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Patients need more support than ever to access, afford, understand, and stay on treatment, especially in the case of specialty drugs for rare and chronic conditions. Adding to the challenge, specialty medications generally require extensive coordination between healthcare providers (HCPs), payers, manufacturers, and patients.
Leading biopharma companies are bridging these gaps with a well-designed patient support programs strategy that provides education, financial assistance, and adherence guidance, helping to ensure patients receive the care they need while removing unnecessary barriers.
As pharmaceutical companies contend with increased competition, changing regulations, and higher patient expectations, these patient support services must be scalable and sustainable. Outdated approaches or manual processes can slow down access to treatment, increase costs, and make it harder for patients to get necessary care.
A thoughtful strategy guarantees patient care continues even as factors outside their control changes. This also means that internal patient support teams have the resources and systems necessary to do their job effectively and efficiently. By making processes more efficient and digital-first, biopharma companies can strengthen patient and provider engagement and drive better health outcomes.
By designing holistic, patient-centric programs, biopharma companies can create the foundation to provide consistent, high-quality support while positioning themselves for long-term success.
This blog explains what sets leading patient assistance programs apart and how biopharma teams can develop a scalable strategy that supports patients today and far into the future.
Scalability in patient support programs means designing services that are:
With the right technology foundation, companies can remain agile and responsive as market and organizational needs change, including new product launches. A scalable program can more readily support new indications (i.e., accommodating additional uses of therapy beyond its original approval), internal team changes, and shifting regulatory requirements.
Biopharma companies contend with multiple headwinds to effectively support patients, including a complex network of healthcare partners, various reimbursement structures, and changing regulations. Without the right foundation, programs can become inefficient, inflexible, and unable to keep pace.
This can lead to gaps in access and financial assistance as well as inconsistent support, all of which negatively affect patient outcomes. Additionally, inefficiencies can drive up costs.
On the other hand, a comprehensive patient care program improves the patient experience, supports optimal health outcomes, and strengthens a company’s long-term position by putting frameworks in place that can evolve.
Patient support services must be designed to adapt to changing patient needs, regulatory shifts, and market factors. Below are some targeted strategies organizations can follow to create and deliver impactful patient support programs.
It sounds simple, but a patient-centric mindset is foremost to delivering a scalable and effective patient support program. This starts at the top with executive leadership and trickles down through the organization. It isn’t enough to say you’re patient-centric; biopharma companies need to operationalize this mandate by focusing on the end-to-end, step-by-step patient journey for patients, caregivers, and prescribers.
This means understanding each group's unique needs and developing solutions that add value through patient education or ongoing support. Patient advocacy groups can play a vital role in this process, shedding light on what matters to patient communities, whether that’s information on various treatment plans for caregivers or access to patient portals to report adverse side effects.
Without strong communication and tight coordination, it’s not a matter of if, but when, delays and gaps in care will hinder patient access.
This cross-functional collaboration is two-fold. It requires first bringing the right functions and leaders to the commercial table, from brand marketing to medical affairs to market access and patient services to analytics.
Secondly, it requires the right systems and processes to integrate data, systems, and teams and to facilitate compliant coordination. Streamlined communication between internal teams and external partners like HUBs, specialty pharmacies (SPs), and copay partners is critical to ensuring all stakeholders have the information they need to be effective.
Purpose-built technology systems eliminate the need for teams to jump between various systems to collaborate, resulting in smoother patient enrollment, initiation, and ongoing adherence. By leveraging technology to offer more personalized support, organizations can increase engagement and overall patient satisfaction, improve disease management, and drive better outcomes.
It’s also critical to have the right technology and data infrastructure in place to understand what’s happening across patients, providers, and programs. Without central visibility, commercial teams struggle to understand potential leakage points or opportunities to improve the treatment experience.
Courier Health’s patient CRM integrates patient data, delivers real-time insights, and streamlines workflows so that field access, patient services, and commercial operations teams can mitigate the barriers to getting on therapy. By centralizing information and streamlining processes, organizations can reduce administrative burdens, improve effectiveness, and scale their support programs.
Biopharma companies need flexible solutions designed for patients’ dynamic, real-world journeys. Biopharma is a complex, nuanced industry that requires deep expertise, so biopharma companies need solutions that are purpose-built for their day-to-day needs.
Patient stages, omnichannel workflows, and key performance indicators (KPIs) need to be configurable at the therapy level because that’s how best-in-class biopharma manufacturers think and operate. With other legacy solutions, instances are custom-built for each therapy or program, which means that adding a new team, launching a new product, or changing factors in your program setup requires extensive rework, time, and cost.
This is again where a purpose-built, configurable solution pays dividends, enabling you make changes or scale your program up or down without dedicated developer resources.
As biopharma leaders strive to implement support programs that keep patients engaged, boost outcomes, and adapt to changes in the healthcare landscape, they should keep the following recommendations in mind.
Putting patient engagement at the forefront starts with leadership recognizing the importance of a patient-centric approach. This requires strategic investments in people, processes, and technology to build scalable, impactful programs.
Leaders should also ensure that cross-functional teams, including those responsible for market access, field access, and patient services, are involved in shaping commercial strategies and launch plans. Biopharma companies that break down silos, challenge the status quo, and foster a shared commitment to patient-centricity can create programs that make a real difference in patients' lives while also supporting business goals.
Commercial teams need to be honest about identifying gaps in their existing infrastructure and program setup in order to know what can be improved. In doing so, they should evaluate these key areas:
Once these questions have been answered, biopharma leaders can refine their strategic technology investments to enhance patient experience aims.
Platforms like Courier Health unify patient journey data into a single source of truth and leverage advanced technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) to automate processes and surface actionable insights. This gives teams the information they need to support patients, providers, and healthcare organizations.
Strategically investing in the right technology enables teams to deliver high-quality support while maintaining agility and responsiveness to the broader healthcare industry landscape.
As commercial leaders look to the future, they should adopt a test and learn mindset that focuses on regularly assessing and refining their patient support framework and standard operating procedures (SOPs).
Instead of waiting for perfection, teams should focus on launching, learning, and optimizing their programs based on real-world insights. This is only possible with the right data-driven technology and infrastructure in place.
Moreover, don’t forget to bring patients into the development process and incorporate their voice into support services and resources. The ‘perfect’ strategy developed in the conference room may not accurately reflect their needs and realities in the real world. Staying connected to patient communities and data-focused (around what’s being utilized, what’s working, and what’s not) can help leaders establish and maintain agile support programs.
Biopharma companies that want to stay ahead of the curve must develop a holistic, technology-enabled patient support program strategy.
Courier Health’s patient CRM is flexible, configurable, and designed specifically for biopharma commercial teams. By centralizing patient-level data, automating workflows, and connecting stakeholders, the platform helps biopharma teams provide tailored engagement and support.
Contact Courier Health today to learn how you can take your patient support programs to the next level.
True patient-centricity. Everyone says it, but few deliver. Upgrade your patient experience with Courier Health.
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