Patient Centricity: Is it the Dawn of a New Pharmaceutical Era?

Category - Medical

As the world continues to move forward while grappling with new health challenges and crises every day, one thing that remains steady and almost dependable in a way, is the growth of the empowered customer. As the pandemic forces the pharmaceutical industry to operate to its limits, enabling patients to access medication and therapies remotely, or through varied channels becomes more appropriate than ever before. Given the current health challenge context, it seems more and more pertinent that the industry begins to revolutionize health solutions and their deliveries to fit a more patient centric framework.

But what does patient centricity even mean? It’s the process of creating and developing healthcare services or solutions centered around the patient. As a concept, it seems easy enough to understand and perhaps even inculcate. But execution tells a different story. Patient centricity requires an understanding and willingness towards a patient’s input at every step of the way. It could start from the very foundation of writing protocol, to creating and disseminating a marketing campaign. A pharmaceutical company will achieve true patient centricity when the patient’s needs are involved in every step of production, delivery, and post consumption processes.

How can organizations ensure that this materializes and becomes part of their values and vision? By engaging in patient centered dialogue. The industry has moved away from “observing needs” and deriving solutions to those needs, to actually listening to what the consumer has to say. Collection and analysis of data will become a key factor in achieving the precision required to develop medicines and solutions, while always keeping the patient in mind. Corporations have now begun to rely heavily on med-tech, predictive AI, genome tech, and other data driven systems. This would also mean, engaging with patients earlier on in their healthcare cycle, compared to before. An interesting approach is to use the information, patients themselves have about their own disease and how they manage it, as data.

The hurdles to cross when it comes to achieving complete patient centricity are significant. Pharma guidelines and compliance being the most important. For instance, patient driven communication is restricted within pharma compliance guidelines, and for a very relevant reason. To keep low quality products from making un-merited claims and thus mis-informing the general public. However, this could also prove to be a barrier to achieving patient centricity. There is a lot of social media noise surrounding health care practices, especially centered around the use and side-effects of medication, more often than not, these pockets of information that inevitably go viral, are untrue. Given the present pharmaceutical communication guidelines, there is currently no way to unsubstantiate such claims, and hence more harm is done to the public than good by ways of adverse effects when healthcare and medication systems are altered based on this mis-information. A more current system to approaching the guidelines; one that would prove to adapt to the many large-scale changes that have taken place in the industry and the world, would prove to be more beneficial to patient safety, and would then achieve the industry’s goal of becoming more patient centric.

The last two years have seen a number of companies adopting this approach in a bid to keep the patient they cater to, front and centre, with initiatives that involve patients at a very core level in development and solution creation. This would certainly indicate the beginning, of what is considered the second phase of the pharma industry (post Covid-19). As with any marked industry change, there are likely to be hurdles, but as consumer voices become more prominent, it is likely that the industry will adapt quickly to a future that is looking more and more at the patient as the foundation and centre of the global pharma industry.