Taking a closer look into how pharmaceutical manufacturers are leveraging data to enhance patient support within the complex healthcare system.
End-to-End Patient Support Begins with Clear, Actionable Data
The healthcare system is full of complicated policies and practices that can fall short when supporting patients in need of education and financial assistance. As a result, patients are lost trying to self-navigate an intricate system, and the pharmaceutical manufacturers that are able to meet patients where they need support are finding the most success.
One way that these brands are finding success is acknowledging the challenges of Big Data and finding better ways to extract valuable insights. An overwhelming amount of data is now available, but it’s often coming from several disparate data sets and being crammed together into an incomprehensible jumble of information. Without proper distillation and analysis, manufacturers can find themselves unable to reach patients and physicians to inform them of available services.
So, how can pharma brand teams make their data work harder for them?
The Limitations of Big Data It is clear that the key to success for a pharmaceutical manufacturer is to support and encourage patient adherence. To accomplish this, many marketers focused on gathering as much data as possible. This was a perfectly logical strategy a few decades ago, because overall demographic, psychographic, geographic, and behavioral insights were incredibly useful for reaching more key stakeholders and speaking to them on a general level.
At that time, Big Data was a fairly new concept. Plus, drugs were less expensive and had fewer competitors than they do today, so it didn’t take as much data—or data analysis—to create awareness around the brand and convince patients and providers to start using it.
Today, brand marketers live in a world with increased competition, increased prices, and increased personalized advertising. This has caused many of them to reexamine how they use their data and focus their efforts on gathering “Small Data,” which is, more granular patient- and prescriber-specific information that can be used to support an individual’s personal medication journey. By distilling Big Data into more user-friendly Small Data, patient access professionals can provide real-time one-on-one support to help specific patients get on and stay on therapy.
Wise Small Data reporting should include actionable guidance that a variety of teams can use to help determine both short- and longterm planning.
Turning Knowledge into Wisdom Knowledge is simply the gathering of information, while wisdom requires a deeper understanding and ability to interpret insights. Wise Small Data reporting should include actionable guidance that a variety of teams can use to help determine both short- and long-term planning. When used strategically, large quantities of data can be pivoted into these smaller, more accessible insights that can help the skilled analyst interpret individual barriers to adherence and help solve for those scenarios.
To do this, marketers should:
• Pool data into one interoperable dataset that shows a complete picture of the patient journey, from diagnosis to refill, to help analyze where potential adherence pitfalls did or could occur.
• Build a responsive reporting portal that is customized for various functions, such as marketing, patient access, and sales, so that the story being told through the data is relevant to that particular group.
In other words, the desire for more actionable Small Data does not eliminate the need for gathering and housing large quantities of data from disparate sources. The key is in how it is broken down and disseminated among your team.
Making Data Actionable
Small Data strategies speak to an understanding that patients need to feel empowered at every point in their journey, so it is important to assess data at each stage, and possible hurdles, of that patient experience. Once data is broken down it should be used to inform and implement programs to support awareness and patient involvement:
• It is well documented that cost is the number one barrier to medication adherence, so knowing which patients and physicians to target, where to reach them, and how to communicate with them is an absolute must in any successful data-driven patient engagement strategy.
• Specialty patients in particular need plenty of support and fast answers as to whether their payer will approve their medication, and a great way to accomplish this is through a patient-initiated benefit verification program.
• Solutions that include patient-initiated benefit verification, in-pharmacy point-of-sale support, patient messaging and two-way communication services, and other tools focused on empowering patients are clear indications that this service provider is looking to keep patients actively engaged in their healthcare.
Pharma executives are looking for granular patient and prescriber-specific information that enables manufacturer teams to provide real-time one-on-one support—the kind of support that helps patients start and stay on therapy. Customizable, interoperable data, presented in user-friendly portals, promises a revolution in the continued push for medication access and affordability while opening doors for patients to take on a more active role in their healthcare.
Resources:
1. https://www.doxee.com/blog/technology/big-data-in
pharmaceutical-sector/
