Pharmaceutical Patient Services

Competition in the drug market is heating up as the FDA drug pipeline grows and emerging biotechs represent a greater portion of the new drug pipeline. FDA approval, however, is no longer viewed as the major gate to a successful drug launch. Rather, biopharma companies are focused on ensuring payer reimbursement and keeping patients on therapy given the shift to higher cost medications.

The drug landscape has also shifted away from small molecule drugs towards clinically complex specialty drugs. In today’s market, patient populations are consequently more targeted and pharma is increasingly required to manage individual patients journeys.

To manage patient care for these more complex therapeutics, biopharma turned to large call-center focused models. But such demand fulfillment is no longer sufficient as the manufacturing complexity for specialty drugs, biologics and CGTs has driven lower gross margins for pharma. Biopharma is consequently now focused on fulfilment optimization, whereby future commercialization paradigms revolve around improving ROI for pharma’s patient services vendor base.

Given the prevalence of legacy call-center models, lack of technology enablement and limited patient adoption proof points, LLR believes there is a near-term opportunity to build some of the best-in-class patient service solutions for pharma through the automation of manual processes, delivery of next-gen patient experiences and the integration of disparate systems across stakeholders.