India is the diabetes capital of the world. It is estimated that 50 million Indians suffer from it. Look at it differently — diabetics make a sizeable market. Sanofi-Aventis, which sells insulin and anti-diabetes medicine worth more than Rs 200 crore in a tear, has flagged off two new initiatives to talk to patients more closely, rather than bank on doctors as the only medium.
Its counselling teams and numerous doctors’ camps across the country since 2003 helped it act on some insights in communicating with patients. It realised that patients were more receptive to advice from others like them, rather than doctors all the time. As a result, it has come up with a programme called ‘I am a Champ’ where it has invited doctors from across the country to nominate patients who have done well with diabetes and seen the benefits of medication. Once the list of 8,000 patients gets consolidated, the jury will select 42 people who will speak to other patients across the country. Different months would carry different themes such as diet and exercise.
“It is especially relevant for certain types of patients who neither seek information to improve their situation nor follow the right advice,” says Sanofi-Aventis Director (commercial) Susheel Umesh. The patient types identified by Sanofi are ‘sahi’ who is the ideal patient, open to suggestions and pro-active in tackling the ailment; ‘Pareshan’ who cribs about his condition to others without doing anything himself; ‘Abhi’ who wants instant cure through medicine and loses interest beyond that; ‘Mrs Chalta-hai’, the woman of the house who takes it in her stride but does precious little to keep diabetes in check; and the ‘Ikia’, which spelled out is ‘I know it all’, a patient who tinkers with medicine dosage and other treatment according to his will. People also resort to home remedies, turning a blind eye to the possible need for prescribed medicines.
Sanofi already runs a programme called Saath Saath which sends out 60 counselling teams daily to consult with patients recently diagnosed with the condition, backed by call centres to field queries. The consultations cover the patient’s diet, his or her family’s attitude towards lifestyle and even managing care when travelling. The teams have been trained to be sensitive to the different predispositions.
The other initiative the diabetes team has undertaken is to bridge the gap between the diagnosed and the untreated. According to estimates, only about 25 per cent diabetics are treated for the disease. “We realise that the 800-1,000 diabetes specialists and 5,000 consulting physicians in India cannot diagnose and treat the country’s population with diabetes. General physicians have to be able to identify it first,” says Umesh. Sanofi thus works with 1,000 general practitioners in eight states to gather data for a study that can help doctors detect diabetes probability in a patient. The doctors working on the project will check the first 10 patients who walk into their clinics for hypertension, hip-waist ratio, blood sugar, lipids and schedule an ECG to rule out diabetes, irrespective of the ailment the patients come in with. Sanofi would foot the bill and analyse the data. It is expected to release the study by year-end.
For the diabetes division, the 245 towns clubbed as Tier I (population of over 100,000) will remain the focus because of the lifestyle changes there. “The problems in rural India are different and addressed by our programme called Prayas. In metros, 18 to 20 per cent of the population is diabetic, while in the villages it is just 3 per cent.”