At this year’s Fierce Pharma Week, the panel “From Awareness to Action: Building Connected Patient Ecosystems that Deliver Education, Access, and Outcomes” highlighted a key tension in the industry: pharma continues to refine its ability to find patients, with growing momentum around truly helping them move forward.
While pharma prioritizes precision targeting, precision isn’t enough, nor is delivering the right message to the right patient at the right time. Patients expect more than relevance. They want to feel empowered to make informed choices and equipped with resources that actually help them succeed.
Why Precision Alone Falls Short
With vast datasets and advanced analytics, brands can pinpoint the right audiences and deliver highly specific messages. But precision alone doesn’t guarantee progress. Finding the right patient is not the same as helping that patient move forward.
Too often, precision stops at placement: the right ad, in the right feed, at the right time. What it rarely delivers is relevance that feels personal, actionable, or supportive. A message may reach the correct individual, but if it doesn’t speak to their health literacy, cultural context, or immediate barriers, it risks being dismissed as noise.
This is why patients disengage. Messages that feel prescriptive or irrelevant erode trust, while messages that feel generic or overly broad do little to motivate action. In both cases, the opportunity is lost — and the cost is staggering. Non-adherence alone costs the U.S. healthcare system an estimated $100-300 billion annually.
Pharma must move beyond precision to what comes next: delivering not just the next best action but the next best value.
From "Next Best Action" to "Next Best Value"
The industry has long focused on predicting the “next best action” as a way to get even more precise in prescribing or manufacturing what someone should do or may need next. But a predictive message that tells patients what to do may not resonate if it doesn’t actually help them navigate the journey.
What matters instead is identifying the next best value: understanding patient intent and needs, giving them options, creating opportunities where they can gain utility or support, making progress easier, and then re-engaging them at various touch points.
It could be something immediately practical: a cost support program that removes financial barriers, a flexible scheduling tool that fits their lifestyle, or access to a community resource that helps them feel less isolated.
This shift changes the nature of engagement. When patients see real value, they don’t just receive a message—they act on it. By meeting people where they are, in the channels they trust, with experiences they find useful, brands enable patients to engage on their own terms and at their own pace.
Tackling the Real Barriers That Stall Adherence
Delivering true value at every inflection point and patient need is important, especially as it relates to adherence.
Adherence isn’t just about taking the medication. It’s about navigating the everyday barriers that make it hard to stay on track. For many patients, cost is the first hurdle. Nearly half of U.S. adults say healthcare is difficult to afford. So when people land on treatment or brand-specific content, a large share are actively searching for savings. Meeting that need in the moment—by surfacing copay cards or financial assistance programs as soon as intent signals suggest cost concerns—can determine whether therapy starts or stalls.
But cost is only part of the story. Patients also need a utility that helps them manage the realities of treatment. That means tracking symptoms, understanding side effects, and making small, sustainable lifestyle changes around nutrition, sleep, and mental well-being.
Patient preferences confirm this broader view of support. Healthline Media research shows 68% of patients want daily hints for healthier actions, while 35% find condition-specific communities valuable for learning from others who share similar experiences.
By combining cost navigation, practical tools, and social connection, we can help patients overcome the barriers that most often derail progress and stay engaged over time.
The Path From Awareness to Measurable Outcomes
Precision targeting has taken pharma part of the way, but if the goal is better education, access, and outcomes, the industry must go beyond predicting the “next best action.”
Patients don't simply want to be reached—they want to be supported with the next best value that reduces friction and makes progress easier. Sometimes that’s financial assistance. Sometimes it’s a simple lifestyle nudge, or the reassurance of a peer community. What matters is that the interaction feels useful, not prescriptive or generic.
The future lies in ecosystems that combine precision, personalization, and value. By anchoring technology like AI in medically reviewed content and human insight, pharma can scale support in timely, contextual, and meaningful ways. The result is a shift from simply reaching patients to empowering them, transforming awareness into measurable progress and lasting adherence.