The Communication Gap In Patient Services: A survey of 362 healthcare professionals

Rigorously generate evidence on the effect of patient services on outcomes—starting with clinical trials.

This calls for embedding services into the development process to generate the required data to prove impact on patient outcomes—starting with clinical trials. Capturing this evidence at the very earliest stages of clinical trials will also help prove the value internally to sales reps, medical affairs and budget holders, who will then advocate or allocate resources so that service programs can be developed more effectively and marketed more purposefully.

Refocus commercial functions from developing and marketing brands to designing and marketing holistic patient solutions.

Some organizations have tasked their brand teams with marketing patient services; doing so has typically led to patient services being an afterthought to the product. Other pharma companies have built separate patient services organizations working separately/in parallel to brand or marketing teams; this approach also relegates services to an add-on position. Leading organizations will embed patient services talent into their existing brand teams to enable their organizations to build and market holistic solutions.

Focus “conversations” with HCPs (and the market) on outcomes—across all channels and with greater frequency.

The entire healthcare industry is shifting to a value-based approach, but pharma companies are still talking primarily about their products. Pharmaceutical companies need to embrace an outcomes-first mindset, which means they are bringing an outcome to market, rather than a product. They need to ensure that every communication through every channel leads with outcome—this approach should apply whether they are communicating to the market through the marketing organization, through sales reps, or through