Pharmaceutical companies are increasingly investing in patient support programs designed to increase engagement, optimize medication use, and achieve better individual health outcomes. However, not all patient outreach is effective, and getting it right is essential to achieve 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 deploy 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:
- Encourage therapy initiation
- Overcome adherence barriers
- Increase days on therapy
- Optimize medication use
- Elevate brand performance
The question is: How can pharma companies enhance patient support programs to ensure outreach is as efficient and effective as possible?
4 Ways to Enhance Patient Outreach
Patient outreach is about more than just sending generic messages to all plan members; it should educate and engage patients to encourage healthy behavior. With the right patient-centric approach—supplemented with the right technology—pharma companies can enhance patient outreach and deepen engagement. Here’s how:
- Reach out to the patients who need the most support.
Enhancing patient outreach starts with identifying which individuals to engage. Rather than targeting all plan members for interventions, pharma companies can use artificial intelligence (AI) to identify patients with the highest likelihood of becoming non-adherent or experiencing other medication-related gaps in care.
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.
- Choose the best channel for each patient.
Patient interventions used to 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 “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 intervention than a phone call. Custom-tailoring the intervention channel to meet each patient’s unique needs will increase the likelihood of a positive outcome.
- Personalize your messaging.
Personalization is key when it comes to patient engagement. To enhance outreach, pharma companies can deliver hyper-personalized interventions with content that truly resonates with each individual to impact patient behavior.
For example, some patients will benefit more from robust education, whereas others may benefit more from a simple reminder. Personalizing patient outreach is also about getting the timing and cadence right for each person.
- Use AI to optimize over time.
The best patient support programs are continually optimized to improve efficiency and effectiveness. AI produces smart data which gets smarter over time, learning from robust, varied datasets, including historical engagement data, medical and pharmacy claims data, consumer behaviors, and social determinants of health (SDOH).
In other words, using smart data, pharma companies can optimize patient engagement and refine efforts over time to have the greatest possible impact.
Enhancing Patient Outreach with AI
Leading pharma companies have partnered with AllazoHealth, leveraging our AI engine 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.
Download the case study to learn more about enhancing patient outreach with AI.