THE CHALLENGE
Streamlining and elevating patient experience
In today’s rapidly evolving healthcare landscape, where patients and physicians are faced with an overwhelming array of treatment options, truly understanding and addressing patient needs has become essential to delivering comprehensive care beyond a pill. As access challenges grow and patient-centricity becomes the industry standard, pharmaceutical companies must elevate their patient support offerings to differentiate themselves in a competitive market.
A leading global pharmaceutical company recognized this imperative and set out to transform their approach to designing and delivering patient services, ensuring that support programs meet patients where they are in their treatment journey.
Navigating the complexity of multiple therapeutic areas and brand-specific needs, the client sought to codify best practices for designing Patient Support Programs. Their objective was both ambitious and vital: to streamline the strategic thinking underlying key program elements at the enterprise level and elevate the overall patient experience to improve adherence to treatment.
With this vision in mind, the client turned to us for expert guidance in shaping brand-agnostic standards for the design, development, and implementation of Patient Support Programs that deliver meaningful, patient-centric support across their portfolio.
OUR SOLUTION
A playbook for success, tailored to the patient’s journey
At the heart of this engagement was a simple yet powerful mission: To set the Gold Standards for developing impactful Patient Support Programs. We partnered closely with the client’s Patient Services leadership team, adopting an integrated approach to deliver results.
Here’s how we made it happen:
- Understanding existing practices: We started by assessing existing Patient Support Programs across key brands in their portfolio, uncovering several inconsistencies that adversely impacted or limited patient and physician experiences. These findings highlighted gaps in strategic thinking at the foundational level, allowing us to develop hypotheses on the key parameters that define best-in-class patient support programs and drive their success.
- Codifying Best Practices: Through comprehensive secondary research and analysis of competitor programs, combined with insights gathered from internal and external stakeholder interviews, we refined our hypotheses and codified best practices to optimize key parameters across the Patient Support Program: Adherence, copay, free goods, onboarding, and clinical services.
- Tailored solutions for every brand archetype: We categorized selected brands into distinct archetypes based on key criteria such as reimbursement method, pharmacy channel, route of administration, and therapeutic area. This structured approach enabled us to tailor Best Practices to the specific needs of each brand archetype, ensuring more effective and targeted patient support strategies.
- Enabling implementation: We developed a pragmatic diagnostic tool to evaluate the baseline performance of existing programs against established Gold Standards. The tool featured a simple scoring methodology, enabling the patient services teams to systematically identify and prioritize areas for improvement while optimizing resource allocation for maximum impact.
Our approach went beyond just identifying gaps—it was about developing a foundation to set higher standards for serving patients and creating a roadmap for continuous improvement.
THE RESULTS
A foundation for strategic planning and implementation of high-impact Patient Support Programs
We delivered a comprehensive playbook with tools that empowered our client teams to elevate their patient support strategy for maximum impact.
Here’s what we achieved together:
- Dynamic guidelines: Clear, actionable guidelines for designing and implementing Patient Support Programs across therapeutic areas, ensuring they remain adaptable to evolving patient needs.
- Diagnostic tool: A practical tool that enabled client teams to assess the performance of existing programs, identify gaps against defined standards, and prioritize actions based on their potential impact.
- Consistency and scalability: The playbook ensured uniformity across programs while allowing the flexibility to adapt to brand-specific nuances.
- Strategic alignment: Activity-level governance ensured alignment with brand strategic imperatives, clarified roles and responsibilities, and empowered the client to make informed investment decisions.
These outcomes have enabled the client to transform their Patient Support Programs into a best-in-class capability that meets the evolving needs of patients and healthcare providers alike.
