Why Patient-Centered Marketing is Key to Healthcare Success

Demand and supply: The convergence of omnichannel patient marketing and patient services We mentioned above that life sciences companies are pursuing a more holistic array of patient engagement capabilities. In particular, patient marketing and communications now play a key role in helping patients, their families, and care providers better understand how a given drug therapy is relevant. This is the front-end, “demand side” of the patient 

experience that has emerged in recent years: Companies are using enterprise marketing technology platforms to engage, educate, and onboard patients much earlier in the disease life cycle in an effort to drive better health outcomes. These “martech” platforms provide key omnichannel capabilities for communicating with patients, families, and providers, including 

email, SMS/text, and mobile/ wearable device integration. Through such platforms, life sciences companies can enable and deliver product information, HCP collaboration, therapy scheduling, dosage reminders, financial assistance, and other activities. Importantly, these capabilities equip life sciences companies with more relevant and timely patient data, helping them to better understand unique patient needs (such as their channel preferences or 

Behavioral tendencies

Better data can help companies integrate patient marketing efforts with the “supply side” of patient engagement— the ability to provide patient services capabilities such as therapy administration, appointment reminders, financial assistance, and clinical programs at the quality and scale needed to meetPlatforms such as these are allowing life sciences 

companies to continually improve their interactions with patients and their care network through ongoing insights and testing. As life sciences companies aim to share more of their patient marketing and services insights with care providers to improve patient care, this continuous learning cycle allows providers to gain greater insight into the patient’s needs, 

interact on a more relevant (not necessarily frequent) basis, and deliver more personalized care to optimize therapy adherence and efficacy. Supported by these core patient platforms, additional opportunities to complement patient marketing and patient services capabilities include: Digital coaching. Patients can receive interactive care directly from their mobile 

Devices through apps that enable

them to select and share information with their HCP and other care providers in a variety of areas, including medical, nutrition, fitness, and rehabilitation. Wellness coaches can provide fully integrated and personalized care plans based on patient needs, helping to increase patient accountability to drive adherence to treatment. Privatized health information. 

Engagement platforms are offering patients more options when it comes to managing their privacy, allowing them to tailor what information they share with providers/caregivers and giving them the ability to manage personal goals in line with care plans. This provides a layer of protection for private health information, and it also affords patients greater control over 

how they mobilize their care ecosystem to support them through diagnosis, therapy, and recovery.Telehealth. Providers can expand their offerings to include at-home care for patients to receive routine check-ups, as well as mobile-enabled hospice care with on-call capabilities that are aligned with therapeutic call centers and local partnerships. Through these offerings, 

Patients could interact with providers

in real time without waiting weeks for appointments, thereby accelerating therapy adherence and the overall healing process. Similarly, health care providers will be able to provide virtual care to mobility-impaired or remotely located patients. It is interesting to note that the COVID-19 pandemic, despite the societal trauma it has inflicted, may have enhanced the opportunity 

to expand telehealth by increasing patients’ and providers’ acceptance and adoption of telehealth capabilities such as videoconferencing and remote diagnostics and care, though the level of long-term adoption remains to be seen. Artificial intelligence. Life sciences companies, health care providers, and health care payers should all seek to increase their investments in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) platforms. These 

technologies can leverage large patient data sets to identify key insights that can inform more relevant patient communications, enable better point-in-time care, execute improved clinical trial programs, and generate more efficient patient case management at higher volumes over time. Crisis detection and response. Patient engagement platforms could help health 

Conclusion

professionals manage public health crises byproviding communications with key patients and the general public. For example, the Takeda Pharmaceutical Company, a leader in blood plasma-based therapies, is using patient engagement technology to help recovered COVID19 patients register online and potentially donate blood plasma for ongoing research in pursuit of 

vaccine. More generally, the COVID-19 pandemic crisis has pushed companies to use patient engagement capabilities to rapidly reimagine the care delivery process, condense the testing and drug approval processes, and expedite logistics to distribute care across geographies out of pure necessity for the general public welfare. As a further encouragement to life sciences companies to put such capabilities in place, recent Deloitte Center for Health Solutions 

research provides evidence that patients are increasingly open to next-generation patient engagement channels, tools, and techniques involving virtual care, robotic surgery, AI, biosensors, and even drones to deliver prescriptions (figure 2). What’s more, our research also shows that the move to virtual services had already been welcomed by many patients