Emerging Biopharma
Flexible solutions. Responsive teams. Data-driven insights.
-
Americas
-
Asia & Oceania
-
A-I
J-Z
EMEA Thought Leadership
Developing IQVIA’s positions on key trends in the pharma and life sciences industries, with a focus on EMEA.
Learn more -
Middle East & Africa
EMEA Thought Leadership
Developing IQVIA’s positions on key trends in the pharma and life sciences industries, with a focus on EMEA.
Learn more
Regions
-
Americas
-
Asia & Oceania
-
Europe
-
Middle East & Africa
-
Americas
-
Asia & Oceania
-
Europe
Europe
- Adriatic
- Belgium
- Bulgaria
- Czech Republic
- Deutschland
- España
- France
- Greece
- Hungary
- Ireland
- Israel
- Italia
EMEA Thought Leadership
Developing IQVIA’s positions on key trends in the pharma and life sciences industries, with a focus on EMEA.
Learn more -
Middle East & Africa
EMEA Thought Leadership
Developing IQVIA’s positions on key trends in the pharma and life sciences industries, with a focus on EMEA.
Learn more
SOLUTIONS
-
Life Sciences Solutions
-
Healthcare Solutions
-
Medical Device and Diagnostic
-
U.S. Government
Life Sciences Solutions
Bringing together unparalleled healthcare data, advanced analytics, innovative technologies, and healthcare expertise to create intelligent connections that speed the development and commercialization of innovative medicines to improve patient lives.
Learn MoreLife Sciences Solutions
Healthcare Solutions
Accelerate digital innovation to enable smarter decisions that reduce cost, modernize patient and consumer engagement, and improve health outcomes.
Learn MoreHealthcare Solutions
Medical Device and Diagnostic Solutions
Your world is unique – and quite different from pharma. In the U.S., decision-making has shifted from individual physicians to integrated networks--GPOs, IDNs and payers. These groups have heightened the focus on proving your solution’s value, demanding outcomes analyses and putting pressure on pricing.
Learn MoreMedical Device and Diagnostic Solutions
U.S. Government Solutions
For government agencies and organizations at every level—from federal or national to regional and local—Big Data can have a huge impact on public health.
Learn MoreU.S. Government Solutions
U.S. PROGRESS POINT
A curation of IQVIA's best thinking on topics and trends driving change, disruption, and progress in the United States healthcare market.
LEARN MOREU.S. BLOGS
Get the latest insights on our life sciences, healthcare, and medical technology solutions in the United States. Follow our blog today!
LEARN MOREBlog
Patient Support Programs for EBPs: Three Imperatives to Measure What Matters
May 03, 2024
As you build out your patient support program (PSP), emerging biopharmas (EBPs) have the opportunity to start fresh and incorporate the latest thinking without being tied to legacy design or infrastructure decisions.
This provides an advantage over larger companies who likely have experienced challenges related to siloed patient support operations and metrics that lean toward outputs instead of outcomes. When services are independently designed and measured, the sheer number of metrics becomes complex and overwhelming. It’s difficult to assess the aggregate performance and impact of an overall program, and it's also challenging to optimize investments — or to compare a program’s performance across the organization’s portfolio and against comparable programs.
As an EBP you can avoid these pitfalls and measure what matters by focusing on three imperatives.
1. Measure customer experience
In this context, the word “customer” includes active patients, their healthcare providers (HCPs), and the HCP’s office staff who often play a significant role in helping patients start and stay on therapy. But customers also include patients who are getting your product through specialty pharmacy, but haven’t enrolled in your support program.
Customers don’t care how a company organizes their PSP; they care about their own experiences — and positive experiences are crucial for changing and sustaining behaviors. That’s why empathy, clarity, ease of use, and seamlessness are among the main principles that should guide the design of a PSP. These principles should also be baked into the metrics that EBPs routinely measure, monitor, and work to improve.
Consider establishing key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure:
- What is the caliber of experience we are providing to all stakeholders?
- Which benefits and features do stakeholders expect manufacturers to address? Are we addressing them?
- What do stakeholders need? How do they prioritize those needs?
You can consider perception research to know where your company stands with customers and which investments will drive meaningful improvement.
2. Focus on impact
The purpose of a PSP isn’t to have a hub that answers calls promptly (though that’s important). The purpose is to help patients get — and stay — on therapy. That’s an impact that occurs through the orchestration of multiple services.
Consider how you can build a measurement strategy that helps you track impact at the program and enterprise level. That may include a progression of metrics from tactical to strategic, as follows:
- Interaction metrics track the volume and types of interactions, rate of inbound and outbound calls, compliance with adverse event reporting, and sent vs. planned communications.
- Journey metrics capture the time from enrollment in the program until treatment initiation, case status information, and conversion rates through to benefit amounts and patient out-of-pocket expenses.
- Relationship metrics go a level higher to measure how the PSP is affecting perception of the company’s brand and how well the customer experience is addressing the needs of stakeholders.
- Outcome metrics measure the performance of a PSP in mission-critical goals, such as adherence/persistence, time-to-fill, discontinuation, healthcare/cost utilization, and clinical outcomes.
3. Be consistent
Bring it all together with a measurement framework that enables enterprise consistency. Whether you have everything going through a hub and a single specialty pharmacy, open distribution, or a few specialty pharmacy partners, you need orchestration and consistency within and across the elements of your PSP.
When your framework spans from interaction- to program-level metrics, you will be better positioned to demonstrate the operational efficiency of your PSP. You will also be able to support greater agility through detailed insights into what’s working, what’s not, and how you can tune investments to support intended outcomes.
What does ‘good’ look like?
EBPs are diverse in size, maturity, and focus. The key questions — Are we reaching the right patients? Are we performing better in certain populations? — will be the same. But initial priorities may differ:
- Precommercial companies should work to ensure that metrics and an analytic framework are part of the patient services strategy and roadmap. Think about metrics long before — not after — launching a program.
- Commercial companies with a single asset should prioritize a set of metrics that matter — the ones that will shine the most light on customer experience and program impact. Get organizational alignment on this focus, including consistent definitions and targets for metrics.
- Larger EBPs with several assets need to focus on ensuring organizational consistency. Given the limited resources of most EBPs, a good measurement framework will support tough decisions on strategic tradeoffs.
If nothing else, remember that your service level agreements are NOT your KPIs; by thinking through metrics early and thoroughly, your organization can excel at measuring — and continually improving — the impact of your PSP.
Related solutions
Contract Sales and Medical Solutions
Deploy sales representatives, clinical nurse educators, field reimbursement specialists virtually or in the field to communicate the benefits of your therapy.