Is Your Healthcare Brand Following a Patient-centered Approach?

In its ground-breaking report titled Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century, the Institute of Medicine made a cogent argument for healthcare organizations to adopt a patient-centered approach to developing treatments.

Following that report, healthcare companies have come to recognize that patient-centrism is not only the right thing to do for their markets, but a smart business decision as well. Back in 2014, Sanofi created what was considered the first Chief Patient Officer role by hiring Dr. Mary Beal, former deputy executive director of the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI). Accordingly, other Big Pharma brands have followed suit, adding patient-centric leadership to their C-suites.

However, not all pharma brands have put patients at the centers of their worlds. Some have been slow to adopt this shift in emphasis from products to patients.

What is a Patient-centered Model?

A patient-centered model focuses on a product development philosophy built around:

• An obligation to care for patients on their own terms
• Adopting a deep respect for patients as unique organic beings
• Getting feedback from patients about their own care
• Honoring patient wishes while still ensuring safety

A truly patient-centric model requires an understanding of a patient’s experience of his or her condition – not only symptomatically, but accounting for the values and needs that can lead to a positive healthcare outcome.

A patient-centered model is now considered an essential starting point for commercial practices, informing decision-making around product development, patient support needs, launch planning, commercial targeting, and value communication.

The Patient-centric Value Proposition for Pharma Brands

Brands that have moved to a patient-centered approach have reaped rewards in several areas. The Aurora Project, a 2016 global benchmark survey of the pharma industry, reported that 93% of respondents believe that integrating patient-focused strategies has improved overall business outcomes.

Respondents identified specific lifts in brand value, including:

• Increased employee engagement (58%)
• Improved HCP trust (58%)
• Improved patient trust (56%)
• Higher revenues (40%)
• Employee recruitment/retention (36%)

Although some brands continue to focus solely on business needs, the report showed that the industry has been moving to a “sweet spot” between patient needs and business mandates.

Adopting a Patient-centered Model

Moving to patient-centricity is not easy. Adopting this model requires significant organizational shifts for existing brands. It’s a model built on top-down adoption – there has to be buy-in from leadership. A shift to a patient-centric model involves the following transformative steps:

1. Building a culture change into the existing business model, where leadership recognizes and embraces the competencies required to be patient-centric leaders.
2. Creating mechanisms to capture and categorize patient and caregiver experiences by building formalized channels to engage and receive feedback in a simple, measurable manner.
3. Translating those patient and caregiver experiences into internal initiatives, programs, and policies that improve offerings and drive better outcomes.
4. Integrating this newfound data into the day-to-day operations to drive better product development, trials, and reporting activities.
5. Enhancing feedback mechanisms and product development cycles based on the insights found through this new approach – so that leadership does not make business decisions that run counter to the commitment, potentially impacting patient trust.

For pharma brand marketers, “patient-centric” cannot simply be a marketing buzzword. Brand marketers and agencies must better understand the emotional and economic factors that drive patient behavior so they can create the direct-to-consumer marketing communications that speak to those factors, not simply speak to symptoms or conditions.

Ultimately, pharma brands must “walk the talk” or risk losing market share. Patient centrism is not a promotional viewpoint. It’s also not simply a means to a financial end. Adopting a patient-centric model requires a complete transformation of the market frame of reference through which a company operates.

A key for brands in building relationships with patients is to also ensure they are trusted by providers and other HCPs. Gaining credibility among healthcare providers is important as a pathway to building patient trust. Therefore, it’s helpful to understand how to gain that credibility.

Read our whitepaper Where Credibility Goes, Doctors Follow to see the importance of building that credible reputation.

Article Written by: Alex Brown