Introduction

Pharmaceutical organizations invest nearly $5 billion annually¹ in patient support programs (PSPs) but encounter challenges of fully harnessing their potential for driving patient value. Historically, PSPs have relied on traditional, people-driven engagement solutions, mostly delivered through nurse and case manager engagement. While affirming the importance of human-based interaction in the PSP model, the abundance of technology affords even greater potential to meet patient needs, improve upon their experience, and deliver better outcomes at lower costs. To achieve the best results for all stakeholders, there are EESI (EASY) goals that should underpin a company’s investment strategy in PSP technology:

• Enhancing patient and care partner engagement
• Empowering collaboration across service teams
• Simplifying the user experience
• Improving insight generation and operational insights to drive better patient outcomes

E – Enhancing patient and care partner engagement
It is imperative that we improve patient and care partner engagement. A pivotal first step: leveraging technology to bridge the gap between care team education and patient actions. For example, the adoption of wearables, tablets, mobile apps, and smartphones expands our reach to the patients we serve, allowing better assessment of overall health, the option for personalized recommendations, and the ability to intervene at critical points in their treatment journey. Advancements in these solutions afford clinical and commercial teams the opportunity to implement data-driven insights that identify high-risk patients, efficiently match individuals with patient support programs, and aid patient enrollment in appropriate services.

E – Empowering collaboration across service teams through technology
Current PSPs have disparate vendors and teams (i.e., affordability, access, adherence, etc.) and multiple processes that bring confusion rather than simplification for patients. A fully integrated technology platform should expose the backend user to a 360-degree view of the patient with visibility into all aspects of the patient journey. This way, when the patient transitions from one internal (or external) functional group to another, they experience seamless connectivity. This connectivity is also critical for care teams (e.g., physicians, nurses, office influencers) who often grapple with multiple workstreams and little insight into processes such as copay approval, drug shipments, or patient adherence trends. A progressive and intuitive technology platform designed to foster cross functional collaboration for end users can enable teams to optimize the patient and care partner experience.

S – Simplifying the user experience
The development of new treatments and care models requires an efficient, convenient, and accessible patient support experience for patients and their care teams. Technology solutions must simplify the user experience by utilizing the best-in-class tools for secure messaging, content sharing, patient encounter documentation, and telephony solutions, including interactive voice response (IVR) systems. When technology supports EMR integrations, clinicians can effortlessly connect patients to support services and streamline utilization management, ensuring that the patient's needs are met effectively and quickly.

By enabling interoperability and secure communication across the key players in the patient support lifecycle, advanced technology can create one voice for the patient. Improvements in patient adherence outcomes will result from making the patient treatment journey barrier-free by leveraging remote patient monitoring technologies like wearables and connected devices coupled with conversational IVR, utilizing telehealth technology for virtual health visits, taking advantage of advances in mobile technology to enable in-home care, and offering appointment scheduling technology,.

I – Improving insight generation and operational insights to drive better patient outcomes
Technology today has the potential to help better measure program performance not just operationally, but practically with patient outcomes. It can be leveraged to more effectively investigate longitudinal performance which helps evaluate patient outcomes on therapy over time. Additionally, AIML driven technology platforms can begin to discern diverse needs of patients to help support a more tailored and personalized experience. Connecting various touch points in the patient support lifecycle through innovative technologies creates an opportunity to understand the diverse needs of patients through data and advanced analytics.

Conclusion

In summary, advanced technologies enable each patient and diverse sets of patients to experience care support not only more effectively, but also more efficiently. Leveraging technology to understand what motivates patients to stay within the treatment cycle, helps PSP teams take more targeted approaches to reach, engage, prioritize, and retain patients, always with their respective preferences and needs in mind to personalize and optimize the patient experience. The ultimate goal being, to deliver improved clinical outcomes possible with compliant therapy.

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¹ Bulik, B.S. (2021) Pharmas' return on $5B spent yearly on patient support programs? Only 3% are using them: Survey, Fierce Pharma. Fierce Pharma. Available at: https://www.fiercepharma.com/marketing/pharmas-return-5-billion-spent-yearly-patient-support-programs-only-3-use-survey (Accessed: April 10, 2023).