PharmaPrograms takes a collaborative approach to patient care

PharmaPrograms is an Australian organisation helping to redefine the delivery of pharmaceutical care in Australia. Leveraging technology and its clinical expertise, it’s created a model for more collaborative patient care that ensures greater adherence to medication and therefore better health outcomes.

“What we do is work with drug manufacturers and pharmacists to support patients in their medication journey. The result is that medications are taken in the way that they should be for an optimal outcome,” said Nader Mitri, General Manager at PharmaPrograms.

Salesforce supports the success of this model by enabling more seamless collaboration between PharmaPrograms, more than 5,600 pharmacies across Australia, and an ever growing patient network.

PharmaPrograms was established in 2016 and it began using Sales Cloud from day one to create a single view of pharmacies and to track their interactions as they enrolled into different initiatives.

PharmaPrograms then opened up Sales Cloud to pharmacies and used it as a joint system of record for pharmacists, allowing them to directly create a record of each intervention with their patients.

For PharmaPrograms’ first couple of years, however, most of the collaboration around patient care took place outside of Salesforce and neither PharmaPrograms nor pharmacists had full visibility of patient interactions. In addition, some pharmacists’ participation in programs was limited which meant there were patients out there not being reached.

“We needed to streamline collaboration with pharmacists so they would engage with us more often. Talking with Salesforce, we realised that they had a lot of capabilities that could help us with this and make our programs easier to manage,” said Mitri.

One of those capabilities was Experience Cloud which PharmaPrograms has implemented itself. As a rapidly evolving business, it wanted to bring people in-house to help drive fast innovation so it hired Salesforce Platform Manager Riaz Evans and Salesforce Developer Matt Lang. Evans joined with nine Salesforce certifications and both he and Lang have continued to grow their Salesforce skills using Trailhead. This has been a benefit to them personally and to the business as it has helped them to learn and take advantage of features like flows to automate processes and increase efficiency.

Experience Cloud has replaced 15 individual websites supporting different programs to provide pharmacists with one central place to manage all of their activities. Known as myPharmaPrograms, the portal allows pharmacists to enroll patients in particular programs and monitor their progress to ensure that they take their medications and achieve the best outcome. Pharmacists can also track their performance and the payments they receive in exchange for participating in programs.

According to Mitri, the experience and engagement of pharmacists has been vastly improved, resulting in a 25% increase in pharmacist and patient interactions. These include patient enrollments and interventions to ensure they’re taking their medications. PharmaPrograms now has more than 5,600 participating pharmacies, and over 135,000 enrolled patients. Pharmacists participating in PharmaPrograms initiatives have now delivered over 2.5 million interventions to their patients.

Consolidating program websites and bringing pharmacists onto Experience Cloud has created significant efficiencies. For instance, PharmaPrograms is able to roll out new programs in half the time it took previously and the creation of monthly reports for drug manufacturers takes just two days as opposed to two weeks.

Drug manufacturers also receive better, real-time insight into the performance of their programs to support strategic decision making. For example, if adherence to medication is lower than it should be, they can decide what education or other programs are needed to drive up compliance. This data can also be mapped directly to target territories to better support in-field sales teams.

“Salesforce helps us drive more engagement with pharmacists which ultimately drives better outcomes for their patients. It also helps manufacturers achieve more success with their products,” said Mitri.

PharmaPrograms is extending its use of Salesforce to deliver a more unified patient experience. Its in-house healthcare team is now using Service Cloud to provide a greater level of outbound patient support. This includes phone calls from nurses, dieticians and pharmacists to ensure patients are taking their medication.

Service Cloud has also enabled PharmaPrograms to respond to 90% of requests within 24 hours. It has also helped the business to categorise common requests and publish responses to frequently asked questions in its Knowledgebase. The number of service requests has decreased by 28% as a result, providing the team with capacity to support more patients.

Marketing Cloud will be rolled out next which will help to digitise and personalise patient engagement. For example, using Journey Builder, PharmaPrograms will be able to create and send patients a series of emails and SMS messages which will remind them to take their medications.

“We are always looking for opportunities to maximise patient engagement and Marketing Cloud will help us by allowing us to send more tailored communication. It will also fill a gap in terms of providing pharmacists with visibility of the messages being sent to their patients,” said Mitri.

PharmaPrograms also has plans to use Marketing Cloud to automate communication with pharmacists and send them personalised messages to celebrate their successes or alert them to missed opportunities. PharmaPrograms will also be able to create customised journeys for pharmacists and patients which will be automatically tailored and activated by their level of engagement.

“Salesforce has helped us to deliver an experience for pharmacists that is significantly better than before and we now have a massive opportunity in front of us to deliver more positive patient outcomes,” said Mitri.