With 80% of FDA approvals now classified as specialty products, commercial teams must rethink how they bring medicines to market, said Matt Lehmann, executive vice president, Global Commercial Solutions at Syneos Health, in a conversation with Fierce Pharma’s Rebecca Willumson. Lehmann stressed the need to remove obstacles along the patient journey, from long waits to prescription fulfillment challenges, and highlighted the growing role of patient support services in ensuring access to therapies.
On the HCP side, Lehmann noted that through Kinetic, Syneos Health AI-powered decision-making engine that accelerates commercial performance, they’re able to answer critical questions around HCP engagement. And with innovations like Predictive Storytelling and the Mindset Engine, biopharma brands can engage HCPs with precision and resonance by translating behavioral and attitudinal signals into actionable insights.
Lehmann’s ultimate guiding principle: never lose sight of the end goal — getting medicines into the hands of patients. Watch the full interview for more insights on commercialization’s future.
Rebecca Willumson:
Hi there. My name's Rebecca Willumson. I'm publisher of Fierce Pharma. I'm here today with Matt Lehmann, executive vice president of Global Commercial Solutions at Syneos Health. Matt, thank you so much for joining me.
Matt Lehmann:
Thank you, Rebecca.
Rebecca Willumson:
So, Matt, to start us off, tell me, as science becomes more specialized and markets more competitive, how should commercial teams be adapting their product development and go-to market strategies to meet evolving stakeholder needs?
Matt Lehmann:
Yeah. You're right. Specialized medicine is kind of the thing that's happening. I think, throw a couple of statistics out at you. 80% of all the medicines that are coming through the FDA now are kind of deemed as specialty products. And so we definitely need to evolve and change how we're adapting and responding to that. Some more statistics, because I think it's good background for the answer to the question, right? 54% of patients, when they get prescribed a novel compound, never fill it.
Rebecca Willumson:
Wow.
Matt Lehmann:
It's almost a month that goes by where patients are trying to get in to see a specialist for these specialty medicines. There's so many different challenges that they're facing along their journey. I think the way I would answer the question is to say we have got to remove obstacles from patients. That's what we as commercialization specialists need to figure out how to do. And in our business at Syneos Health, we have a very growing area around patient support services, I think for that very reason, right? We're trying to dial in along the patient journey, every inflection point that those patients have, and trying to figure out how to reduce the complexity for them so that they can get access to those medicines. I think that's what we need to do.
Rebecca Willumson:
Now, you've talked about keeping patients at the center. Now, assuming this bridges into changes for HCP engagement as well, how do we engage HCPs in this evolving world? What are the tools and the innovations driving impact?
Matt Lehmann:
Yeah. HCP engagement is massively changing. So, look, we have so much data in our space. It's probably one of the biggest challenges that we have, is we have so much data. Predictive analytics are flooding our brains and all of our teams. And then we're powered by AI now. So we have so much at our fingertips. At Syneos, we have a predictive model that's built called Kinetic, an engine platform, if you will, that helps us to kind of navigate how we engage with physicians.
I'll give you a couple examples. We have an innovation called Mindset Engine and then Predictive Storytelling, which are two different innovations that we power with that engine. Basically, what it allows us to do is to understand why physicians are doing what they're doing, and it allows us to be very, very specific with the way in which we message to the physicians themselves to gain resonance with them. It allows us to do that in real time as well. And so, that, to me, is a good way that we're leaning on and changing.
The second part of that that we lean on for the Kinetic engine is what we call predictive sales intelligence. So, to us, there's just a couple different parts of that. Predictive targeting and channel optimization, I think, fall into that area. Basically, we know a lot about the physician. We know what they're doing. We know why they're doing it. It allows us to focus in on the right physicians. And then we couple that with understanding where they go for their information and how they like to be communicated to, and we optimize all of that together. And it allows for very, very impactful communication and engagement with physicians. So, your question's a good one. There is massive change going on on how we're engaging HCPs. Those are just a couple of examples.
Rebecca Willumson:
Now, a lot of what you talked about is grounded in gen AI or causal AI. How are you thinking about and using agentic AI?
Matt Lehmann:
We get asked all the time at Syneos Health, "Can you help us figure out how many salespeople we need? Where should we put them?" And so we built an agent that helps us crunch all of that information with very little input now because the agents, it's so strong and knowledgeable. But we can then come back to our customers within hours instead of weeks to basically tell them how many, where that they need to put them, and then we use all the other intelligence to build from there.
Rebecca Willumson:
So, with so much of the technology and data availability changing over time, are you seeing similar shifts in the types of problems customers are asking Syneos Health to solve?
Matt Lehmann:
Yeah. It's an interesting question. I think the answer is yes, some of the problems are different. But maybe the more interesting piece to talk about is, a lot of the problems are the same, we're just getting a little bit better at how it is that we're responding to them because we've got better insight than we had before. I'll give you an example. At Syneos, I've mentioned before that we get often asked about sales forces. "Do we need one? How big do we need it? Should we go all over to the digital side of the spectrum?" And I think that conversation has started to now kind of center out right in the middle. We all know that it's not all one or the other, for most use cases anyway.
And so we spend a lot of time with people talking about, "This is how much you need in terms of a sales force." And the most important part that's changed with this is how does that plug into the other channels. So, we've evolved, we truly have evolved in our industry now from multichannel marketing to omnichannel marketing. No customers really come to us anymore and ask us for just one thing because of the appreciation of how things are interwoven together. And so, that's a difference in the way that the marketplace is approaching us. The questions are quite similar to way they've always been, but we're answering them slightly differently.
There's actually one other question, too, that's worth commenting on. We've been asked for a long time about how do we make our medicines accessible and affordable to patients. And this notion of direct-to-patient is a very real concept that's getting traction in our industry. So we have a lot of customers now approaching us to say, "What would this look like for us? How do we do this? What's the strategy? How do you operationalize that?" So, while it's, again, a similar question to before, that wasn't really part of the answer before that we explored. So, creating interesting conversations there.
Rebecca Willumson:
That is really interesting. So, I'm going to end with a broad question. So, if there's one guiding principle you believe every commercialization leader should embrace to deliver both business and patient value, what would that be?
Matt Lehmann:
That's a good question. Look, life science companies, we exist to discover a medicine, to develop that medicine, to turn it into a brand so that it's approachable by patients. As a life science commercial executive, our number one job and, really, our only job is to figure out how to get that medicine into the hands of patients. So, everything that I just talked about, like, "These are all of the different tools and the perspectives that we all have," sometimes we fall in love with our own game of trying to figure out all these things out and sometimes we lose sight of, "We have got to figure out how to get the medicine into the hands of the patient." And just when you think you've got it, you wake up the next day and something has changed. So, look, our parents, our kids, our spouses, our friends, nobody deserves anything but our very best to make sure that we do that. That guiding principle is find a way to get them the medicine.
Rebecca Willumson:
That's great. That feels like a perfect place to close out, Matt. Thank you so much for joining me today.
Matt Lehmann:
Thank you.