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Biopharma companies contend with a complex operational ecosystem comprising patients, healthcare providers (HCPs), insurance companies, and medical science liaisons, among other stakeholders. Field Access and Patient Services are the nexus of these relationships, requiring a tailored, highly coordinated approach to deliver best-in-class engagement and support.
These Field Access and Patient Services teams’ communication and collaboration prove crucial to improving both patient care and program performance. Without them alleviating process bottlenecks and pain points across engagements with patients, providers, and other stakeholders, new drugs and treatments miss expectations or encounter setbacks.
In practice, however, biopharma companies face unique challenges at each stage of the product life cycle, stemming from siloed data systems, limited visibility, and manual workflows. These negatively impact the performance of internal teams and overall program outcomes, which impacts the number of patients who can start and stay on therapy and achieve their desired health goals.
Workflow and data visibility challenges cannot be overcome at the scale that biopharma companies need without a dedicated technology platform. A customer relationship management (CRM) solution for life sciences allows organizations to harness their data and teams to gain better visibility into their operations and enhance patient journeys. The right patient CRM connects data, systems, and stakeholders, empowering commercial teams to improve patient and provider education, engagement, and support.
Continue reading to discover how biopharma companies can deepen customer relationships with a best-in-class CRM for life sciences.
A CRM solution for life sciences can manage and orchestrate communication and collaboration across the ecosystem, including between biopharma companies, patients, providers, and more. It does this via the compliant integration, collection, and analysis of patient and other data. Leading solutions will intelligently surface tailored insights that help users engage and support their customers—whether that’s patient services users who work directly with patients or field reimbursement managers who use the system to coordinate externally and internally across Providers, HCOs, sales teams, and more.
Conversely, general-purpose or industry-agnostic CRM tools are designed to fit the needs of diverse industries and roles—from customer service for a telecommunications company to fashion and retail use cases. These solutions require expensive, time-consuming customizations to meet the needs of biopharma and managing patient information—and that’s often only for their initial use case. With each new variable or difference (not to mention launching entirely new products), additional instances and customizations will be required, adding to the mountain of complexity and cost.
The right patient-focused CRM built specifically for life sciences is designed to orchestrate and optimize complex patient journeys across multiple therapies. This necessitates equipping Field Access and Patient Services teams with industry- and role-specific capabilities “out-of-the-box,” including:
In practice, this means that teams on the platform have the visibility, control, automation, and insights they need to orchestrate a better experience for patients and providers..
Barriers to Improving Customer Engagement
Without the insight and functionality of a CRM developed for life sciences, biopharma companies and their partners lack:
In turn, biopharma companies will likely encounter barriers, like those identified by Deloitte, that most affect whether launches meet expectations, such as limited market access, inadequate understanding of market needs, and poor product differentiation.
Improving engagement and overall program outcomes requires building long-term relationships with patients and providers. Biopharma companies can more easily achieve this with a purpose-built solution that offers robust contact management, data-driven insights, and robust compliance and security.
CRMs like Courier Health offer built-in communication tools like email, phone, fax, and eSign to support compliant communication and coordination. With sophisticated contact management, including channel consent preferences and centralized interactions, biopharma teams can use a patient's or provider’s preferences and history to deliver personalized experiences.
For instance, some patients may only be available after 5 PM due to work schedules and prefer email or other digital communications, whereas others may want phone calls only.
What’s more, working from the same set of data (e.g., who’s stuck in PA approval and who’s the primary contact for these issues?) across internal teams reduces inefficiencies and delays in patient care.
A patient-centric approach requires a modern, purpose-built technology solution that enables commercial teams (whether that’s field access and reimbursement, patient service teams, or even marketing) to view each stage of the patient funnel, orchestrate coordination, personalize engagement and support, and identify patterns or trends to drive continuous improvements.
Taking such nuances into account will help turn patients and providers into advocates and champions along their health journeys towards better outcomes.
Biopharma companies handle vast volumes of data from multiple sources, and a CRM that is built for the industry integrates disparate data into a cohesive system, unlocking powerful insights into patient and provider journeys.
These insights allow commercial leadership to make more informed decisions about how to manage and evolve patient support programs, as one example. For instance, by automating new patient welcome journeys in a CRM platform that also captures data on engagement and interactions, program leadership may learn that making a new patient welcome call within 24 hours is the biggest indicator of adherence at the 6-month mark within a specific territory and can update processes to apply that learning nationwide.
A patient CRM for life sciences can also improve visibility into journey pain points and support quick workflow changes to improve patient care. As another example, data may reveal that certain channels or messages result in lower engagement rates, so teams can begin testing shorter contact intervals to determine the default schedule with the greatest impact on engagement.
Healthcare and life sciences are highly regulated industries, which significantly elevates the complexities and restrictions an industry-specific CRM must meet. Compliance with HIPAA, for example, highlights the need for robust safeguards to secure patient data. Various teams or user groups will require different access to the system, so a solution must support granular permissions.
A patient CRM like Courier Health is built to ensure compliance at every level, offering features like:
Adopting a HIPAA-compliant CRM like Courier Health simplifies maintaining robust records and audit trails and streamlines compliance across the organization.
Building and fostering long-term stakeholder relationships takes time, regular communication, trust, feedback loops and more, for which a purpose-built patient CRM provides a central, comprehensive solution.
From the patient perspective, teams can now provide the personalized, integrated support individuals seek—from capturing consent and engagement preferences to automating dynamic journeys (e.g., welcome programs, prescription adherence check-ins, medical inquiries, appointment reminders).
From the biopharma company and stakeholders’ perspectives, the automated workflows and intelligent recommendations, or next-best-action recommendations, remove considerable manual work while making processes more efficient and engagements more timely. Guided by the CRM, Field Access and Patient Services teams can focus on higher-quality patient and provider interactions.
Moreover, teams receive the reassurance of an intelligent system “safety net” of sorts that proactively surfaces issues that may otherwise go undetected. Predictive analytics support a proactive approach to managing patients, providers, and more, helping to address issues before they escalate.
No matter the capabilities, the success of a life sciences CRM hinges on effective implementation and adoption within an organization. To increase the likelihood of success:
Life sciences CRM solutions are increasingly essential to program success. They provide data-driven insights across different stages of the patient journey and empower commercial teams to improve engagement with patients and providers.
This leads to enhanced customer relationships, as biopharma companies can use the insights to personalize experiences, boost patient and HCP engagement, and help patients achieve better health outcomes.
With Courier Health, companies get a purpose-built patient CRM that unlocks data visibility, orchestrates and optimizes patient journeys, and boosts stakeholder engagement to help patients start and stay on game-changing therapies.
Contact Courier Health today to learn how you can upgrade your patient and provider experience.
True patient-centricity. Everyone says it, but few deliver. Upgrade your patient experience with Courier Health.
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