Opportunities for AI to revolutionize patient support programs
By Imre Varju MD, PHD, MPH, CHES, Director, Learning Strategy and Daniela Carrasco, Group Director, Experience Design Strategy, YuzuYello
Pharmaceutical companies have made massive investments and strides in driving earlier and increasing rates of diagnosis, helping patients get prescribed the latest treatments. Yet many companies still lack the tools to consistently support patients once the prescription is written –including ensuring smooth patient treatment starts, countering adherence barriers or preventing premature treatment drop-off. These critical gaps in the post-Rx journey directly impact outcomes, costs and brand success.
AI is redefining how we address these challenges. Leading this wave is IPG Health’s proprietary EPICC (end-to-end platform for insights, creativity and content) platform – a solution engineered for the unique compliance, privacy and complexity requirements of pharma and life sciences. EPICC integrates clients’ post-Rx patient experience data to unlock more targeted, precise and scalable ways to deploy and optimize patient support programs (PSPs) that drive access and adherence.
At YuzuYello, our team has designed over 50 PSPs across therapeutic areas. Here's how EPICC is helping us answer the most pressing questions about how to better support patients—at scale.
Planning the best support for patients: what drives patient behavior post-script?
Traditional segmentation approaches focus on identifying what drives patients to ask for a new therapy but fall short in explaining what keeps them on it. From insurance navigation to managing side effects to lifestyle barriers, patients face a series of micro-moments that can derail adherence.
Utilizing a combination of internal client data, claims data, as well as the Acxiom dataset integrated with the platform, EPICC can generate LivingPersonas and LivingJourneys that provide a deeper understanding of post-Rx behaviors. We understand the top influences that cause biases and how people make decisions to lead to behavioral recommendations. We then leverage behavior models that are integrated within the platform to allow us to design smarter support services, more meaningful messaging and smoother patient experiences.
Complementing the rich output from EPICC is PSP Jump Start, — currently in its beta stage — a proprietary closed loop GPT that YuzuYello utilizes to sift through multiple qualitative and quantitative inputs to generate service design parameters, for example, how and where we support patients, faster than ever before. PSP Jump Start provides a validated foundation for PSP design, with considerations such as time-bound critical inflection points, recommended services and channel preferences.
The bigger picture: how do we create portfolio programs efficiently?
While individual products and therapeutic areas may have unique adherence challenges, EPICC can identify adherence archetypes. Archetypes represent a certain set of common behavioral patterns that might hold true across therapeutic categories, rather than only being true for a single brand. For instance, patients with very different diseases might have similar beliefs (e.g. disease is a punishment), socioeconomic characteristics (low health literacy) or engagement preferences (email over phone calls). Identifying these common patient preference types (archetypes) allows enterprise/portfolio programs to not ‘reinvent the wheel’ every time a new product is launched. Rather, it allows us to identify what type of adherence archetypes are most common for new patients to fall into, leading to efficiencies and tactical solutions with just the right balance of customization (making assets appropriate for the patient need) vs standardization (leveraging what works across patient types).
Executing patient support: how are patients actually experiencing our support?
Standard market research captures what patients say but often misses how they feel.
Natural language processing, a core module of EPICC, uncovers emotions and biases underlying patient verbatims, unlocking new approaches to messaging, behavioral strategy, as well as service execution. Patient text can come from various sources and may be aggregated from existing market research, transcripts and other sources, allowing us to refine messaging, adjust tone and optimize delivery based on how patients are experiencing their journey, reporting it all in a HIPAA compliant manner.
Increasing enrollment: how can we leverage AI to raise awareness and enrollment in patient support programs?
Clients often ask us "if we build it, will they come?" And rightfully so. There is an industry-wide issue of low awareness of PSPs. This results in low enrollment rates that hinder health outcomes for patients, increase healthcare costs for health systems and damage the bottom line for companies. With better targeting, more patients can get the support they need, improving health outcomes while reducing overall cost of care.
AI-powered platforms like EPICC help pharma marketers rise to the challenge of high patient expectations by enabling PSPs that are smarter, faster and finally, patient-centric in practice, not just in theory. For organizations looking to bridge the post-script gap with innovation, efficiency and precision, the opportunity has never been greater.
