Background: A key task for the pharmaceutical industry is to understand the compliance implications of engaging with a patient advocacy group (PAG). This presents challenges for the industry to negotiate the ethical and reputational issues that can arise when working with a PAG.
Objective: To gain the views of pharmaceutical industry executives on future compliance challenges when working with PAGs.
Study design: We conducted two surveys among two sets of industry executives: one group focussed on market access roles and the other focussed on non-market access roles.
Results: Transparency was identified as the biggest challenge, followed by project rationale and then by project ownership.
Conclusion: We explore how this can be overcome and make recommendations on how best to work compliantly with PAGs.
Keywords: compliance; ethics; patient advisory group; pharmaceutical industry; reputation; transparency.