How Digital Solutions Improve the Patient Journey

What if we told you that you have the single most effective tool to help patients stay and get healthy? What if we told you that all pharmaceutical companies can use this tool at any stage of patients’ journeys? In fact, you can enhance the effectiveness of this tool whenever necessary. So, what is this powerful tool that you can use? 

It is your patients’ voice.  

Putting patients’ needs at the center of their healthcare journey translates into better clinical outcomes, higher patient satisfaction rates, and customer loyalty. Customers’ voice helps life sciences brands understand what to research, how to develop, how to market products, and, eventually, how to build rapport with the audience. The use of technology allows them to amplify this voice, thereby facilitating the patient journeys. 

Let’s dive into some stats. Approximately 46% of adults in the US take prescription drugs. A quarter of individuals aged 18 to 39 regularly consume two prescription drugs, which means that the dependence on multiple medications is not exclusive to the older population. Meanwhile, patient visits last around 18 minutes only. That’s not a lot for most patients to receive all the information they need.  

These statistics explain why patients are increasingly taking more control over their own health. It becomes blatantly clear why 80% of patients read about their diagnoses online and 76% expect pharmaceutical companies to provide information that complements the products they sell. 

Viseven is a future-inspired global MarTech services provider delivering pharma companies digital innovations to craft valuable content, devise robust marketing strategies, and elevate brand awareness. This is the description you will find both on our website landing pages and at the bottom of our external articles.  

But that is only the part of the story. While we do help pharma achieve their business goals, our primary focus has always been on patients. And, today, the Viseven team wants to bring a crucial topic to the discussion: how innovations enhance the patient journeys. 

What is Digital Innovation? 

Digital innovation reers to the implementation of modern digital tools to improve business operations and processes. Companies introduce digital innovation to enhance patient experiences and shorten their healthcare journey to the brand. One of the major goals of digital transformation and innovation is to create a competitive advantage over market players and build a large base of devoted consumers.  

Why are Digital Solutions Important for the Patient Journey? 

Customer-centric companies make a science out of understanding patient needs. Using digital solutions while concentrating on healthcare experience helps to meet patient’s expectations and increase brand attractiveness. For instance, automating healthcare services can elevate efficiency and increase speed, making a company more appealing and reliable in the eyes of consumers. 

Technologies allow companies to offer value in a patient-focused manner without making difficult trade-offs. As an example, pharmaceutical companies can personalize content for different patient groups without making large investments into content production. Artificial intelligence (AI) and the modular approach make this possible. Brands assess performance of separate modules and craft effective marketing strategies based on evidence, rather than taking a shot in the darkness. Later, they can reuse highly performing assets to target specific audiences. 

Achieving Customer-Centricity in Your Digital Transformation 

To ensure a customer-centric digital transformation, it is essential to leverage data to know your customers, ensure security of their private information, and focus on compliance solutions for patients’ safety. 

Use Data to Know Your Customers 

People differ in their approach to care. Some prefer studying all potential side effects, while others refuse to get involved and find it hard to comply with prescribed therapy. It is not enough to simply provide information. It is essential to generate interest and provoke engagement. 

To connect with your customers, successful brands get to know their fears, emotions, cognitive biases, motivations, and personal struggles. An effective means to know your customer is a patient journey mapping. But there is a nuance: they must be written from the patient’s perspective. What do patients need once they notice something wrong with their health? How do they react to reality after receiving the diagnosis? At what point do they turn to available information for help? By understanding their customers, life sciences brands can seamlessly move them from one touchpoint to another. 

Pharma companies should leverage data analytics to identify specific barriers that can cause patients to abandon therapy or refuse care at all. As an example, a life science brand can rely on AI to understand why patients diagnosed with HIV/AIDS drop off treatment. Some individuals may fear possible side effects of the antiretroviral therapy or be affected by stigma surrounding the disease. Acknowledging these misconceptions enables businesses to send the right message based on an abundance of convincing evidence. 

Still, no matter how well your content is crafted, it is of little use, unless you engage patients where they are. Sending the right content through the wrong channel or at the wrong time significantly reduces the chances that the patient stumbles upon it.  

Viseven not only creates engaging, personalized content at a scale but also uses data to reach those who need it. Our omnichannel patient journey strategy helps pharma companies deliver messages in a compelling way, with the desired frequency and through the preferred channels. In doing so, we assist in bringing genuine value to patients, building connections with them, and raising awareness about pharmaceutical brands. Our clients experience up to 250% increase in engagement rate and 20% higher click-through-rate. 

We also firmly believe that data is often ineffective without visualization. Our team transforms overwhelming amounts of statistics into user-friendly graphs and diagrams, letting pharma companies make sense of their crucial metrics, such as impressions, clicks, shares, reach, comments, and leads. Our analytics not only capture patient engagement results but also highlight trends and patterns that might otherwise get lost in the sea of data. 

Ensure Clinical Data Security to Build Trust 

In the past, a healthcare provider (HCP) used to keep patients’ sensitive information in manila envelopes stored in filing cabinets to ensure data security. Nowadays, as health data migrated to the cloud, we must constantly come up with more sophisticated security strategies that outsmart hackers’ intentions. 

Health information contains more private and personal information than any other kind of customer data, making healthcare organizations more vulnerable to cyber-attacks. According to the latest evidence, more than 540 healthcare organizations reported data breaches in 2023, which affected upwards of 112M patients.   

This translates into money and time needed for recovery, let alone the damage to the organization’s reputation. According to the Healthcare Breach Report, a healthcare organization needs 236 days on average to recover from a data breach. Each incident costs approximately $500 per compromised patient record. 

Encryption protocols, file backups, regular security audits, and multi-factor authentications are some commonly used solutions to protect patients’ data from prying eyes. Pharma companies adopt robust anti-virus and anti-malware applications and, what’s equally important, keep them updated all the time.  

It is not uncommon to use system monitoring applications that track and record all activities and data usage. This boosts transparency, as you can have a bird-eye view on who is updating, deleting, accessing, and moving patient files. When these solutions spot any suspicious activities, they instantly notify the organization’s IT staff. 

While all these measures are effective, why are cyber-attacks prevalent today? One often-overlooked reason is healthcare professionals’ large workloads. HCPs frequently express feelings of being overwhelmed and exhausted. In an effort not to disrupt the workflow, they may be tempted to neglect proper protective measures.  

The health system must adopt a holistic and comprehensive approach to address HCPs’ heavy workloads and mental health concerns. Leveraging technologies, standardizing processes, and offering wellness programs are some of the ways that help them combat chronic fatigue and burnout. 

Balance Innovation and Compliance 

Pharmaceutical companies must navigate a tricky path – innovating rapidly to drive the health system forward, while toeing the line of local and international regulations for patient safety. The rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines is the case in point, where groundbreaking speed did not compromise compliance. Trials adhered to all standards, and patient data was constantly shared with regulatory agencies.  

Now comes the million-dollar question: How is it possible to balance innovation and compliance? And once again the quick answer is technology. 

Modern technologies play a pivotal role in areas like drug development and pharma marketing. And they are equally helpful when it comes to adhering to stringent regulatory requirements. AI, blockchain, and data analytics optimize processes, ensure traceability, reduce human error, and increase transparency in the pharma supply chain.  

But let’s look at the examples. The development of precision medicine has become one of the macrotrends in the industry due to advances in proteomics, genomics, and data analytics. In fact, the precision medicine market is expected to be worth $126.14 billion by the end of 2025. Another study shows that the number of personalized drugs in the United States alone has doubled from 2016 to 2020. Personalizing therapies based on genetic makeup and unique environment holds the potential for more effective ongoing care, with fewer side effects.  

New laws are continuously introduced to control personalized treatments and genetic testing. As a result, pharma brands must regularly update their organizational processes to remain compliant. But this is easier said than done. Personalized therapeutics is much more sophisticated than the “one-dose-fits-all” approach.  

Pharma heavily relies on regulatory technology, also known as RegTech, to keep up with the overwhelming number of new amendments and always-changing standards. When a new law comes in, a notification pops up, telling them to reconsider their compliance processes and helping them report to regulatory bodies on time.  

The adoption of AI to accelerate the Medical Legal Regulatory (MLR) process is an important innovation in digital pharma marketing. The rise of ChatGPT has shown how content can be created in a matter of seconds. But while in many industries it only takes a couple of minutes to generate and send an email to a customer, the pharma industry is a different ballgame. Due to strict regulations, each claim must be supported with the relevant reference and then approved by the MLR team.  

On average, it takes about four to five weeks for a pharma company to send just one email. But in less-than-ideal situations where content must do a little back-and-forth dance between content creators and MLR crew, businesses are not just losing time and money but also gambling their competitive edge. Companies risk not sending timely follow-ups, potentially losing HCPs as customers, or missing the chance to update them on the latest groundbreaking therapies, facing a decline in engagement rates. 

The good news is that the same AI can be used to speed up content creation while ensuring compliance. Let’s take our eWizard, content experience platform for pharma, as an example. We are developing a feature that allows users to see the likelihood of content approval before undergoing the formal MLR process, thereby speeding up time-to-market. If there are content mismatches, sensitive images, or missed references, you receive an alert and, importantly, suggestions on how to improve your piece. 

Once the content gets the green light, you can recycle and tweak it for future campaigns without the need to go through rigorous MLR procedures once again. Thanks to AI technology, you can automatically tag all your texts and images to easily compose a new personalized campaign using the already-approved modules. With eWizard, one of our clients, Biogen, a major player in the global biotech sector, has streamlined their content production, cutting the time-to-market from three weeks to just one. 

Final Words 

Effective patient’s journey presupposes caring for patients in every aspect of business. This includes creating drugs with their needs in mind, prioritizing data safety and patient experience, generating compelling, compliant content, and always considering them, even in HCP marketing. 

Pharmaceutical brands that treat patients respectfully and address their unique challenges throughout the entire patient journey tend to build trustful, mutually beneficial relationships with their target audience. Digital innovation in healthcare offers a means to build this trust, be it through granting access to reliable information, providing ways to engage patients, or ensuring data security. 

What’s equally important, digital innovations enable pharmaceutical and life sciences companies to put customers first without compromising their business interests, like costs or operational efficiency. This intricate balance lets brands satisfy their customers’ needs while propelling towards organizational health and a competitive edge. 

Viseven has been delivering compliant, cutting-edge solutions for over a decade now. Our pharmaceutical MarTech company boasts a 93% client satisfaction rate. In fact, 80% of our clients have come to us through referrals.

Need a robust, patient-centric digital solution? Drop us a line, and we will reach out to you as soon as possible.

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