In healthcare, companies succeed when the patient comes first. When a pharma organization truly understands the needs, experiences, and perceptions of their patients and providers, they are empowered to connect the right patients with the right treatments at the right time.
Gaining this understanding is often easier said than done. Patient data is plentiful, but often challenging to collect, decipher, and utilize effectively. Modern analytical tools, including artificial intelligence (AI), are helping pharma take a fresh approach to data and forge deeper connections with their patients and providers.
When patient focus and smart tools are combined, companies can leverage patient-centric intelligence (PCI) to pave the way for improved care outcomes and commercial success.
What is Patient-Centric Intelligence?
Patient-centric intelligence evolves raw transactional events through applied clinical expertise to illuminate behavioral trends and treatment dynamics that claims data alone cannot reveal. It spotlights how patients navigate complex protocols, combine therapies and transition across lines of treatment. This intelligence quantifies adherence patterns, reasons for discontinuation, switching trends and more based on how actual patients engage therapies in the real world. Patient-centric intelligence uniquely transforms disconnected medical events into an insightful care journey narrative.
It is created by aggregating longitudinal patient claims data—the factual record of medical codes, procedures, prescriptions over time. Sophisticated analytics and machine learning algorithms then structure this data by cross-referencing clinical repositories. This enriches raw medical codes with the medication details, diagnosis descriptors and protocol context needed to elevate billing events into clinically meaningful touchpoints.
To bring the most value to pharmaceutical partners, the right datasets should include patient demographics and claims information, prescription rates, fill and refill statistics, and context around the other drugs involved in a patient’s treatment journey—both those prescribed in conjunction and those tried before or after the product of interest.
While real world data provides the quantitative truth of what treatments patients receive, patient-centric intelligence powers the critical insights into how and why therapy decisions occur that serve to inform patient-first commercial strategies. Together they create a navigation system to map optimal routes to improve treatment, outcomes and the patient experience.
Improved Patient Outcomes = Commercial Success
At its core, patient-centric intelligence melds high-quality patient-level datasets with smart analysis tools to uncover critical insights about prescribing patterns and patient journeys. These insights can give brands a better understanding of how their products are being engaged with and where they can direct resources to improve product perceptions and usage. Patient-centric intelligence ultimately centers the patient’s needs to drive market performance while simultaneously improving patient care.
When patients are matched with the right treatment for their unique needs and offered guidance to maximize their results, they experience better health outcomes. Providers who observe patients thriving on a treatment are often more likely to prescribe that drug again in the future, driving commercial success.
Patient-centric intelligence helps pharma companies better match patients with treatments and detect challenges in prescribing, compliance, and retention. By focusing on the patient’s journey, companies can identify opportunities to tailor marketing messaging and educational materials to the real world experiences of their ideal patients and their providers. These insights can lead to improved patient outcomes, increase provider trust, and strengthen sales.
PCI—A Catalyst for Precision
Market research can be a valuable tool for understanding patient and provider perceptions of a product, but it cannot always tease out the underlying factors that are shaping those perceptions. Building a deeper understanding of the real-world experiences of patients and providers can help reveal these nuances and lead to better targeted marketing.
Do providers see a product as their go to treatment or a Hail Mary when all else fails? Are patients refilling their prescription on schedule or do refill patterns suggest inconsistent use? Are they switching from or to the competitor?
When patients aren’t matched with the right treatment at the right time or aren’t educated to take a prescription as intended, it can create provider misconceptions about a product’s efficacy and best use cases. Mapping out the patient’s journey from symptom recognition to treatment can surface opportunities to better match an intervention with the patients that will most benefit from it.
Patient-centric intelligence is critical to understand what is occurring in real-world scenarios that might influence prescribing preferences and patterns. The insights generated can highlight potential patient/treatment mismatches, common pitfalls during treatment, or barriers to prescribing—challenges that can be addressed to improve patient outcomes and elevate provider perceptions of a product. This knowledge helps marketers to create targeted messaging with high impact for the right audiences.
The Road Ahead: Transforming Pharma’s Future
Placing the patient journey at the heart of decision-making processes enables pharma companies to better navigate their market landscape while simultaneously delivering the best patient outcomes. With a deeper understanding of patient and provider behaviors, preferences, and unmet needs, organizations are able to identify and meet gaps quickly and intelligently. Patients gain better care, providers gain better treatment strategies, and companies gain market share.
Building a patient-centric intelligence program starts with high-quality datasets that offer longitudinal views of thousands of patient journeys. Finding meaning in these datasets requires smart analysis that identifies novel patterns and gets to the crux of key questions. Tools like AI can uncover these answers and make analysis and interpretation easy for non-data scientists.
When these components come together, pharma organizations are empowered to connect the right patients with the right treatments at the right time.
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Prospection has been providing solutions and services to pharma analytics and commercial teams for more than 10 years. Its proprietary Patient-centric Intelligence Core transforms RWD into intelligence, and powers a range of solutions including the flagship brand management platform, Prospection AI.
Contact us to learn how patient-centric intelligence can become core to your business.
