Fresh off taking the top spot in an annual survey of how patient groups around the world view major drugmakers, ViiV Healthcare has clinched the No. 1 slot in a U.S.-specific version of the survey, too.
In contrast to the larger survey, where ViiV's first-place finish was a repeat of the previous year’s results, this year marks the company's triumphant return to the top of the U.S. patient groups’ ranking after a couple of years away.
The new report (PDF) from PatientView summarizes the results of a survey of 372 patient groups in the U.S. The groups represent more than 13 million patients and dozens of therapeutic areas, including sizable numbers in cancer, rare disease and neurological conditions.
The survey took place between December 2024 and March of this year, with the groups rating pharmas’ reputations in 2024.
Given a list of 40 drugmakers, the respondents rated ViiV most highly in terms of corporate reputation, followed by Servier—last year’s No. 1—and Amgen. ViiV also took the top spot when the patient groups were asked to rank only those companies with which they’d directly worked, followed again by Servier and Amgen.
When the pool of companies was reduced only to Big Pharmas, Amgen topped the reputation ranking, with Roche and Pfizer in second and third places, respectively.
ViiV has long left a good impression on U.S. patient groups. It topped the list in 2020 and 2021, and, after disappearing from the top three in 2022, returned to take second place in last year’s survey, representing the groups’ opinions of pharmas in 2023.
In the latest survey, the respondents were also asked about their overall perceptions of the pharma industry. Just over 60% rated the industry's reputation as “good” or “excellent”—marking an improvement over both the 57% of U.S. patient groups that said so last year and the 56% of groups that agreed in this year’s global survey.
That rating placed pharma behind biotech—where 74% of respondents gave a “good” or “excellent” reputation score—but ahead of all other areas of healthcare included in the survey such as medtech companies, generic drug makers, retail pharmacists and more.
Still, when looking at how well drugmakers perform certain activities or qualities, the patient groups’ ratings were shown to have dropped almost completely across the board since 2020. The biggest decreases came in integrity, ensuring patient safety and patient-centricity, with drops of 15, 14 and 10 percentage points, respectively, between 2020 and 2024.
The only improvement came in pricing transparency, which was up by one percentage point over the period, while funding transparency has stayed steady at a 32% positive rating since 2020.
The industry’s best-rated quality was its offer of products that benefit patients, with 77% of patient groups calling its performance in that area “good” or “excellent.” Also crossing the 50% positive threshold were ensuring patient safety (64%), innovation (63%), patient group relations (60%), information (57%) and patient-centricity (50%), while integrity dipped just below, earning “good” or “excellent” ratings from 49% of the groups surveyed.