Digital Solution Implementation
In the second part of her interview with Pharma Commerce Editor Nicholas Saraceno, Meghan Mullooly, Archbow Consulting’s Vice President, offers advice to pharma manufacturers for successfully applying digital solutions to their patient support programs.
PC: What advice could you offer pharma manufacturers for implementing these digital solutions within their patient support programs?
Mullooly: There are a lot of ways to successfully implement these solutions within your patient support program, but there are three that I think are really crucial, with the first being to know your customer. Know who your patients, your HCPs and your customers are. The second would be to map your patient and prescription journeys, and the third would be establishing your goals.
If I can expand on those a little bit, it's important to know who the patients are, who the HCPs are, what's important to them, what's valuable to them, because not every digital solution is appropriate for every patient population, for every patient in a specific therapeutic area, with a particular disease, and so it's important to know what value the customers are going to drive to make sure it's even appropriate.
When you're mapping your patient and your prescription journeys, you're able to target your digital solutions along the way that are going to be most impactful. So maybe there's a particular roadblock that exists within your patient journey, and you can implement a digital solution to solve that problem, or there's a way to create efficiencies, to get therapies to patients faster by implementing particular solutions. You want to understand that holistic journey as well.
And then lastly, with establishing your goals, it's important to understand what you're trying to achieve so that you can measure your success and ensure that there is value. Too often, we see manufacturers who just want to be seen as tech-driven or tech-forward, so they implement solutions for the sake of implementing them, but then they can't just determine if there's even value or success on the other end. You want to make sure that you're utilizing the solutions in a way that's going to enhance your program and improve the customer experience, which can ultimately lead to that overall success.
