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Patients prescribed specialty treatments generally need significantly more support than retail medicines. These therapies usually involve complex regimens, higher costs, and significant side effects, requiring personalized guidance and ongoing assistance.
Patient support services pharma teams play a key role in helping qualified patients by educating them about their therapies, supporting financial assistance, and offering ongoing mental, social, and emotional support. This results in a streamlined treatment experience, improving patient health outcomes.
While this all sounds great in theory, designing and delivering these services is no small feat. Even when patient support services teams exist internally (offering more control over the process than external HUBs allow), pharmaceutical manufacturers face many operational challenges, including data silos, strict compliance requirements, and poor coordination across teams.
It’s also easy for manufacturers to fall into the trap of building overly complex support services based on assumptions of what may be needed by patients and providers or what they've seen work in the past. The result is programs that aren’t adequately tailored to the unique needs of patient populations and may not be utilized.
All of these factors contribute to the overall experience with a therapy, program, and biopharma company.
Optimizing patient support services for today’s world requires actionable strategies and innovative approaches, both of which are explored below. By leveraging patient-centered design, better data integration, and digital-first solutions, biopharma companies can upgrade their support operations and improve patient outcomes.
Patient-centric support services are becoming increasingly important in the biopharma industry. These services provide people living with chronic and rare diseases with the education, resources, and assistance they need to start (or complete) their treatments successfully. They are necessary to improve access to care, increase treatment adherence, and facilitate better communication and coordination across stakeholders.
For example, support teams can help connect people with patient assistance programs (PAPs) to overcome cost barriers that can significantly affect their ability to start prescribed treatments. This is particularly important when you consider that three out of every four patients abandon their treatment if they need to pay $100 or more out of pocket.
Several trends fuel the demand for more robust and personalized support services. Patients are more empowered than ever, seeking tailored care that aligns with their lifestyle and preferences. Innovations in clinical treatments and digital technologies have changed expectations for how support and care are delivered. Meanwhile, regulatory requirements have pushed pharma companies to provide greater transparency and access. Finally, increased competition among manufacturers drives them to offer comprehensive services to help set their therapies apart and serve as a strategic differentiator.
Leading biopharma companies understand that the deeper patient-manufacturer relationships achieved by standing up their own internal teams produce far better results.
Failing to offer patients adequate support can have significant consequences. Analysis has shown that medication non-adherence contributes to up to 50% of treatment failures and leads to billions of dollars in unnecessary healthcare costs every year.
Patients on specialty medications face even higher risks of dropping off treatment. Investing in well-designed support services teams and empowering them with the right tools for the role is no longer optional—it’s essential for success.
Patient support services teams work daily to complement clinical care and enable a seamless patient experience. To do so, they must overcome substantial operational challenges that otherwise diminish their impact, including the following.
Data silos occur when information is stored in separate, disjointed systems, making it difficult to access and share information across teams. In pharma, this happens frequently between providers, payers, HUBs, specialty pharmacies (SPs), and biopharma manufacturers’ own teams because they typically all work in disparate tech environments and use different platforms.
These silos lead to a lack of visibility, slower decision-making, and errors caused by manual processes. For example, it can take longer for a patient to be authorized for financial assistance or receive their medication, causing frustration and gaps in treatment. Breaking down silos with a purpose-built patient services solution like Courier Health is critical to improving efficiency and patient outcomes.
Inefficiencies abound in biopharma. There is still far too little automation and far too much reliance on spreadsheets, data entry, and manual processes. This slows response times and hinders strategic, tailored patient engagement.
For instance, if a Patient Services Manager (PSM) struggles to access a patient’s history due to scattered records, they’ll take longer to make crucial decisions and find it harder to provide personalized support. Similarly, an oversight or bottleneck in prior authorization processes can delay treatment, resulting in adverse patient medical events.
The main takeaway? Streamlined workflows made possible by user-friendly and highly automated solutions like Courier Health enable healthcare professionals to provide faster and more effective patient support.
When teams don’t have the information they need, there is no central system, and task ownership is unclear, communication and collaboration will obviously suffer. This leads to inconsistent messaging, treatment delays, and confused or misguided patients.
A good example of this is a patient receiving conflicting instructions about their medication from support staff and their healthcare provider.
Patient care becomes disjointed and messy without proper coordination. Modern CRM solutions like Courier Health can prevent this. These solutions offer advanced communication tools and a unified platform that provides a 360-degree view of the patient journey across internal teams and external partners, streamlining coordination.
Fragmented communication channels make it difficult to engage patients, leading to missed connections and inconsistent support. From regular treatment adherence check-ins to providing emotional and mental support, patient services can’t build trust and rapport without regular interactions.
These difficulties compound when teams can’t easily access patient communications preferences, including channels, language preferences, or requirements.
Courier Health, for example, offers built-in functionality to automatically route patients to a PSM who speaks their language, even outside usual territories. Functionalities like this facilitate continuous support, connecting patients with support services without any additional effort or manual oversight.
Heavy reliance on manual processes results in wasted resources, which can be highly costly for biopharma companies.
Patient engagement solutions like Courier Health automate and personalize repetitive tasks so PSMs can spend their time on higher-level engagement and patient education.
This makes teams more efficient and effective.
Finally, as operations expand, it can be difficult to maintain high-quality resources and services across internal/external patient support groups.
Providing consistent, personalized support for an extensive portfolio of products or in various regions, for example, can lead to discrepancies in engagement and overall brand experience.
Moreover, if the technology platforms patient services teams rely on aren’t purpose-built for life sciences—such as when vendors ‘customize’ their generic CRM solutions—scaling will always add considerable costs and complexity.
Each new product or other changing variable will require more costly customizations to be bolted onto these makeshift platforms, complicating usage and ongoing management.
Maintaining high standards while scaling operations will be complex and resource-intensive for pharmaceutical manufacturers without the right systems in place.
Biopharma patient support teams can count on Courier Health. The industry’s first patient CRM platform integrates patient data from multiple sources into a single source of truth. As a result, PSMs and their teams have complete visibility into the patient journey and can stay connected.
Courier Health’s advanced automation features, including dynamic workflows, recommended action notifications, reminders, and built-in compliance tools, eliminate manual processes so teams can spend time on meaningful engagement.
Every day, patient services professionals leveraging Courier Health know what tasks to prioritize via Recommended Actions which notify them to reach out to patients at risk of abandoning treatment or to follow up with a HUB about an outdated prescription on file.
Courier Health’s purpose-built CRM solution dramatically improves communication with built-in phone, email, SMS (text), fax, Outlook calendar integration, and recommended next best actions. This helps pave the way for a streamlined treatment experience that ensures patients receive the support they deserve.
With Courier Health, pharma companies can deliver high-quality patient support to drive better patient outcomes at scale.
Delivering exceptional patient care in the specialty therapy space isn’t for the faint of heart. From data silos and inefficiencies to resource constraints, the daily challenges can feel overwhelming. Add the complexity of scaling support services without compromising quality, and it’s clear the task demands innovative solutions.
Courier Health’s purpose-built CRM platform is designed to tackle these challenges head-on. Courier Health empowers biopharmaceutical companies to deliver consistent, high-quality engagement and support.
With Courier Health, biopharma teams can focus on what truly matters: Providing the best possible care to patients to improve health outcomes.
Don’t wait—contact Courier Health today to see how its innovative platform can simplify and elevate your program operations.
True patient-centricity. Everyone says it, but few deliver. Upgrade your patient experience with Courier Health.
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