Building the Partnership Muscle: The Key to Delivering Successful Patient Experience Solutions
Originally published in Med Ad News December 2024
THE BUSINESS RATIONALE: WHY PATIENT EXPERIENCE MATTERS TO PHARMA
For clinical trials
Imagine a scenario where patients feel like superheroes when joining a clinical trial. They understand what to expect before signing up. Their needs around transport and the inability to sit for long hours are addressed up front. Documents are completed before arrival, and they are offered healthy snacks and engaging materials during treatment. Trial milestones are celebrated, and at the end of the trial, there is a celebration to honor participa
In this scenario, trial recruitment is faster and easier, and drop-offs are significantly reduced, easing the pressure on biopharma teams to hit targets. Recruitment times are shortened, which would bring valuable new treatments to patients sooner.
Today, this scenario might seem out of reach for many biopharma companies in the absence of tight partnerships with CROs, investigators, and clinical trial site staff.
“Clinical trial patients should be celebrated,” says Paul Landerville, U.S. early asset lead, Boehringer Ingelheim. “They are taking a chance on a potential new treatment, but not all trials end well for patients – not everyone gets the new treatment. I see them as explorers, and the industry calls them subjects. If we could improve their trial experience, remove the burdens, create some fanfare when they are halfway through the trial, [or] have a special day for them at the end of the trial. It would help them feel more valued.”
For patient support
In another scenario, imagine patients staying on treatment longer despite adverse events, gaining a sense of control living with their disease, and achieving improved health outcomes.
Patients enroll in a disease management program offering care team support, a patient mentor, and messaging delivered from within the EHR system tailored to their experience, which include setting expectations up front about potentially burdensome side effects. A user-friendly digital solution tracks their disease journey, with milestones patients celebrate with family, peers, and care team.
This scenario might also seem out of reach for many biopharma companies, and uncommon for most patients today, but it is achievable through careful collaboration with digital health providers, physicians or hospital systems, and patient advocacy groups.
“We have research to show that patient motivation is similar to a battery,” says Natalie Bloomfield, former global patient engagement leader at Amgen. “After diagnosis, patients may be running on empty, as the process of diagnosis and treatment initiation can be exhausting and traumatic. It takes multiple milestones to recharge their battery, to see treatment progress, feel informed so they can understand their disease and treatment, and transition from their ‘old normal’ to a ‘new normal.’ Patients need solutions that create connections, enable sharing experiences with similar patients, and practical, personally relevant support – all of these things are necessary, they aren’t ‘nice to haves.’ But executing these solutions in isolation is the challenge.”
BARRIERS: SYSTEMIC ISSUES THAT HINDER SOLUTION DEVELOPMENT
Clinical trials
Many pharmaceutical companies outsource clinical trials to CROs who are focused on efficiency rather than patient experience. As a consequence, inadequate attention is paid to each step of the journey that patients (and the clinical trial site staff) experience, leading to suboptimal trial enrollment and completion rates and a longer-term reduction in the pool of willing trial participants.
If patients don’t know what to expect, and if the pharmaceutical sponsor together with the CRO and site staff do not understand patient expectations throughout the trial experience, the trial experience will not meet patient expectations.
Patient support programs (PSPs)
Pharma-sponsored PSPs often fall short due to high costs, limited scalability, perceived compliance risks, and difficulty measuring impact. Many PSPs end up as basic messaging programs, missing the mark on delivering meaningful value to patients, or too complex to use, or redundant with other solutions available in the market. Physicians and nurses may also see them as intrusive rather than complementary tools for better patient management.
Meanwhile, hospitals and group practices often don’t have the resources, time, or incentives to manage each patient optimally with customized patient engagement solutions. And, advocacy groups don’t see PSP implementation as directly in their purview.
“A key problem with pharma-sponsored patient support programs is that every time we try to create a great patient experience, to build peer-to-peer support, there is a lot of hesitation in terms of compliance risk,” Bloomfield says. “And then we go with the safest option, which doesn’t work. Meanwhile, the ideal solution cannot be delivered in a vacuum; it requires the close cooperation of multiple players: physicians, nurses, advocacy groups, health-tech, and pharma.”
OPPORTUNITIES: HOW LEVERAGING PARTNERSHIPS CAN SUPPORT DELIVERY AT SCALE
As we have seen, there are a number of constraints on biopharma’s ability to act alone to build optimal patient experiences, and equally there are resource constraints that sometimes prevent physicians and the wider hospital/healthcare systems from collaborating with pharma. Some of these constraints, such as those connected to institutional incentives, are not easily overcome. However, many constraints, including overcoming compliance risks, cost concerns, ability to measure, and failing to meet patient expectations can be overcome through systems thinking (understanding patient needs holistically across the interactions) and cross-stakeholder leadership and partnering to improve the situation.
“Intervening in the care path directly as a pharma company is difficult and probably not desirable,” says Marta Lago Arenas, a customer experience consultant. “The opportunity is to collaborate. For example, providing insights, [and] supporting studies or experiences where a new approach is designed, implemented, and tested can improve outcomes in a compliant and evidence-based way. Pharma partners with providers and healthcare systems to create improvements in patient experience and evaluate the approach.”
REAL-WORLD EXAMPLES
Here are just a few examples of how systems thinking and partnering across the health ecosystem have made a real difference in patient engagement in clinical trial and patient support settings.
Boehringer partners with pharmacy chain and trial solutions provider to make clinical trials more accessible
To reach underserved communities in the United States, global biopharma company Boehringer Ingelheim is partnering with Walgreens pharmacies and Emvenio Research, a decentralized trial network, to improve clinical trial recruitment and retention, as well as increasing diversity in Phase III obesity and type 2 diabetes trials. The project aims to educate Black and Hispanic adults, who are more likely to be impacted by these diseases, on clinical trials and empower them to utilize this treatment pathway. By bringing trial sites directly to communities, Boehringer hopes to engage patients where they are in their journey, and make trials more accessible for a wider group of patients.
Amgen partners with hospitals and digital health to improve adherence
Global biopharma company Amgen led a consortium partnership to empower patients at high risk of cardiovascular disease to take control of their recovery treatment plan and reduce the likelihood of further hospital admissions postheart attack. The program, called Rehab+, was based on digital tele-rehabilitation, with Liva Healthcare providing the app technology. Amgen partnered with rehabilitation hospitals in Spain, including La Paz in Madrid, Vall d’Hebron in Barcelona, and Virgen de la Victoria in Malaga, and Zuyderland in the Netherlands. The program was endorsed by the Spanish Society of Cardiology, Netherlands Society of Cardiology, and Foro Español de Pacientes (Spanish Patients Forum).
Partnering with a health-tech company to embed messaging in clinical workflows
MyCareCompass, a digital health solutions designed for oncology care teams, partnered with Kettering Health Network to decrease cancer patient fear and anxiety, improve patient satisfaction and outcomes, and decrease healthcare resource utilization and costs. The collaboration allowed for rich insights from oncology nurse navigators to understand gaps in patient education and associated impact, content aligned with health literacy best practices and cancer patient engagement data, full integration within Kettering Health’s EMR platform and operational workflow, and auto-deployed educational videos and content to patients from Kettering via email/SMS.
DELIVERING ON THE PATIENT EXPERIENCE PROMISE
Pharmaceutical companies are well positioned to coordinate the delivery of next-generation patient support thinking and solutions given their unique strengths including scientific innovation, financial resources, and specialized disease insights. Below are recommendations for flexing Pharma’s systems-thinking and ecosystem partnering muscles in service of better patient experiences.
ADVICE FOR SENIOR LEADERSHIP
Recognize friction and limitations of developing solutions in isolation, and the benefits of a multi-partner approach.
Measure what you need to change. To create solutions that are scalable across therapy areas and markets, understand what you need to change and build success metrics around that. For instance, if treatment adherence is the key issue, identify benchmarks and set concrete performance objectives for a successful program before initiating any partnerships.
Utilize cross functional squads. Involve market research, patient engagement, clinical operations or medical affairs, and communications and IT team members, but ensure there is clear accountability and responsibility in the squad.
Embed ecosystem partnering into job accountabilities. Partnerships may be in place with agencies or digital health providers to support partnerships, but consider explicitly tasking internal teams with ecosystem thinking and partnership formation. Consortiums including hospital or healthcare systems, patient organizations, health tech, and innovation networks should be encouraged. You could even consider creating a role specific to ecosystem integration.
Take an agile approach to partnering. Using lean methodology to build, measure, and learn enables your team to deliver solutions faster, but you want to learn first before you build. Leverage existing knowledge from market research and data from existing or previous programs to drive early decision making, and build solutions in a modular and agile way so new data can be utilized to pivot or adapt quickly.
ADVICE FOR MEDICAL, COMMERCIAL, AND PATIENT PARTNERING TEAMS
Leverage an ecosystem approach to codesign solutions that extend beyond a single market.
Share and learn from partners. Leverage pharma’s market research strengths to understand the intersection of patient journey and care pathway, and share what you learn with partners. Partners may have valuable knowledge to exchange including behavior change approaches, clinical practice data, and gaps in services for high-priority patient needs.
Engage partners early. Too often, partners may not be consulted until near the end of program development, almost always as a validation of the thinking that has gone into developing the program, rather than in shaping the program from the beginning.
Include nurses and front-line staff. Nurses are often overlooked in solution development but they are critical to delivering a great patient experience. Front-line hospital staff are often under-resourced and welcome digital tools and innovations that will enable them to do a better job for patients in critical care or emergency situations.
Leverage digital health partners and start-ups. As you consider build versus buy versus partner, think carefully about buy and partner. The ecosystem of digital health companies and start-ups is well developed and expanding quickly. Chances are there is a provider that would be eager to partner and would save time, energy, and money.
As you embark on 2025 strategic planning, give extra consideration to how you can embed ecosystem thinking and a partnership mindset into your patient engagement ambitions. The building blocks of successful patient engagement solutions are in place, they are just distributed across the healthcare landscape. Let’s continue to flex our partnership muscles to give our patients the solutions they deserve.
Authors
Gregg Fisher, Managing Partner, The Stem – gfisher@thestem.com
Debbie Denison is a Lead Strategy Consultant, The Stem
Category: Customer Experience, Digital Transformation, Direct to Consumer (DTC) Engagement, Featured blog post, Global Customer Engagement, Innovation, Patient Engagement & Support, Pharmaceutical & Biotechnology
Return to articles page
follow us on LinkedIn
Next post
