Changing Pharma’s DNA Is Core to Making “Patient-Centricity” Real

Changing DNA: Mission Impossible. Or is it?

Pharmaceutical companies are being driven to directly engage with patients in a new way as the industry moves from “how many prescriptions and devices are being sold” to “what are the medical outcomes that are achieved.” This new approach is often referred to as patient-centricity—listening to, understanding and designing pharmaceuticals for the patient. Having a better understanding of who is in the patient population, and how the company can collaboratively help them to stay healthy or deliver better medical results, is increasingly imperative. It can impact what to prioritize for clinical trials, how fast a drug or device can be brought to market, how quickly adverse events are addressed, and customer/patient satisfaction and loyalty.   

Many companies are turning to digital technologies to gather data and information and interact with people—from Twitter feeds and online communities to remote monitoring, edible devices, and more. However, pharmaceutical companies also need to consider contextual interests and challenges such as how willing and able people are to use digital technologies, the impact of family and job responsibilities, geographic impact, and communication preferences. For many pharmaceutical companies, it means changing the way they work within the company and across its partner ecosystem—their DNA.

Within pharmaceutical companies, HfS has seen a new role emerging that can act as a critical lynchpin in this transition, to drive this change, connect with people in their world, and shepherd that insight and understanding into the business and clinical activities of running a pharmaceutical company. Sanofi, for example, calls this C-Suite level role the Chief Patient Officer. As the C-Suite defines the vision and strategy and sets the tone and culture of an organization, such an appointment can indicate intent to drive full-scale culture change.   

Dr. Anne Beal, Chief Patient Officer, leads a Center of Excellence with vision, governance and structure, geared towards instilling a new patient- and people-oriented culture into the operations and research agenda at Sanofi. The goal is to understand and engage both who is serving and who is being served: balancing the business and the consumers of the business. She is an agent of change.

In our current research at HfS, we are taking a look at how eight service providers are similarly working with pharmaceutical clients to rethink and realign the industry to be more consumer-centric. This group of service providers—Accenture, Cognizant, Genpact, HCL, TCS, Tech Mahindra, WNS, and Xerox—are sharing their capability and experience with us as we consider their role and impact in helping to change this industry.

Sourcing is a fairly well established model for process support in pharmaceuticals, but it, too, has reached a point in time in which it needs to be reimagined. It is not just about selling a set of services, but about articulating a problem and outcome, and using the building bocks of talent, tools, and technology to create an agile and dynamic As-a-Service solution.

This upcoming HfS Pharmaceutical Business Process Services (BPS) Blueprint will highlight the trends and examples as well as profile the service providers in the areas of research and development and commercial services. The core of it is how they are helping pharmaceutical companies effectively align talent and technology in hybrid and flexible patient-centric models—a new industry DNA.