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Biotechs and other pharma businesses face distinct challenges in managing complex relationships, vast data, and implementing targeted marketing campaigns, especially within the regulated pharmaceutical industry. Especially in the case of specialty medicines which accounted for nearly 93% of FDA approvals in 2023, getting and keeping patients on specialty treatments while increasing customer loyalty is far from straightforward.
It requires coordination across various stakeholders, including internal teams (sales, marketing, medical affairs, market access, patient services, field teams) and external partners like healthcare providers, specialty pharmacies, and payers. Effectively managing customer relationships and diverse customer data across a highly regulated pharma industry demands a powerful customer relationship management (CRM) solution.
In this article, we’ll compare CRM tools based on key factors like market focus, features (like marketing automation), ease of use, security, and scalability. Our goal is to help you choose the best CRM for life sciences to centralize your data, empower your teams, support the success of treatments, and enhance patient outcomes.
(Please note that we interchange the terms CRM for life sciences and CRM relating to pharma throughout this text. It’s also worth noting that we may refer to ‘customer’ relationships and data, but that includes both the traditional definition of healthcare providers, or HCPs, as well as patients.)
Every organization, from small biotechs launching their first product to large market specialty pharmaceutical companies, operate in a multifaceted and highly regulated environment. Success hinges on balancing stakeholder needs and patient care, pharmaceutical sales, data management, and strict regulatory compliance. Below, each of these elements is explored in more detail.
Businesses in the healthcare industry and life sciences industry must adhere to various regulations, including the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) . They’re expected to protect patient privacy and securely manage all data, preventing unauthorized breaches or unintentional PHI exposure, particularly because sensitive health information is at risk.
HIPAA (and SOC 2)-compliant CRMs, like Courier Health, enable consent capture, preferences management, single sign-on (SSO), robust user-based access controls, secure document storage, and intelligent PHI obfuscation to help companies stay secure and compliant while not compromising the overall treatment experience.
Courier Health also offers advanced features such as a user-friendly workflows builder, advanced predictive analytics, and seamless integration with existing pharma and life sciences industry systems to power the biopharma patient experience.
Life sciences companies handle large volumes of data from multiple sources, including electronic health records (EHRs), HUB and specialty pharmacy providers, specialty infusion providers (SIPs), and other healthcare providers and systems (to name just a few). Integrating these diverse data streams into a single system (your CRM) is necessary to streamline operations and obtain comprehensive insights into your patient experience, leading to better marketing and sales strategies.
Biopharma companies must have real-time visibility into the patient journey (i.e., where a patient stands at any point in time) if they want to drive engagement and provide meaningful patient support. (As we’ve said before, you can’t manage what you can’t measure.) This includes diverse customer (HCP) and consumer (patient) data and touchpoints, including relevant contact information, consent preferences, program status, documents, and more.
By understanding where patients are in their healthcare journey, companies can develop and execute personalized marketing, access, and adherence strategies that increase the likelihood of achieving the desired treatment outcome. A patient-focused CRM system like Courier Health enables biopharma commercial leaders to carry out personalized support and engagement campaigns and tailor messages across multiple channels from a single system.
Moreover, tracking patient interactions and outcomes within a single system offers a macro view, helping to identify what’s working and supporting data-driven decision-making.
To select the right CRM software for your business, look for features and functionality that will boost efficiency, enable security and regulatory compliance, and provide the visibility, control, and coordination to enhance the treatment experience. A purpose-built, patient-focused CRM like Courier Health allows companies to effectively manage patient and provider relationships and complex healthcare journeys while staying agile to adapt to business and market changes.
Below are three features that companies should seek in pharmaceutical CRM software to meet their business goals and improve patient outcomes.
In an ever-changing industry like life sciences, flexibility is key. This applies to both the ability of the solution to integrate within your larger technology stack and the ability of the solution to adapt to changing needs—whether that’s updated standard operating procedures (SOPs), territory assignments, or the addition of new therapies.
Unlike industry-agnostic CRMs that require extensive customization to fit the unique needs of biopharma field access and patient services, a purpose-built life sciences CRM is designed to handle patient data and orchestrate the patient journey. As opposed to general features and functionality that need considerable customization to meet your needs, the right solution is designed to easily configure according to your program/product needs to begin adding value on day one. (By configuring, we mean its internal capabilities and tools can be adapted to a company’s unique needs like adding or changing fields, dictating permissions, and building or modifying workflows, without time-consuming, expensive custom development.)
This is more important than ever today because innovative biopharma companies are investing in personalized patient experiences like never before. Rather than outsourcing critical patient-facing roles or thinking of the patient journey in linear terms (consisting of discrete statuses or “tasks”), they’re thinking holistically about how to engage stakeholders to drive better patient outcomes.
As outlined in our "3 Trends Raising the Bar for Patient Services" white paper, this outcome-oriented approach is only possible in a thoughtfully designed platform that understands the complexities of life sciences, patient data, and biopharma user roles and day-to-day needs. By prioritizing a configurable, patient-focused CRM for life sciences, organizations can avoid being bogged down by tech debt, manual workflows, and brittle, outdated pharmaceutical CRM software that is at odds with progress.
Advanced analytics and reporting capabilities help life sciences companies monitor patient journeys, team performance, and program outcomes in real-time. The best pharma CRM software has robust in-platform reporting that puts that connected data to work. This includes risk scoring and predictive analytics that can help identify at-risk patients, programs, and providers and surface “next best action” recommendations that make teams more efficient and effective.
In this sense, the right CRM acts more like an internal command center, enabling your access, support, and commercial analytics teams to become more strategic partners, optimizing programs to drive better results.
Top CRMs do more than just integrate with a company’s existing tools and systems; they become mission control for what’s happening across a program or product portfolio, accessible through a single login.
By consolidating multiple systems into one streamlined platform, CRMs like Courier Health eliminate inefficiencies and reduce the need for constant switching between tools (e.g., one for sales, one for reporting, one for HUB or SP portal actions, etc.). With built-in communication capabilities and an API for third-party integrations, Courier Health’s CRM delivers all the essential functionality biopharma companies need to be more efficient, strategic, and effective with patient and provider engagement and support.
The right CRM system can make all the difference for life sciences companies, giving them visibility and control over a large amount of data, as well as the ability to coordinate across numerous interrelated relationships. Beyond that, the best pharmaceutical CRM software will provide proactive insights that drive high-level decision-making across teams and ultimately improve team and program performance.
Below are several of the top life sciences CRMs available today. It’s important to evaluate and select the one that meets your key business aims.
Courier Health is the first and only patient-focused CRM designed for life sciences companies. Unlike industry-agnostic CRMs, Courier Health’s purpose-built system is designed to handle patient data and act as mission control for commercial teams, including field access, patient services, patient marketing, commercial operations, and more. It can serve as the single system for patient, prescriber, and healthcare organizations (HCO) management, ensuring the smooth flow of information.
Perhaps most notably, Courier Health’s CRM is designed to power the patient experience, giving biopharma companies the visibility, control, and automation they need to help patients start and stay on life-changing treatments.
Key features:
Courier Health stands out because of its focus on patient outcomes. It also addresses industry-specific needs to improve conversion rates, achieve faster time-to-therapy, and boost adherence rates.
A well-known CRM across industries, Salesforce Health Cloud enables customer engagement via dedicated modules with diverse healthcare use cases across Clinical, Medical, and Commercial. Salesforce has a strong partner ecosystem, including both native integrations and implementation partners, that customers can leverage for customization and a well-known learning platform and resource library.
Key features:
While Salesforce Health Cloud offers powerful breadth and functionality, it is not designed specifically for patient data and the unique complexities of life sciences.
IQVIA’s Orchestrated Customer Engagement (OCE) solutions are part of its larger healthcare technology offerings designed to enhance HCP engagement and collaboration for life sciences companies. This includes tools for sales and marketing, HCPs, medical devices or diagnostic teams.
Key features:
Having started as a data and analytics provider, IQVIA’s CRM offers extensive analytics but isn’t designed for complex patient journey management or patient-centric workflows.
Pega CRM is designed to help businesses automate, personalize, and optimize their customer interactions across various channels. This includes payers, providers, pharmacy benefit managers, and government healthcare providers, as well as the financial services, insurance, government, automotive, and communications service providers industries.
Key features:
Pega CRM’s strength lies in automation but falls short in offering life sciences-specific functionality.
Designed for sales and marketing teams, Pitcher CRM offers tools that manage interactions and campaigns across channels. It offers a mix of life sciences exclusive modules (such as MSL collaboration and sample management) and industry-agnostic modules (such as post-call activities, learning portals and sales coaching).
Key features:
While Pitcher CRM provides general customer engagement capabilities, it lacks the patient-focused capabilities distinguishing Courier Health within biopharma patient services, field access, and commercial operations organizations.
Selecting the best pharmaceutical CRM software is a strategic decision that impacts a company’s ability to unify and leverage data, streamline operations, improve patient outcomes, and support long-term growth. To make the right choice, consider the following key factors.
Start by evaluating your company’s goals and mapping your short- and long-term needs. In the case of life sciences, it’s critical to bring a group of cross-functional leaders together to think about the patient journey and program you’re trying to deliver. Identify core needs—such as connected data and visibility across partners—and the CRM features—such as built-in communications tools, workflow builder, or next-best action recommendations—that will power your company and program objectives.
Implementing a new CRM or replacing an old one requires planning and preparation. There is no overnight solution, so throughout the evaluation and decision process, consider your timeline, available resources, and potential challenges.
Choose a CRM that is a true product – designed to add value on day one – not a never-ending project. This should include built-in tooling to easily configure the platform and trusted solutions partners who share in your company goals and oversee the implementation from start to finish.
Engaging with customer success partners, rather than relying on outside implementation consultants, can ensure a more efficient, cost-effective deployment that sets your organization up for long-term success. You should own your data, systems, and program success, so aim to avoid a situation where you need to contact an outside partner every time you need to make a change, want to update existing business logic, or need to access your data.
Any organization undergoing a change faces some inertia, so prepare your team for the transition by clearly communicating the benefits of the new system, addressing any concerns early on, and providing comprehensive ongoing training. The right solution will have an in-house customer success team that will guide you through this process, offering best practices and ongoing support.
Remember, your CRM should be scalable and flexible enough to accommodate future growth or changes. Most CRMs aren’t built to easily adapt as your portfolio of therapies expands or your patient support programs evolve, requiring extensive custom development work.
Opt for a configurable CRM that can easily scale and evolve with your business. Agility to respond requires the right data and systems infrastructure, as well as a true solutions partner that is committed to growing and innovating alongside its client partners. How many CRM providers can say that they are entirely focused on life sciences commercial teams?
Emerging and large-market specialty pharmaceutical businesses must adopt strategies and systems to manage the end-to-end patient experience —or risk falling behind the competition.
As the first and only patient-focused CRM for life sciences today, Courier Health drives positive patient outcomes through centralized patient and provider management, omnichannel workflow automation, and advanced analytics.
If you’re ready to experience how Courier Health can upgrade your patient experience, get in touch today.
True patient-centricity. Everyone says it, but few deliver. Upgrade your patient experience with Courier Health.
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