Biopharma’s Perfect Storm

January can be a particularly hectic month for life sciences companies and their partners with an influx of time-sensitive re-authorization requests to ensure that patients don't lose access to critical treatments.

No matter the time of year, re-authorizations require a significant amount of data, coordination, and communication across a complex healthcare system. For example, each patient’s policy must be individually reviewed to understand exactly what is required to prepare a complete, timely submission, before gathering all the necessary plan- and patient-specific information. (Renewals that fall in January must also contend with changes to health plans, which are generally instituted between November and the start of the new year and impact which treatments and services are covered. All this adds even more uncertainty to re-authorization timing, requirements, and criteria.)

If this sounds like a lot, it’s because it is.

For many Market Access and Patient Support teams, January re-authorizations represent a perfect storm of factors that combine to threaten the overall patient experience, not to mention team capacity and overall stress levels. In the case of specialty pharma, the stakes are even higher with any breakdown in the process adding more uncertainty and undue stress on patients and their loved ones who may already be in distress.

Whether it’s for re-authorizations or initial enrollments, outdated, manual approaches to patient engagement and support are bad for biopharma. They're bad for patients who depend on life-saving treatments and bad for life sciences companies who care deeply about improving patient outcomes and can’t afford to be bogged down in manual work.

How to Make Re-Authorizations Smoother and More Efficient

The good news is that it’s possible to get - and stay - ahead of the re-authorization blizzard with the right innovative approach combined with the right purpose-built technology.

For biopharma, it all begins with real-time visibility into the patient journey. With core visibility to know where every patient is in their journey, teams can more proactively identify and resolve issues before they build into a potential storm.

With a platform like Courier Health that is specifically designed for biopharma Field Access & Patient Services, not only is all patient data securely stored and managed in one place, but patient journeys are mapped and coordinated within the system. For re-authorization workflows, this means that Patient Services can be automatically notified months before a prior authorization is set to expire, triggering an action to contact the patient to begin scheduling necessary clinician/lab work appointments. Empowered with purpose-built technology, Market Access and Patient Support teams can spend less time on manual work and more time on strategic, valuable customer interactions that improve adherence and compliance.

At the end of the day, streamlining re-authorizations at scale requires changing the overall dynamic of how biopharma engages and supports patients year-round. With one central tool to manage the end-to-end patient journey, biopharma can begin to shift from reactive response to more proactive engagement.

“To level up, the industry has to make it easier…to move from one item to the next,” says Snehal Patel, Executive Director, Patient Access Support Services (Hematology, Oncology & Cell Therapy) at Bristol Myers Squibb. “Empowering them with tools to be successful is critical. How can the whole industry shift to become more proactive and adaptable to changes?”

As clinical advances and digital innovations transform how the industry operates, life sciences companies are examining their current approaches to streamline patient engagement, enhance overall outcomes, and in the process, demonstrate value beyond the therapy itself.

Download Redefining Market Access to learn how five industry thought leaders are shaping the future of Market Access and Patient Support.

‍This post was originally published as a LinkedIn article.