Advancing Patient Support Services in the Biopharma Manufacturing Industry
Patient-centric PSPs can help improve adherence and patient outcomes by enhancing a drug’s benefits with information and engagement. But to deliver on their promise, they need the proper digital infrastructure.
Pre- and post-launch PV is a legal requirement for biopharma, and it requires effective data collection, processing, and reporting of AEs to ensure optimal benefit-risk management of medicines.
Connected Patient Care
Patient support programs (PSPs) such as those by Pharmacord are becoming increasingly important with the growing focus on outcome-based reimbursement. They can improve equitable access and provide early safety signals, promoting drug efficacy and supporting adherence. Increasingly, patients want to engage with their medicines proactively.
To meet this need, connected care must be personalized and holistic. It must also be interoperable, ensuring that PSPs communicate information back and forth and maintain consistent views of the patient.
To meet these demands, pharma operations leaders must shift their emphasis from cost savings to continuous improvement and readiness for growth. This will require immense mobilization and thoughtful prioritization. However, the rewards could be significant, including more excellent value creation through revenue expansion.
Personalized Patient Experience
With patient outcomes increasingly taking center stage, personalization has become a must-have. The shift to value-based care requires that healthcare providers understand and optimize the other factors that influence a patient’s health, including social determinants of health, in addition to traditional medical interventions.
Personalized outreach and engagement are vital to supporting the tenets of 4P medicine by consistently communicating with patients to educate, empower, involve, and remind them. This approach can improve medication adherence and disease progression tracking by emphasizing supported self-management. Fortunately, rapid transformations in data analytics and automation enable biopharma to leverage these tools to personalize non-clinical touchpoints of the patient journey.
For example, mapping the communications processes used for patient outreach can help identify opportunities to prioritize digital channels and selectively deploy high-touch human phone calls for those who need to be more responsive to email, text, or portal messages. This can result in a more tailored, 1:1 patient experience without adding to the PSP’s operational workload.
Integrated Patient Engagement
Integrated patient engagement is crucial for biopharma companies. The right technology should be able to track and measure patient and HCP data that can help a business better serve patients, increase customer satisfaction, and ultimately boost revenue. One of the most critical aspects of effective patient engagement involves making healthcare accessible to all patients.
Providing reliable estimates for out-of-pocket costs and decreasing lag times in claims processing is critical to building patient trust. Many studies have shown that patients who are “activated”–that is, those who see themselves as managers of their health and care–have better outcomes at lower costs than those who are less activated.
This has led some to advocate for strategies to achieve the triple aim of better health outcomes, better patient care, and lower costs. These include patient activation and interventions that support positive behavior, such as choice architecture (a process in which decisions are structured to nudge patients toward specific options).
Data-Driven Decision Making
When pharma companies invest in a data-driven approach, they can uncover important information that may have escaped notice. This information can then inform judgments, help determine the right action, and guide overall strategy. Digitalization offers many opportunities to improve patient support services through increased workflow efficiencies and enhanced insights.
However, to succeed, biopharma must build the proper infrastructure to enable AI and other digital solutions to function securely and seamlessly across an integrated data network. This includes establishing governance and security policies, developing data literacy, ensuring the integrity of collected data, and adopting a single source of truth.
Biopharma’s investment in a data-driven approach can lead to more meaningful engagement with patients and HCPs and better outcomes. To realize these benefits, the industry must be willing to take risks and invest in innovative technology to ensure a successful future.
