Patient centricity: a complete guide

What is patient-centricity? It’s a term that the pharmaceutical industry has been talking about for a while. However, delivering a truly patient-centric experience is hard — even though we all know it is important.However, to those who work behind the scenes, complexity is only the beginning.

In this guide, we’ll explore the evolving trends in the industry, examine the challenges that come with them, and introduce proven solutions that can help your business thrive with this evolution — starting with patient service programs.

• Chapter 1: Industry Transformation Driving Improved Patient Experiences
• Chapter 2: Technology Gaps Challenging Patient-Centricity in Healthcare
• Chapter 3: Crafting a Comprehensive Patient-Centric Approach with Salesforce

To understand how pharmaceutical organizations need to adapt, we’ll cover three key trends and their associated challenges and then show you how your business can evolve to stay ahead of them.

Pharmaceutical organizations are under pressure to demonstrate that new drugs can deliver meaningful improvements to patient health outcomes. In some new contracts with insurers, the cost of a drug is fully reimbursed only if the patient responds positively to treatment and achieves defined clinical thresholds. As a result, provider and pharmaceutical organizations are focusing on ensuring that patients obtain access to the right therapy and take the appropriate steps to ensure they are supported throughout their treatment journey to achieve optimal health results.

The industry’s relationship with patients is changing. Pharmaceutical organizations must evolve to truly understand what patients really need so they can provide better support and build deeper relationships. Doing so can enable easier access to their products, promote medication adherence, and help deliver improved health outcomes. Patients are also looking for more support from drug companies.

However, despite the current patient programs and the growing availability of patient data, pharmaceutical organizations often lack access to the information they need to drive awareness of current offerings and truly understand the patient journey.

The growth of specialty drugs and personalized therapies like gene therapy, cell therapy like CAR-T, and cancer vaccines requires a transformation of the patient services, programs, and reimbursement models used today. The personalization required will force organizations to reinvent their business models and think differently about how their organization needs to connect with patients, providers, and payers.

At the same time, digital technology is pushing the entire industry to rethink how to benefit from the innovations unfolding around them. Thinking “beyond the pill” is the mindset of not just the future but of the here and now. That means providing digital tools to help patients with diagnosis and adherence.

If the pharmaceutical industry has been talking about patient-centricity for a while, why hasn’t it happened to the degree companies aspire to? The answer: Regulations, technology gaps, and a deluge of data have limited the industry’s ability to gain insights into the patient experience and to engage them. Nowhere is that clearer than in patient service programs. There’s a great opportunity to get closer to a patient-centric model with these programs as organizations prepare their business systems for the future. We see three key areas to tackle: program structure, personalization, and data integration.

Historically, regulations that pharmaceutical organizations must adhere to have meant keeping patients at an arm’s length to avoid unnecessary risk. For example, despite the value of having a closer connection to patients, organizations have traditionally outsourced their patient services to hub providers to mitigate the risk of HIPAA violations related to the management of protected health information (PHI) and address other regulatory concerns like the Anti-Kickback Statute. Outsourcing cascades from connecting the experiences with financial assistance programs (like copays or discounts) to helping provide personalized patient support along their treatment journey. Organizations must evaluate their programs and leverage the newest technology to determine what to bring in-house.

Patients say they want a closer relationship with drug makers. Many will even share more personal information to get better service.* This is a call to action to think through every need of the patient and every potential touchpoint. These touchpoints are already expanding. Traditionally, patient service programs have focused on improving access, usage, and adherence to prescription drug treatments. Recently, these programs have expanded to include transportation services, access to peer support groups, and mobile apps that help with medication, behavioral, or treatment reminders. These services require a tighter connection and a better understanding of patients’ needs. Service agents and care teams can respond successfully only if they can get the right information when patients reach out to them. And patients are willing to help.

Getting access to the right patient data is a game changer — and it’s the only way to stay competitive. It enables internal teams to make predictive recommendations to help patients stay on treatment. The teams will also gain better access to real-world data like patient outcomes to track program results. But the growing tangle of legacy systems and patient data silos creates a challenge. Organizations need a data strategy and to invest in building the proper infrastructure. This should include a technology platform to ingest the data and analytics to produce proactive, actionable insights. Without a scalable solution, a company will have fewer insights into their business and lose a huge opportunity to understand their patients’ needs and fully put the data to work.

How do you evolve your systems to keep pace with the disruptive transformation surrounding your business and drive patient-centricity? How do you unify patient data based on consent across siloed systems? How do you get people on therapy faster and keep them on it? How do you enhance your patient programs while reducing operational costs?

You need a platform with new tools that empower you to deliver therapeutic support programs that are personalized, at scale, and engage patients. In short, you need a CRM built for life sciences. Salesforce is just that.

Salesforce Connect the Patient Experience solution enables pharmaceutical companies to deliver personalized engagement and support programs across a single platform to reduce operational costs while helping patients proactively manage their disease and navigate their health journey.

Link disparate systems and use a single platform to lower the operational costs of maintaining patient services and programs across brands and therapeutic areas.

• Single platform: Surface key patient and provider data from Health Cloud alongside other systems to support full-scale patient support portals for real-time therapy assistance.
• Out-of-the-box, certified connectivity: Link key life sciences systems to ensure reliable real-time patient support from services teams, capture real-world data, and obtain reporting of post-launch regulatory data.
• API-led: MuleSoft’s approach to connectivity enables IT teams to build and share reusable assets, allowing similar patient support programs for different regional and global needs to be established two to three times faster, on average.

Connect patients with Patient Service Agents to coordinate onboarding, insurance verification, copay programs, behavioral and adherence apps, and more to ensure patients get the support they need and adhere to treatment plans — all in one place.

• Guided program enrollment: Create journeys to improve the patient experience with a step-by-step enrollment guide from Journey Builder for patient services teams.
• Digital informed consent management: Easily manage patient enrollment and consent forms from anywhere. Collaborate with teams across care programs and capture e-signatures in person or remotely on a tablet or mobile device.
• Omni-channel patient services: Empower patients to access program or educational information and support on their preferred channel and right from their mobile device.

Receive predictive recommendations in Health Cloud to improve support programs and gain better access to real-world data to achieve targeted patient outcomes.

• Embedded analytics: Surface key metrics and KPIs through visualizations embedded directly within the CRM.
• Intelligent predictions: Understand the key factors that impact a patient’s time-to-therapy overall and receive AI-driven recommendations surfaced by Next Best Action. This enables proactive steps to minimize the time between an HCP treatment prescription and the onset of patient therapy.
• Actionability at the point of insight: Use the Action Framework to take steps directly within the solution and surface the next AI-driven prediction to further optimize the patient experience.
• Patient experience notifications: Receive immediate notifications via email or mobile to track the customer experience — for example, if a customer’s time to therapy exceeds a certain threshold.

The challenges presented by the trends we’ve discussed here are imposing — but with the right tools and technology, delivering a truly patient-centric experience is possible. Learn more about how Salesforce can help.