MELISSA CONNOLLY, Associate Principal, Strategy Consulting, IQVIA
JESSICA MESERVEY, Senior Principal, Patient Engagement, IQVIA
ADAM SOHN, Vice President, Patient Engagement and Digital Health, IQVIA
While pharma heavily invests in measuring customer experiences and the impact of their commercial strategies, the same rigor has historically not applied to patient support programs (PSPs). Insights into customer experiences with PSPs are often gained incidentally as part of broader research objectives or reactively when program issues arise. This is further exacerbated by the fact that most manufacturers focus measurement on operations and vendor quality (as measured through service line agreements) and not customer-driven metrics. While traditional operational metrics remain important, they are insufficient to rigorously evaluate, optimize, and communicate program impact.
In partnership with a top ten pharma company, IQVIA developed a framework beyond these traditional operational metrics. The new framework has delivered consistent, longitudinal, and nuanced insights about what customers need and how they experience manufacturer patient support across all relevant therapeutic areas. Importantly, the pharma company can now benchmark perceptions vis-à-vis its peers.
Armed with this added information, the pharma company is now able to understand what matters to customers both in terms of needs (highlighting that despite significant investment in education materials across the industry, education is still the top need) and experiences that matter (trust, responsiveness, and clarity are key).
Whether designing a PSP for a new product or optimizing existing services, consider how need- and experience-based metrics could help power your success.
To illuminate how well the patient support organization is addressing needs and delivering the caliber of experience that their customers want and expect, IQVIA helped build a new customer-centric measurement framework. This framework focused on measuring and longitudinally tracking how well their support programs were “showing up” for customers. Designed to be direct, simple, and scalable, the framework covers features, experience, benefits, and outcomes.
This layered approach to measurement helps in revealing a more complete story about individual PSPs. When applied across customers and therapeutic areas and benchmarked to peer companies, it allows pharma to focus on enterprise-wide opportunities, challenges, and gaps.
The study affirms that each stakeholder type prioritizes diverse needs and has different expectations for support from manufacturers. Differing classes of therapies and therapeutic areas also introduce entirely different sets of needs to address.
For example, in mature, high-cost therapeutic areas, patients prioritize understanding how to pay for treatment. However, across the board, patients prioritized learning about treatment. For office staff, helping patients gain access to therapy is, not surprisingly, a universal need. By knowing the needs of each therapy area and stakeholder, pharma can better prioritize patient support investments into areas that matter and better align where investments should be made across the enterprise.
Across all stakeholder types (patients, prescribers, and office staff), the most significant needs are educational in nature. Despite significant investment in education by pharma, these needs are still resounding and not appropriately addressed. The opportunity lies in not just adding more resources, but rethinking traditional educational tools and assessing how customers are accessing, digesting, and understanding the information provided.
For most therapeutic areas, stakeholder perception of the caliber of the experience was equally, or more strongly, correlated with program satisfaction than how well the program addressed needs.
Pharma can implement all the right services, but if it is not offered with a high-quality, human-centric experience, the program’s impact will be limited. Manufacturers should focus on investing in high-caliber, well-orchestrated experiences in high-need areas versus over-investing in many, ultimately, lower-quality service offerings.
Investing in personalized experiences that cater to the specific disease and audience is crucial for achieving outcomes. Improvement in experience is correlated with both faster time-to-first-fill data and improved patient adherence and persistency. To ensure an increase in the number of days on therapy, improving the program experience is just as essential as offering top-quality programs.
Most PSPs are awash in data. The challenge is getting the right primary and secondary data and transforming it into meaningful, actionable metrics. Building that kind of measurement capability is critical for any company seeking to deliver truly human-centric care. That includes the ability to connect needs to experiences and, when executed optimally, to assess clinical outcomes supported by patient services.
In the case of patient support, such insights tracked consistently over time help shape more effective program design and delivery, guiding investments in services and support that are most beneficial and increasing clarity and confidence about how patient services are delivering value for customers and the business.
As this example illustrates, an enterprise focus on simplifying and enhancing customer-centric metrics longitudinally — and ensuring that they are transparent — is more likely to produce holistic insights. This concept of consistent metric tracking is not just applicable to PSPs — but to all aspects of commercial development.