—because every metric is a decision about your future focus.
As my first venture into longer form article writing on LinkedIn, I'd love to get your feedback on this first one. Also, any current medical market research or commercial healthcare behaviour-change challenges?
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