“Go take a nap,” my husband told me. I had been complaining about the debilitating fatigue that plagues me as one of the many symptoms of the cancer I have been living with for years. He obviously got a little impatient hearing about it, and he just doesn’t understand. This fatigue is not the kind of tiredness you can correct by taking a nap. When those closest to you have difficulty empathizing with the patient’s journey, imagine the value in being able to reliably offer that empathy to those patients in the market for your company’s products.
It’s an open secret that these days, biopharma brands require a patient engagement strategy to be competitive. The empowerment of the patient in their healthcare treatment decisions continues to grow, so it seems foolish to ignore the stakeholders around whom the entire healthcare industry is built. Paying attention to feedback is one part of the answer, but the most solid strategies will be patient centric at every point in the product lifecycle. How can brands implement such a strategy?
To answer that question, let’s first examine the industry-patient relationship from the patient’s perspective: The moment a person learns that they are now a patient—usually around the time of diagnosis—the patient journey zig zags through the five stages of grief: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance. However, that journey is not linear, and patients will bounce back and forth between the stages often, sometimes even within the same phone call. Apart from feeling overwhelmed, confused, and tired, many patients also report feeling isolated: They don’t know whom to talk to or where to turn. No one else quite understands what it feels like to live with the condition, and they’ll tell you to “take a nap.” If you have a rare disease, you may never meet another person living with the same condition.
By providing empathetic support from a professional team, biopharma brands can help patients remove barriers in their journey to treatment. The relationship established is neither simply transactional nor 100% standardizable. Instead, patients are met at eye level, by a human Health Educator on the other end who listens and adapts the process to meet the patient where they are in the journey with the information they need, delivered in the way they need it in real time—whether it be text, social media, phone, or email.
The Flexible Patient Support Model
The role of a Health Educator is to make authentic connections with patients. They lead with empathy and understanding, interacting on a personal, individual level. The team includes varied cultural and healthcare backgrounds (nurses, Master of Public Health (MPH), social workers, pharmacy technicians, medical assistants, etc.). Of course, the exact composition of the team will have to be customized by brand and patient needs.
For this to work well, the operating model must have enough guardrails to remain compliant and be flexible enough to truly meet each person exactly where they are with no guesswork or presumptions. This means it cannot be over-engineered. Instead, common sense and tactical decisions on who to contact, how often, and how to reach out will drive the program forward. Each touchpoint informs the next one without the rigidity of a traditional customer relationship management (CRM) program.
Channels, Content, Timing, Format
Some patients are effectively reached via email, text, or social media. But it has been rightly said: “The phone didn’t die when the internet was invented.” Each connection channel has its specific strengths to support brand and patient goals along the journey.
From search, social media, or unbranded microsites in the awareness phase, to brand.com and starter kits in the consideration/conversion phase, and patient adherence programs during the adherence/retention phase. Health education support lines span across all stages of the journey. People of all ages and at all stages in their journey should have access to a regulatory-compliant service that is right for them.
As for content: It is not a given what each patient needs in any given moment. The art is to cocreate content that addresses the patient’s current situation and that is compatible with their preferred method of communication. Timing, also, is highly dependent on the individual and their specific situation. The best time and frequency to speak or interact is a choice that is informed by the need for optimal engagement and action. Finally, the “format” of the communication refers to a structure of the conversation or communication that allows for an optimal flow to achieve the patient’s goals as well as the brand’s.
The Virtuous Circle
In practice, this could, for example, mean that a patient who opted in is onboarded with a welcome email. Week one, the first call with a Health Educator takes place, followed up by a customized support text message. Two months later, there might be another call with a Health Educator. Two weeks after that, the patient receives customized support via text. One month later, they receive an educational email. One week after that, the Health Educator checks in via text. And so on. The result is an omnichannel CRM program that flexibly changes the approach to best align with the patient’s needs and situation.
This flexibility also allows for swift adjustment of strategy and tactics based on insights gained from data collected along the way. However, to benefit from that advantage, a measurement strategy and approach is needed prior to execution of critical tactics. This continuous virtuous circle of analysis, reporting, and optimization leads to measurable business impact and improved outcomes for patients.
It should be the goal of all of us in healthcare marketing to move beyond the transactional. Our products and services are important and central to the value we bring to the table, but we can only maximize their impact if we treat patients as more than just consumers. It is what each of us expects for ourselves as well.
