Is your Patient Access Hub a Strategic Partner?
By Kelly Green, Vice President of Client Success at Phil, Inc.
For patients prescribed a specialty or specialty-lite medication, getting started and staying on that therapy is typically a complex and expensive journey. That’s why many life science brands are increasingly turning to hub providers to support patient access and affordability.
The success of a hub program hinges on accomplishing three critical outcomes:
Maximizing the number of covered dispenses
Ensuring patients get started on therapy as quickly as possible
Driving medication adherence
Unfortunately, many hub programs struggle to produce these outcomes. Although manufacturers pour billions each year into patient support programs, only 3 percent of eligible patients enroll and use these programs, and 3 out of 4 patients who try to fill a launch brand are unsuccessful due to payer controls. And even with good insurance and drug coverage, medication adherence rates for chronic conditions remain between 50-60%.
Identifying the right hub partner translates to identifying a strategic hub partner that can deliver on the three critical outcomes. Patient access teams should consider several key factors that will enhance the value of their patient access program. At the same time, they need to recognize the red flags that may deter success and ultimately result in a poor return on investment.
Considerations to achieving key hub outcomes
It’s crucial to find a strategic hub partner that is flexible, insight-driven, and focused on the patient outcomes that truly matter. With an abundance of hub services providers in today’s market, it can be challenging to discern which is best for your brand. There are several vital factors patient access teams should be looking for:
An incentive aligned model that aligns the hub partner’s and brand’s goals. This approach ensures accountability, and when critical brand outcomes are achieved, it is a win-win-win for the patient, the manufacturer, and the hub partner.
Flexible design and implementation that supports agility in a dynamic drug channel by enabling brand teams to establish and easily alter program business rules to adapt to any changes, such as formulary wins, territory changes, payer response, and brand life cycle priorities.
Insights derived from real-time data that offer visibility into the patient journey enable manufacturers to ascertain whether their internal teams are aligned in promoting the hub, why certain key success indicators may be underperforming, and to measure the true impact of their patient access services to be more responsive to stakeholder needs and health plan requirements.
A consultative approach that ensures all internal stakeholders buy in to and are incentive-aligned with the patient access program from the beginning.
How to identify the right strategic hub partner for your brand
Selecting the right hub partner is critical to the successful trajectory of a brand’s access program. Brand teams should avoid getting locked into a one-size-fits-all model. With the many potential hurdles that exist in an ever-evolving patient access landscape, this approach risks poor hub outcomes and return on investment. A digital hub that enables a data- and metrics-driven approach integrated across the entire prescription journey can give manufacturers the insights they need to quickly adapt to changes, more effectively driving covered dispenses, speed to therapy, and medication adherence.
Patient access teams should also be sure any hub partners under consideration are using emerging technology, especially digital channels, to provide a frictionless, consumer-centered experience. For example, embedding hub enrollment within the clinical workflow of HCPs improves the likelihood that they will prescribe a branded therapy and that patients will utilize support services to help them succeed.
What Phil brings to the table that other hubs do not
In addition to our incentive-aligned model, flexible design and implementation capabilities, and consultative approach based on data, the following differentiators set Phil apart from other hub solutions:
We are a lean organization with deep industry expertise and a technology-forward mindset currently managing 35 manufacturer programs
Our digital capabilities enable brands to have their digital hub program up and running in 6-weeks post contract signing, on average
Our digital hub offers seamless, mobile enrollment for patients, is embedded in HCP workflows, and makes it easy to refill prescriptions via our informed auto refill process
Ongoing, post-launch consultations involved meeting with clients regularly to share actionable data and make program recommendations based on the data we’re seeing
We put patients at the heart of our hub model, providing educational resources and ongoing support to ensure they get the medication they need quickly and affordably
Ready to maximize the value of your hub?
Our team helps specialty-lite brands unlock the full potential of their hub services. Book a demo of the PhilRx patient access platform and discover first hand how we can help strategically maximize coverage, access, and GTN.
