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Despite their life-saving potential, getting specialty treatments into the hands of the qualified patients who need them can be challenging. Biopharma companies must overcome many obstacles—including changing regulatory requirements and an increasingly competitive landscape—to bring therapies to market and ensure patients can reliably access them to achieve better health outcomes.
Field access and reimbursement teams are crucial in helping eligible patients obtain and stay on prescribed treatments—particularly when it comes to educating HCPs and office staff and assisting providers with reimbursement denials and appeals. Field Access CRM solutions support these teams by putting the data they need in one place, simplifying their workflows, and giving them the means to engage with healthcare providers and other stakeholders more strategically.
However, most platforms aren’t built specifically for the cross-functional role field access and reimbursement teams fulfill; the right CRM software solution for biopharma field access must be specifically developed to overcome common challenges (e.g., data silos, HIPAA-compliant coordination) and align internal and external stakeholders to orchestrate the most efficient care coordination path.
Biotech and pharmaceutical companies can gain a competitive edge and improve patient access and adherence by investing in a top-tier CRM.
The U.S. life sciences and healthcare ecosystem is highly complex and fragmented—so much so that roughly one-third of primary care physicians fail to receive useful patient information from specialists they’ve referred. Communication gaps and missing information on patients and their care plans create cracks for patients to fall through.
Without a centralized platform to manage data and track patient and provider interactions, biopharma commercial operations teams struggle to coordinate efficiently and effectively across the treatment experience.
It’s nearly impossible to effectively triage issues, prioritize accounts, and coordinate care when field reimbursement teams have to switch between multiple digital tools to access the information they need! The result is that more time is spent tracking down information and figuring out who to help and in what order instead of engaging HCPs or office staff to streamline processes that result in better patient care.
A patient CRM designed for field access and reimbursement helps tackle these challenges by combining disparate data sets and systems into a single internal command center where field access teams can collaborate more efficiently and effectively while ensuring compliance.
Purpose-built CRM solutions for life sciences like Courier Health provide a unified view of patient progress across therapies, automate manual processes, and surface barriers along the patient journey that require intervention.
Courier Health also helps:
This reduces operational complexity and minimizes the likelihood of patients falling through the cracks due to addressable reasons, such as a delayed benefits investigation or an incorrect PA renewal date. Without a solution like Courier Health, field access and reimbursement teams must manually comb through reports or information to identify potential issues—leaving far too much to chance.
Conversely, Courier Health acts as a safety net to help preemptively identify risks or patient trends before they escalate into bigger issues that contribute to patient non-adherence.
With newfound visibility, context, and reclaimed bandwidth, field access and reimbursement teams can initiate more proactive intervention – such as strategically engaging key healthcare professionals about prior authorization patterns or brainstorming with individuals from their own biopharma company.
Although field access and reimbursement teams primarily coordinate across HCPs, HCOs, and internal commercial team stakeholders rather than directly engaging with patients, few roles have as significant an impact on patient access and adherence. Given the crucial steps of securing PAs and navigating claims processes for continuous care, these teams are the front lines of many of the most significant daily barriers biopharma companies face.
Overcoming these barriers requires timely access to information across various systems. With a sophisticated system to surface insights and recommendations, field access and reimbursement teams can intervene to minimize gaps in patient care. In addition, data gathered in a CRM designed for field access can illuminate the most common bottlenecks, such as a pattern of PA denials (or conversely, PA drug approvals) so that the team can provide more strategic support across accounts.
The impact of improving PA process efficiency can’t be understated, particularly with the American Medical Association reporting that these PA denials have trended upward for Medicare Advantage enrollees in recent years. Another AMA report revealed that while 80% of appeals for these PA denials succeed, 62% of respondents don’t appeal simply because they believe it’ll be denied again, and 48% say they don’t have the time or resources to handle the appeals.
Field access and reimbursement teams can help reduce these numbers and improve medication adherence with a purpose-built CRM–and then use time not spent on manual tasks and new data-driven insights to deliver more strategic HCP support and engagement going forward.
Biopharma manufacturers implementing a generic CRM rather than one developed for field access and reimbursement will quickly encounter challenges that exacerbate over time.
Generic CRMs are developed to be used across numerous industries, and their “one-size-fits-all” development makes them poor fits for heavily-regulated and complex industries like biopharma. They certainly aren’t built to ensure compliance with HIPAA or other regulations from the outset and to support industry-specific workflows.
In addition, as companies introduce changes or try to launch a new product, the ‘solution’ requires additional customizations that further increase complexity and costs.
Not all CRMs for the pharmaceutical industry are created equal. It is important to choose one specifically designed for your team’s needs and day-to-day realities.
An organization should start by assessing its unique needs and pain points. From there, think about scalability, user experience, and adaptability across different products or programs. The right CRM will adapt to your business, handling greater data volume, regular program adjustments, and launching new therapies in your pipeline. Moreover, it must integrate with existing biopharma tools like HUB, SP, and copay data to minimize workflow disruptions and ensure a smooth data flow.
The journey of a promising drug, from its development to commercial launch, usually includes many twists and turns. Biopharma companies can increase their odds of success by investing in a CRM specifically designed to power biopharma patient engagement for field access and patient services teams.
The right CRM will align key stakeholders, streamline operations, and unlock new levels of data-driven visibility. This visibility can be used to improve programs and professional services that facilitate patient and market access to life-saving treatments.
Courier Health’s software solution for biopharma field access is more than a CRM—it’s a powerful command center for field access teams to optimize programs and improve the overall treatment paradigm to improve patient care.
Contact Courier Health today to discuss how to supercharge your field access team and make it a powerful force for success.
True patient-centricity. Everyone says it, but few deliver. Upgrade your patient experience with Courier Health.
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