In a tech-driven healthcare ecosystem in which patients are engaged consumers, product value is contingent on treatment outcomes and patient success. With digital tools and resources at their fingertips, today’s patient is empowered to make informed treatment decisions; and physicians need enhanced support to ensure they’re meeting patient needs. Providing physicians with the tools to practice precise, individualized patient care requires manufacturers to go beyond traditional outreach strategies and adopt advanced technologies using real-world data (RWD). With RWD, companies have the opportunity to produce sophisticated real-world evidence (RWE) that fills in the gaps of each patient’s story.
Gathering high-value RWD is not a new concept, but there’s room to grow for pharma companies that want to efficiently leverage RWE in the patient journey. Most manufacturers know that product success is becoming reliant on RWD and the RWE it generates, but companies do not fully understand how this information affects patients. As a result, companies miss the chance to effectively leverage RWE insights to improve patient care.
To be successful, pharma companies must partner with a scientific team adept in data analytics and research. By integrating the skills of industry experts, such as data scientists and HEOR researchers, into commercialization strategies, companies will understand how to improve patient diagnosis and long-term treatment plans, as well as solve difficult value challenges. To make a meaningful impact on patient outcomes, companies must start by applying RWD and RWE insights when it matters the most — at the beginning of the patient journey.
Meeting the Patient
Patients will go undiagnosed for an average of seven years with a rare disease before an accurate diagnosis. With data-driven insights, companies now have a chance to support patients sooner by shortening the time to diagnosis. As clinicians and researchers look to RWD to support clinical outcome studies and treatment innovation, specifically for rare and complex diseases, the quality, scalability, and breadth of data becomes critical.
Aggregating RWD from sources across the healthcare ecosystem offers a full holistic view of the patient journey. Over time, as regulatory-grade RWE increasingly meets the standards of traditional clinical trials, ensuring data and evidence accuracy will be crucial to product development. As a result, companies must ensure the RWD they’re relying on is auditable, validated against control trials and statistically valid. Otherwise, manufacturers will miss the mark in getting to know patients early in their journeys.
Choosing the Right Treatment Path
After the long road to diagnosis, the patient’s journey, as well as their need for customized support, is just beginning. With the right datasets and machine learning technologies, pharma companies can leverage predictive analytics that will pinpoint patient needs in treatment and sustaining adherence.
In order to achieve individual patient support, pharma companies must develop a deep understanding of patient needs and the patient journey. The ability to produce RWE through countless data sources, like EMR, claims, physician and nonclinical data, presents a holistic view of the patient journey that’s inclusive of underserved communities that often are not represented in clinical trials.
Tools like ACTICS by EVERSANA, a tech-enabled solution, can combine the power of analytics with real-time actions to optimize products and experiences across the patient journey. From this data, de-identified patient personas can be created to provide realistic, actionable RWE that can be used to drive product innovation and value. Patient personas have the potential to connect the right patients with the right diagnoses and therapies years earlier than ever before. With the right RWD tools and expertise, companies can create a world where therapies find patients, improve patient lives earlier and cut future healthcare costs caused by failure to diagnose and incorrect treatments.
Delivering Value and Outcomes
Even if a manufacturer manages to successfully introduce a patient to an effective treatment, early intervention means nothing without long-term adherence. On average, medication non-adherence leads to 125,000 preventable deaths and about $300 billion in avoidable healthcare costs every year.
By applying machine learning technology to RWD, pharma companies can ensure they’re developing reliable RWE to understand patient behavior. Understanding why a patient is nonadherent will allow companies to improve outreach personalization and deliver what the patients need to improve future adherence.
With the right outreach touch points at the right times, companies can improve patient intervention and decrease nonadherence risk overall. EVERSANA’s research shows that personalized touchpoints — for example, texting refill reminders instead of phone calls — can result in a 50% increase in adherence. Through advanced algorithms, companies can continuously aggregate patient profiles and bring a tailored experience to each patient, which is key in supporting patients with life-changing diseases.
Patients with rare and complex diseases face a long journey, and now advanced technology solutions can help uncover patient needs before their treatment journey even begins. By leveraging integrated RWD solutions and RWE to understand each significant patient moment, pharma companies can learn how to optimize patient support for every individual. In a world where therapies find patients, pharma companies can play an integral role in helping patients receive a diagnosis and treatment faster than ever before while ensuring their product is providing true value across the patient journey.(PV)
Contributors: Melissa Thompson, BSc., MBA, Senior VP, Value & Evidence, EVERSANA; Chris Cameron, Senior VP, Value & Evidence, EVERSANA; Justin Forrester, GM, HERO Analytics Data & Data Integration, EVERSANA; Katya Svoboda, Senior Principal, EVERSANA Management Consulting; and Maneesh Gupta, Managing Director, EVERSANA Management Consulting
EVERSANA is the leading provider of global services to the life sciences industry. The company’s integrated solutions are rooted in the patient experience and span all stages of the product life cycle to deliver long-term, sustainable value for patients, prescribers, channel partners and payers.
For more information, visit eversana.com.
