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Blog
Patient Support Programs for EBPs: Three Imperatives to Measure What Matters
Jessica Meservey, Senior Principal, Patient Engagement, IQVIA
May 03, 2024

As you build out your patient support program (PSP), emerging biopharmas (EBPs) have the opportunity to start fresh and incorporate the latest thinking without being tied to legacy design or infrastructure decisions.

This provides an advantage over larger companies who likely have experienced challenges related to siloed patient support operations and metrics that lean toward outputs instead of outcomes. When services are independently designed and measured, the sheer number of metrics becomes complex and overwhelming. It’s difficult to assess the aggregate performance and impact of an overall program, and it's also challenging to optimize investments — or to compare a program’s performance across the organization’s portfolio and against comparable programs.

As an EBP you can avoid these pitfalls and measure what matters by focusing on three imperatives.


1. Measure customer experience

In this context, the word “customer” includes active patients, their healthcare providers (HCPs), and the HCP’s office staff who often play a significant role in helping patients start and stay on therapy. But customers also include patients who are getting your product through specialty pharmacy, but haven’t enrolled in your support program.

Customers don’t care how a company organizes their PSP; they care about their own experiences — and positive experiences are crucial for changing and sustaining behaviors. That’s why empathy, clarity, ease of use, and seamlessness are among the main principles that should guide the design of a PSP. These principles should also be baked into the metrics that EBPs routinely measure, monitor, and work to improve.

Consider establishing key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure:

  • What is the caliber of experience we are providing to all stakeholders?
  • Which benefits and features do stakeholders expect manufacturers to address? Are we addressing them?
  • What do stakeholders need? How do they prioritize those needs?

You can consider perception research to know where your company stands with customers and which investments will drive meaningful improvement.


2. Focus on impact

The purpose of a PSP isn’t to have a hub that answers calls promptly (though that’s important). The purpose is to help patients get — and stay — on therapy. That’s an impact that occurs through the orchestration of multiple services.

Consider how you can build a measurement strategy that helps you track impact at the program and enterprise level. That may include a progression of metrics from tactical to strategic, as follows:

  • Interaction metrics track the volume and types of interactions, rate of inbound and outbound calls, compliance with adverse event reporting, and sent vs. planned communications.
  • Journey metrics capture the time from enrollment in the program until treatment initiation, case status information, and conversion rates through to benefit amounts and patient out-of-pocket expenses.
  • Relationship metrics go a level higher to measure how the PSP is affecting perception of the company’s brand and how well the customer experience is addressing the needs of stakeholders.
  • Outcome metrics measure the performance of a PSP in mission-critical goals, such as adherence/persistence, time-to-fill, discontinuation, healthcare/cost utilization, and clinical outcomes.

3. Be consistent

Bring it all together with a measurement framework that enables enterprise consistency. Whether you have everything going through a hub and a single specialty pharmacy, open distribution, or a few specialty pharmacy partners, you need orchestration and consistency within and across the elements of your PSP.

When your framework spans from interaction- to program-level metrics, you will be better positioned to demonstrate the operational efficiency of your PSP. You will also be able to support greater agility through detailed insights into what’s working, what’s not, and how you can tune investments to support intended outcomes.


What does ‘good’ look like?

EBPs are diverse in size, maturity, and focus. The key questions — Are we reaching the right patients? Are we performing better in certain populations? — will be the same. But initial priorities may differ:

  • Precommercial companies should work to ensure that metrics and an analytic framework are part of the patient services strategy and roadmap. Think about metrics long before — not after — launching a program.
  • Commercial companies with a single asset should prioritize a set of metrics that matter — the ones that will shine the most light on customer experience and program impact. Get organizational alignment on this focus, including consistent definitions and targets for metrics.
  • Larger EBPs with several assets need to focus on ensuring organizational consistency. Given the limited resources of most EBPs, a good measurement framework will support tough decisions on strategic tradeoffs.

If nothing else, remember that your service level agreements are NOT your KPIs; by thinking through metrics early and thoroughly, your organization can excel at measuring — and continually improving — the impact of your PSP.

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