Maintaining a Specialty Medication Regimen
In this part of his Pharma Commerce video interview, Josh Marsh, Vice President and General Manager of Cardinal Health Sonexus Access and Patient Support, discusses the impact technology has in relation to patients sticking to their medication plan.
PC: How does technology play a role in getting and keeping patients on specialty medication?
Marsh: Technology plays a really critical role in helping these patients not only gain access—which is the first goal—but then of course, keeping them adherent as well. Technology, especially over the past five years, has enabled and empowered patients to truly take control of their journey. A couple of examples that rolled out at Cardinal Health Sonexus includes patient-facing chat bots and pharmacy texting portals; all of these result in patients better understanding their patient journey, medication, and therapy better, while also speeding up their time to therapy.
Regarding chat bots, we rolled this out about a year ago. It’s a patient-facing chat bot available 24/7 for them to ask questions, check the status of their enrollment in the hub, but also upload missing information, all on one program. In the past year, we've had 600 patients upload missing information through the chat bot. If you're familiar with the patient services space, getting a patient enrolled into the hub with missing information typically results in that patient canceling out. They don't answer the phone when we try to call them, because it's a 1-800 number, and so being able to send that information through a text where they can interact with a chat bot, upload that missing information—maybe it's an insurance card or something else that we need from them to complete their enrollment—it's truly allowed us to help patients get access to access to therapy, but keep them on that medication as well.
One thing I would say is that while technology has become incredibly important and we see the benefits of it—we reduce patient speed to therapy, about three, four, sometimes seven, eight days when patients interact with technology—not all patients want to interact with the patient support program hub, digitally. That's why it's critical to have the right balance of technology, but also the right team at the hub to interact with these patients live, educate them again on their journey, what's to come, what actions they need to take, and really empower them to take control.
