Readiness Targeting: Leveraging data to optimize treatment administration

You’ve launched a new product and established the clinical benefits for appropriate patients.  A top decile HCP has decided to write the product for her first patient but has a desire to build real world experience before writing more.  You’ve completed all the necessary steps to support your patient through your hub; the patient is payer-approved for the treatment and has the education resources needed to proceed. The patient shows up to a local infusion center but is refused treatment because the infusion center isn’t ready to begin treatment. Either because of frustration or because patients “feel better”, they abandon therapy, impacting their health outcome and your bottom line. Too often, this is because we have sent our Clinical Educators to infusion centers at the wrong time. This could be the result of many reasons. We send them to infusion centers prematurely, and by the time patients are ready to receive treatment at the center, turnover has created a lack of available resources to do so. Or, we have prioritized infusion centers that aren’t likely to see patients in the near term, leaving a gap in coverage for centers likely to see a patient in the near future.  Or perhaps you have set up a team of clinical educators with geographic territories too vast for them to be effective in training them all before launch, again leaving patients ready to start infusion with no place to go. So, what should you do to minimize these situations from occurring?

 

Creating effective patient access

Most organizations investing in patient solutions and HUB programs have a desire to build the best patient ecosystem to improve health outcomes and ensure product adherence while smartly managing financial and personnel investments. Clinical educators play an important role in most scenarios, but sometimes, even the best of plans can miss their target.

We have found a few clear strategies that can be employed to increase your probability of achieving this fine balance when dealing with a field educator team:

• Center resources in areas where there is the greatest imbalance between existing need and support.  Recognize that these areas of opportunity will evolve over time.
• Understand and recognize the balance between frequency of engagement versus breadth of engagement.  Many offices, infusion centers and patients need a bolus of education early in the adoption process but can evolve how and when they engage as their aptitude increases.
• Work to reeducate all customer touchpoints to overcome lack of awareness due to turnover and to keep those in the ecosystem continually aware of the brand, its administration and effectiveness.

While getting patients on therapy as quickly as possible is typically the first goal of patient solutions and HUB programs, it is important to remember that pairing access and administration is paramount to your success in driving positive patient outcomes. Therefore, it is critical to create a plan to deploy the necessary educational resources based on initial proper targeting.

 

Proper targeting can produce optimum results

Mission specific data should fuel any targeting exercise. When you understand your market dynamics, you are in the best position to drill down to the appropriate focus lists where you can best address your patient and clinical education support programs and speed patients to therapy.  When looking to optimize infusion center readiness, key questions might be:

• Where is the greatest concentration of patients?
• What infusion centers are located within those geographic areas?
• Who are the physicians serving that patient population and with what infusion centers are they affiliated?
• What is your clinical educator capacity and location, and how do these factors impact the number and type of HCPs and infusion centers on whom you should prioritize your focus?

 

Taking all these factors, and more into consideration, will lead you to develop the most impactful lists on which to focus, established in manageable priority order. Working with anything less can jeopardize the success of your entire support programs, and ultimately, the success of the brand.

Once the focus list is implemented, you need to monitor closely for necessary adjustments to make sure that targeted infusion centers are being utilized based on expectations. A case in point is that of a life sciences organization who tasked us with meeting their goal of having 80-90% of interested infusion centers being “infusion ready” within one year of launch. Their clinical educators had been provided initial focus lists that didn’t match current product usage habits, impeding their readiness efforts with the needed infusion centers. Within eight weeks, by leveraging in-house proprietary data sources, client data and publicly available sources and our refined methodologies, we delivered new focus lists to clinical field educators based on patient volume, demographics, and educator drive time. These lists identified more than 1,300 high-potential accounts with 78% of them prioritized for infusion readiness. In so doing, we greatly improved the clinical educators’ effectiveness leading to higher engagement, and in the end, creating better patient outcomes.

 

Ultimately, the creation and ongoing refinement of focus lists allow you to prioritize your critical human and digital resources to optimize patient outcome against internal spend.

– Chris Savage, Managing Director, Propensity4 and Chief of Staff, Inizio Engage

 

Nuanced HCP targeting: Partnering for optimum product uptake

You know your brand. We know data and targeting. Your knowledge, coupled with our insight and experience in life science targeting can deliver the ultimate partnership. We are not the black box approach that delivers a list. Rather, we work with you on a consultancy basis to identify the focus lists most aligned to supporting your business strategy and the product’s position on the lifecycle curve. As partners, we will address all the market dynamics, so you receive a focus list bespoke to your needs. Each of our targeting projects begins with human-led design, where we have the ability to support the nuances you need with our integrated, insight platforms. And we will tweak for eventualities to determine how you can be as efficient as possible and accelerate the impact to drive business performance.

That’s the nuance of a partnership with Propensity4.