Pharmaceutical companies are increasingly investing in patient support programs designed to increase engagement, optimize medication use, and achieve better health outcomes. However, not all patient outreach is effective, and getting it right is essential to achieving the best possible results.
Learn the steps pharmaceutical companies can take to enhance patient outreach:
Why is Patient Engagement a Top Priority?
Historically, pharma companies were primarily focused on drug development and not seen as resources for patient education. That is no longer the case.
According to recent research, at least 66 percent of patients want pharma companies to empower them with relevant information and support services. Additionally, more than 50% of physicians said they were more likely to prescribe medication from a pharma company they considered more patient-centric.
Insights like these make it clear why so many pharma companies develop and offer patient support programs to educate patients about their medications. With a first-class patient support program in play, pharma companies can boost patient engagement and:
- Improve therapy initiation
- Overcome adherence barriers
- Increase days on therapy
- Optimize medication behavior and use
- Elevate brand performance
The question is: How can pharma companies enhance patient support programs to ensure outreach is as effective and efficient as possible?
4 Ways to Enhance Patient Outreach
Patient outreach is about more than just sending generic messages to everyone; it should educate and engage patients to encourage healthy behaviors. With the right patient-centric approach—coupled with the right technology—pharma companies can enhance patient outreach and deepen engagement. Here’s how:
1. Reach out to the patients who need the most support
Enhancing patient outreach starts with identifying which individuals to engage. Rather than contacting everyone for interventions, pharma companies can use artificial intelligence (AI) to identify patients with the highest needs such as those with a likelihood of becoming non-adherent or experiencing gaps in therapy.
From there, pharma companies can further enhance patient outreach by predicting which individuals are most likely to respond to intervention. Because some people are naturally more open to patient outreach than others, targeted interventions can increase overall effectiveness, control costs, and improve efficiency.
2. Choose the best channel for each patient
Once AI determines the right patients to contact, the right patient interventions can be used to reach them. Interventions can be conducted over the phone or during in-person visits. Now, there are countless intervention channels, including texts, chats, direct messages, videos, emails, phone calls, in-person visits, virtual visits, and more.
A multi-channel (or better yet, an omnichannel) engagement strategy enables pharma companies to predict and choose the channels that will result in the most effective interventions. Every patient is different, and some individuals are more likely to respond to a text or direct message than a phone call. Personalizing the channel to meet each patient’s unique preferences and needs will increase the likelihood of a positive next-best-action.
3. Personalize your messaging
Personalization is key when it comes to patient engagement. To enhance outreach, pharma companies can deliver personalized interventions at the individual level with content that truly resonates with each individual to impact their behavior.
For example, some patients will benefit from robust education, whereas others may benefit more from a simple reminder. Personalizing patient outreach by channel and content is important. It is also important to get the timing and cadence right for each individual. When pharma companies make patient outreach to the right patient, with the right message, on the right channels, at the right time – that makes all the difference.
4. Use AI to optimize over time
The best patient support programs are continually optimized to improve efficiency and effectiveness. AI gets smarter over time, learning from robust, varied datasets, including engagement data, medical and pharmacy claims data, consumer behaviors, and social determinants of health (SDOH) at the individual level.
In other words, by using AI, pharma companies can maximize patient engagement and refine efforts over time to have the greatest possible impact while saving on intervention costs.
Enhancing Patient Outreach with AI
Leading pharma companies have partnered with AllazoHealth, leveraging our AI platform to enhance patient outreach. Take a leading pharma company, for example. Using smart data, the pharma company increased its patients’ length of therapy by 13.3 percent and increased first fill rates by 8.4 percent for patients who received a co-pay card for the first fill. Only AllazoHealth delivers truly personalized intervention at the individual level, enabling customers to create one-to-one patient health journeys that improve therapy initiation, adherence, patient experience, and health outcomes.
