Friday, August 02, 2024

Mid-Year Hub Review: Five Considerations for Staying Ahead of the Curve

Today’s guest post comes from Stacey Little, Senior Vice President of Business Development and Marketing at AssistRx.

Stacey provides five crucial questions to help life science companies evaluate providers of patient support programs (PSPs).

To learn more, register for AssistRx's free three-part webinar series: Ahead of the Curve: Considerations for your 2025 Patient Support Program.

Read on for Stacey’s insights.

Mid-Year Hub Review: Five Considerations for Staying Ahead of the Curve
By Stacey Little, Senior Vice President of Business Development and Marketing, AssistRx

At this time of year, many life sciences organizations are evaluating the efficacy and value of their patient support (hub) programs (PSPs), vendors and partnerships that drive improved outcomes for their patients.

Your PSP provider should serve as a consultative partner, helping navigate trending market changes, technology improvements and opportunities throughout the product lifecycle to deliver the best patient and healthcare provider (HCP) experiences.

With 15+ years serving 45+ life sciences organizations and 140+ therapies, our team of therapy initiation and patient support services experts have identified five crucial considerations for your mid-year PSP review that will keep your program ahead of the curve.

1. Is your PSP provider going beyond delivering data to deliver data insights?

Today’s life sciences organizations are hungry for data—and data analysis. However, a barrage of data from multiple vendor sources can make data ecosystem management and data interpretation difficult.

During program design, your PSP provider should consult on how to capture, validate, standardize, analyze and evolve program data to make informed decisions. They should confirm your data is representative of the whole, help you understand the meaningfulness of your data and arm your teams with behavior-changing proof points that lead to ongoing program optimization.

2. Are you able to flex your program to gain increased control over data and/or patient and HCP experiences?

Battling lack of visibility and control over patient- and HCP-facing experiences, some life sciences organizations are considering taking a portion of their PSP operations in-house. The scale of both the organizational lift and infrastructure investment required to support an insourced PSP makes PSP providers who can support a hybrid approach especially appealing.

Hybrid PSP models can leverage in-house staff for patient- and HCP-facing touchpoints while outsourcing all backend payer- and pharmacy-facing functions, or they can outsource both frontend and backend touchpoints for access and affordability services while insourcing adherence services. Leveraging a PSP provider’s technology or CRM also prevents needing to build in-house systems.

The right PSP partner can easily integrate into whichever PSP model works best for your program’s goals. AssistRx’s Advanced Gateway, for example, utilizes a single API integration to rapidly deploy comprehensive, tech-first e-support services—easily powering outsourced and hybrid models.

3. Is your program responsive to changes in regulatory policy?

Healthcare policy—especially regarding pharmaceutical pricing and government-funded programs—is a recurrent focus for state and federal legislatures. Your PSP provider should arm your program team and your organization’s decision makers with the latest insights on how new or changing regulatory policies will impact your program, patients and HCPs.

Issues like the Inflation Reduction Act, accumulator and maximizer policies and alternative funding programs are top of mind for many market access leaders.

Your PSP provider should deliver a proactive strategy for your program, plus a consultative approach to utilizing the right balance of tech and talent to ensure your program is responsive and configurable to the changing market and regulatory landscape.

4. Are you able to take a year-round approach to reverification?

Traditional approaches to annual reverification force life sciences organizations to address “blizzard season” with spikes in budgets and FTEs. PSP providers using a tech-first approach to reverification use Advanced eServices and multifaceted strategies to enable year-round screening that effectively eliminates blizzard season.

As a result, your patients are less likely to experience coverage gaps and your program can proactively convert patients to commercial therapy as they gain coverage throughout the year. For one AssistRx program, using Advanced Benefit Verification (ABV) and eIncome Verification to automate reverification resulted in 115 patients converted to commercial therapy and roughly $16 million in recaptured revenue.

5. Can your PSP provider support specialty-lite and retail therapies?

Specialty-lite and retail therapies face unique hurdles. Your program may lose visibility at the retail channel, and your patients and HCPs may require specialty-level access and affordability support. Life sciences organizations are challenged with lower enrollment into support services and/or the ability to provide PSP services with a limited budget due to the therapy’s relatively low WAC.

PSP providers with industry-leading technology can solve for these issues. Digital hubs like AssistRx’s CoAssist can digitally intake an ePrescription from the EHR, triggering Advanced eServices, then route the prescription to the appropriate in-network pharmacy. For pharmacy benefit therapies, initiating access at the point of the pharmacy claim—through AssistRx’s Advanced Access Anywhere (AAA)—immediately triggers Advanced eServices to access therapy and support services. With this model, both HCPs and the pharmacy can remain in their workflow and patients are met where and when they are ready to take action.

Both options support higher enrollment into support services—even eliminating the enrollment form—to provide access and affordability services and gain visibility into the patient journey, all while providing better, simpler experiences for HCPs.

We’ve gathered access and patient support leaders from across the industry to discuss these trending industry topics. Register for our webinar series, Ahead of the Curve: Considerations for your 2025 Patient Support Program.


The content of Sponsored Posts does not necessarily reflect the views of HMP Omnimedia, LLC, Drug Channels Institute, its parent company, or any of its employees. To find out how you can publish a guest post on Drug Channels, please contact Paula Fein (paula@DrugChannels.net).

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