Leveraging Territory Performance Monitoring to Scale Hub Performance
From ever-increasing payer utilization management requirements and declining gross-to-net margins, life sciences companies face complex commercialization challenges. Specialty and specialty-lite retail brands are increasingly leaning on hub services as a key component of their go-to-market strategy to elevate patient access and brand outcomes as conventional commercialization strategies continue to wain in their overall effectiveness.
However, most manufacturers struggle to drive high adoption of and engagement with their patient services programs. Far too often, brands struggle to sufficiently integrate their field teams with their hub. This ultimately results in gaps in healthcare provider (HCP) adoption, patient enrollment, and prior authorization submissions that hinder brand performance. As access teams look to scale their hub services to address these gaps, monitoring hub performance at the territory is essential to ensure strong outcomes nationally.
Without question, biopharma field teams play an integral role in driving overall brand success. The visibility gained from benchmarking hub performance at the territory level enables field leadership and access teams to be more strategic with how they promote the hub and helps manufacturers operationalize brand goal alignment in the following ways:
1) Implementing more effective, responsive HCP targeting
The traditional sales approach is to create an annual or biannual HCP target list for each territory focused on high-volume prescribers in the brand's therapeutic class. This strategy fails to address the current biopharmaceutical landscape's complex, competitive, and ever-changing nature.
Territory data analysis enables a more dynamic – and effective – approach. By identifying patterns in HCP and payer behavior, targeting can be more strategic and dynamic so that field teams focus their efforts on the right HCPs at the right times with optimized messaging that positively impacts brand outcomes.
2) Driving hub enrollment and engagement
A commercialization team’s best bet to getting their branded therapy into patients’ hands as a covered prescription is to ensure the hub is central to the brand’s go-to-market strategy, which also entails maximizing enrollment and engagement in the patient services program. Since the field team is instrumental in making this happen, management should make sure sales reps are:
Aligned to drive patient enrollment enrollment in the hub
Educated on why the hub is beneficial to them and their customers
Trained on how to efficiently and effectively promote the hub to HCPs
Equipped with the right resources and tools to educate HCPs and monitor their actions
Just as importantly, manufacturers must continually monitor territory KPIs around HCP hub adoption and patient enrollment to gauge field performance.
3) Boosting prescription coverage by Improving Prior Authorization Outcomes
In the long run, it doesn't matter how many scripts HCPs write if patients' insurance plans only cover a small proportion as the brand will have to over subsidize access to maintain brand loyalty. And something as simple as an administrative error, such as a wrong ICD-10 code, misspelled name, or omitted details, often results in a denied prior authorization (PA) request.
Given that more than 9 out of 10 physicians report patient care delays associated with PAs, it's incumbent on manufacturers to improve speed to therapy and lay the foundation for covered dispenses by streamlining the PA process for HCPs. Empowering field teams with territory-level script quality insights and real-time data on the PA process empowers them to be more responsive and relevant with HCPs, ensuring brand prescribers are adequately informed on the insurance coverage requirements and submit outstanding PAs in a timely manner.
4) Pinpointing issues
Territory-specific insights provide a granular understanding of various aspects of sales operations. By leveraging this information and feedback loops, manufacturers can pinpoint challenges, develop targeted strategies, allocate resources efficiently, and ultimately improve overall sales performance by:
Benchmarking and comparing performance metrics across territories that reveal underperforming regions or that require attention
Identifying high-performing and low-performing sales reps to implement targeted training, coaching, and support to enhance overall team performance.
Enabling process optimization and implementing best practices to yield a more streamlined and effective sales process.
5) Identifying areas of opportunity
Territory performance data analysis equips biopharmaceutical sales and marketing teams with actionable insights to identify patient access opportunities. By understanding the unique characteristics and challenges of each territory, field teams can develop sales strategies and coordinate with internal brand teams to improve patient access by helping their HCP customers:
Let’s deliver more value to your HCPs
Given the investment life sciences companies make in their hub programs, optimizing ROI by monitoring KPIs correlated with brand success makes sense. That means shifting away from the traditional operational measures not associated with patient access. Staying abreast of what is happening at a territory-by-territory level enables manufacturers to equip their field teams to drive brand success.
With PhilRx, field teams can access real-time data on hub adoption and engagement, script quality, PA submissions, and payer responses. Phil’s proactive, consultative approach helps all internal stakeholders make the most of this data by providing actionable recommendations.
Ready to get started with territory performance monitoring? Book a demo of the PhilRx patient access platform.
