Neurology-focused patient groups’ perception of the pharma industry’s corporate reputation remains on a downward slope.
PatientView’s latest report (PDF) found that just 52% of neurology patient groups surveyed said the industry’s reputation was “good” or “excellent,” down from 55% last year and from a peak of 61% the year before that.
The survey was conducted from late 2024 to early 2025 and comprised 365 patient groups, which collectively support more than 4.6 million patients with neurological conditions, with multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease and epilepsy among the most highly represented focuses.
The steady drop in the neurology groups’ perception of pharma’s reputation lines up with that seen among a larger swath of patient groups across indications: PatientView’s annual broader surveys of groups around the world—which included more than 2,500 organizations in the latest iteration—has seen their positive rating of the industry drop from 60% to 57% to 56% in the last three years’ reports.
Overall, neurology groups have largely marked improvements in the pharma industry’s activities in the space since 2020. PatientView compared the groups’ number of “good” and “excellent” ratings of 14 activities across that period and found increases in all but one: access to medicines, where the number of positive ratings has dropped from 32% to 29% since 2020.
The biggest improvements, meanwhile, were in the industry’s funding transparency, which has increased by 19 percentage points over the years, and in integrity, which jumped 15 percentage points to reach a 45% positive rating.
Despite the broad improvements, however, still only about a third of the activities in question boast majority positive ratings—where “good” and “excellent” scores make up more than half of the respondents’ ratings—from the neurology groups. The most overwhelmingly negative scores were given to the industry’s fair pricing policies and pricing transparency, with 12% and 19% positive ratings, respectively. Other low-scoring activities include engaging patients in R&D, access to medicines and clinical data transparency, all of which received fewer than 30% “good” or “excellent” labels.
In line with those findings, PatientView highlighted feedback from two patient groups—one in the U.S. and one in the U.K.—both of which cited pricing and access issues.
“Some patients have experienced shortages of their medication due to demand. Health insurers do not insure people with long-term conditions,” the U.K. group wrote in part, while the stateside organization noted, “High prices make equal access impossible. Specific discounts cannot help large segments of their patient populations, and discounts not deep enough for the people that qualify for discounted costs.”
As for which pharmas the surveyed neurology groups perceive as doing a good job in the space, Roche once again swept all four versions of the ranking: among the companies that patient groups either are familiar with or have worked with, and among both an overall list of 29 pharmas and a smaller, Big Pharma-centric list.
Joining Roche near the top of the rankings of the overall company list were Lundbeck, UCB and PTC Therapeutics, while Novartis, AbbVie and AstraZeneca ranked highly among Big Pharmas that groups either have worked with or know of.