Accenture sharpens focus on managing pharma’s patient services

Accenture has been offering a variety of software solutions, mostly for healthcare providers but with some overlap with meeting pharma industry needs, for several years; now it has targeted the patient support (hub) programs run specifically by pharma with the Patient Experience Manager (PCM). With PCM, designed to take advantage of solutions provided by the Salesforce Health Cloud (an offering of Salesforce.com), Accenture will provides a “control center that gives a comprehensive, integrated view of all forms of patient engagement across [pharma] service partners, agencies, digital assets, and internal centers of excellence,” said Tony Romito, managing director, Accenture Life Sciences.

Patient support programs managed by pharma companies involve healthcare providers, pharmacies and outsourced service providers ranging from hub services for reimbursement, patient financial assistance and education, among many others. Coordinating the multiple parties involved has been a recognized hindrance to better outcomes (although hub service providers position themselves as the ideal coordinator). Accenture’s research indicates that only 40% of pharma managers are able to measure well the impact of patient services on patient engagement and corresponding outcomes.

PCM is a part of the existing Accenture Intelligent Patient Platform, and a related part of that is the Intelligent Patient Service Exchange, which enables third-party solution providers to link data from their systems into PCM. Newly announced participants include HealthPrize Technologies, a solution for patient adherence and education, TrialCard, a hub services provider with expertise in copay programs, and SmartStory, a content-creation and –delivery service for patient support.

Accenture itself deploys analytic and predictive tools in PCM drawn from the Intelligent Patient Platform; future PCM releases will incorporate artificial intelligence and machine learning to make recommendations on ways to improve patient engagement across channels and services, according to the company.