Bridging Data Insights Across the Patient Journey to Inform Your Commercialization Strategy

Today’s guest post comes from Jenna Mitby-Manning, Senior Director of Commercial Strategy & Insights, Access & Adherence at RxCrossroads by McKesson.

Jenna explains how data-driven solutions accelerate time to therapy, improve patient outcomes, and allow biopharma companies to make informed strategic decisions.

Click here to learn more about RxCrossroads' therapy access and adherence solutions.

Read on for Jenna’s insights.

Bridging Data Insights Across the Patient Journey to Inform Your Commercialization Strategy
By Jenna Mitby-Manning, Sr. Director, Commercial Strategy & Insights, Access & Adherence, RxCrossroads by McKesson

Today’s healthcare ecosystem is rich with data points representing the clinical and commercial journey of a therapy. Together with insights gathered throughout the patient journey, from clinical trials to real-world evidence, there’s a multitude of intelligence that can inform the market strategy for a therapy. The ability for biopharma companies to connect the dots between clinical considerations and commercial needs can accelerate time to therapy, improve outcomes, and increase persistency.

RxCrossroads by McKesson has supported more than 400 therapy launches, which gives us the ability to look across the entire ecosystem and link these experiences to drive greater insight into all aspects of the patient’s healthcare journey.

DATA-DRIVEN PATIENT SOLUTIONS

Enabling the patient journey starts by leveraging data up-front as a critical support program design element. Ideally, data-driven program design starts prior to launch, but the approach can be adopted for any program at various points during its lifecycle.

Data-driven program design is not about the volume of data—we have more data at our fingertips than we have ever had before—it’s about having the right data to generate actionable insights to make informed decisions. When we’re designing patient support programs—from access to adherence to affordability or safety—we help biopharma address critical questions as part of their overall data strategy:

• What are the program’s key performance indicators?
• What data needs to be collected?
• How will the data be used?
• How will the data be analyzed?

Once live data are available, the approach shifts to optimization of the patient journey seeking to reduce access barriers, increase service utilization, and improve patient adherence. Insights driven by data intelligence support informed decision making, helping biopharma guide coverage and outreach strategies.

Streamlining the patient journey not only drives better outcomes, it can also lead to more efficient allocation of resources. For example, effectively increasing speed to therapy suggests strategic investment in first fill programs and adherence support.

ADOPTING A LAUNCH, LEARN, PIVOT PHILOSOPHY

Improved access to data and advanced analytics has enabled the ability to make real-time decisions, learn faster and optimize execution in a more agile fashion. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March, the critical role of data within patient support solutions was amplified. Data fueled biopharma’s ability to pivot; in fact, RxCrossroads partnered with approximately 30% of our customers to make changes in a matter of days to remove barriers to access, adherence, affordability or safety solutions.

Optimization should involve regular testing to capture feedback on what is working, and where the program could provide a better patient experience. At the end of the day, there are going to be features that are not as effective as originally designed, but data empowers biopharma to activate the levers we have to make a program successful.

FUELING INNOVATION WITH DATA INTELLIGENCE

As the volume of data available continues to grow, the importance of data and analytics increases in its value, not only in program design but also in product design. Patient support solutions continue to become increasingly automated, but human involvement in these programs remains a fundamental element, even with advanced technology in place, as it is still required for a significant number of patient engagements. With a thorough understanding of the patient journey, we can identify behaviors and needs at an individual patient level.

Technology innovation is critical to advancing biopharma objectives and the patient experience, but it must not come at the cost of alienating potentially marginalized patient populations. Technology enables services, but only for the patients it can support.

The key to success with specialized therapies that have complex clinical requirements and profiles is to address the individual. RxCrossroads uses data and patient journey analytics to meet patients where they are and bring the empathy and humanity needed to specialty therapies. Here are examples of how we apply this to product and biopharma solutions:

• The use of machine learning in the contact center helps detect Potential Adverse Events (PAE). At RxCrossroads, we use natural language processing to monitor what's happening during human-to-human interactions to uncover missed PAEs. It has empowered agents, not just with data, but with connectivity and technology to mitigate risk and improve the accuracy of adverse event reporting.

• Artificial Intelligence enables our adherence solutions to transition from automated digital interactions to live clinical support to address patient needs as they unfold in real-time.

Access and adherence programs are designed with the patient journey at the center. While data has always added value to the journey, what has changed is the role it plays across the ecosystem to ultimately reduce time to therapy, improve outcomes, mitigate risk, and increase patient persistency.

Click here to learn more about RxCrossroads' therapy access and adherence solutions.

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