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Article

Measuring the Impact of a Patient Support Program

Mar 22, 2021

An alarming 30 percent to 61 percent of patients do not adhere to their treatment regimen – leading to the loss of efficacy for the disease management1. As a result, pharma-sponsored patient support programs (PSPs) have become increasingly popular in chronic therapy areas as a way to improve patient outcomes and deliver the accompanying humanistic and economic benefits of keeping patients on therapy.

Many pharmaceutical companies around the world have intensified their use of PSPs in chronic therapy areas, as reflected in IQVIA’s activity in this field. For instance, IQVIA’s clinical educator teams are supporting over 900 clinicians today with more than 400 Patient Support Programs, in over 100 therapeutic areas. Yet, unless they follow an experimental design to test the effect of their efforts, companies cannot monitor the impact and measure the actual benefit of the PSP.

Fortunately, it’s possible to measure the real value of a PSP for any brand prescribed for a chronic treatment and fulfilled in retail pharmacies. It’s a matter of comparing longitudinal prescription volumes for patients in the PSP versus those not in the support program.

Here’s how we measured the success of one PSP...

An innovative program... but was it worth expanding?

A pharmaceutical company with a treatment for multiple indications had enrolled about 500 patients in a PSP. The program used innovative technology to provide patients with customized digital reminders to help them keep to their medication schedule, to capture details on their compliance (the percentage of doses taken as prescribed) and on their persistence (the number of days a patient takes a medication). (The program was run through a third party, so patients’ privacy was protected, and the company did not have the names of patients.) The company was interested in expanding the program if it was, in fact, making a positive difference. The patient care managers asked IQVIA for an analysis of patient dynamics to understand the impact of the program on patient compliance and persistence.

Matched test and control groups using Longitudinal Prescription data (LRx)

IQVIA was able, using anonymized identifiers, to match 232 patients who were enrolled in the PSP with their dispensed prescription data in our LRx database, which is drawn from a panel of retail pharmacies and contains over 10 years of historical data. We then created three control groups consisting of patients who were not participating in the PSP, but who were matched to the PSP group, i.e. the test group.

We then performed analyses to measure compliance and persistence across the test and control cohorts. To measure the persistence, Kaplan-Meier survival curves were created, in order to follow patients who started on therapy at different points in time. To measure the compliance, we looked at the length of time between refills as well as the number of packs purchased within a certain period, again comparing the test and control groups.

A clear indication of value

In measuring persistence, we looked at the early months of treatment as well as two full years of treatment. Within the first three months of treatment, there was no significant difference between the test and control groups. However, over time, differences became readily apparent. As seen in Figure 1, 69 percent of the patients in the test group, compared to 55 percent in the combined control groups, remained on their medication at the one-year mark. And, after two years, 46 percent of those in the program remained on therapy, versus 34 percent in the control group. Figure 2 shows that in the first year of treatment, patients in the PSP were, on average, more compliant than those in not part of a PSP.

Figure 1: Time on Medication, Test vs. Control Groups

Figure 2: Average Number of Days between Product Purchases

The compliance evolves over time for each group, nonetheless patients participating to the PSP remain more compliant and persistent. We observed less patients dropping their therapy due to lack of efficacy as they were treated on the right dosage.

We also looked at compliance across different specialties and found that there was less of a difference between the test and control group in one particular specialty as compared to the other specialties. One explanatory theory is that in that one particular specialty area, the disease symptoms are severe enough that patients are more motivated to follow their prescribed treatment regimen and are less likely to need the reminders provided as part of the PSP.

Thus, it is no longer necessary to wonder about the effectiveness of a PSP for any chronic treatment that is dispensed through retail pharmacies; using the IQVIA Longitudinal Prescription data (LRx) and proven analytical approaches, we can provide definitive answers.

To learn more about how IQVIA would approach a study for your brand, please contact Julie Desmedt.

 

1IQVIA Claims Data (Q3) 2020

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