The advancement of digital technology has enabled the world to become more interconnected. Throughout the healthcare ecosystem, access to technology has dramatically changed the patient care landscape. With the impact of COVID-19, it is more evident than ever that there is a need for solutions to connect providers with the people whom they serve much more quickly and easily.

At the same time, however, the need for healthcare to become more individualized and personal has also emerged. Truly connecting with people individually is not as easy as technology makes it seem; today, patients are facing more complex challenges on a physical, emotional, psychosocial, financial, and, yes, even a technological level — as access to technology and proficiency with technology is not equitable across all patient cohorts.

Value-based care (VBC) is now being defined as how precise, personalized, and effective any one patient’s experience can be. VBC is rooted in the right medicine and/or therapy for the right patient at the right time through the right channel within the right context. Essentially, there’s always the opportunity to do more and do better for patients, caregivers, and prescribers. Yes, resources have their limits, but those in the pharmaceutical and life sciences services who adapt to utilize artificial intelligence (AI) and its related subset of technologies to benefit patients one at a time will vastly improve their overall operational efficiency, engage their patients more effectively, and be more satisfied with their insights.

With this two-part series, we’ll discuss how industry professionals can attempt to optimize the potential of AI, big data, and other intelligent interventions to deliver more precise personalized resources and interactions for their customers and patients.

Data and the “decision swirl”

When we think about modern patient services, pharmaceutical and life science manufacturers have stepped up big time to ease the burden of navigating our complex healthcare system. Patient services are a valuable safety net for patients and caregivers, and specialty brands are often a lifeline. There are caveats, however, from the business side; the challenge is not just about reaching more patients through technology or how to fund more programs but reaching more people without increasing the size of the support team or swelling budgets.

Achieving positive results may seem elusive to many professionals, and that’s likely because obstacles are hiding in the form of a “decision swirl” that impacts the ability to achieve success. Beyond the typical barriers, today’s market dynamics and accelerating technology adoption are simply making it more difficult to determine which decisions will yield the desired results. The pace of change and the depths at which data can be collected can leave us feeling like we need more time to process information and make decisions. This is because there are more answers needed to the increasingly more questions that technology can lead us to ask of ourselves.

A solution to process information for more effective decision-making is with AI, which has vast potential to optimize the precision of patient access services with fewer resources and without compromising care quality or program availability through automation, prediction, and recommended actions, thereby closing the gap from insights to action and improving engagement. AI also holds immense promise in analyzing data to reallocate finite resources for maximum impact. Operational efficiencies can reduce costs, while automation can manage scaling costs and advanced analytics can drive return on investment.

Consider these four checkmarks to ensure you’re placing your organization in the best position to make the best decisions:

1. Time for processing. Allocate time and devote resources to understanding processes.

Processes are rapidly changing as healthcare organizations evolve traditional workflows to adapt to new operating models, such as virtual care and telehealth. If processes are unknown, not clearly defined, and/or are rapidly evolving, then decisions will not be clear. As a result, the best intentions will be more prone to failure and significant efforts will be needed to divert and react.

2. Growing with your data. Focus resources on data acquisition, management, validation, and contextualization.

New data sources are always emerging. Existing data types are expanding. Decisions are compromised and opportunities are missed when data is poorly managed, incomplete, or unavailable.

3. Investing in insights. Dedicate domain experts in combination with technical resources to drive insights.

Time, resources, and infrastructure are needed to deliver effective insights. Additionally, domain experts play a valuable role in partnering with technical resources for more accurate insights. If insights are flawed, execution will be flawed.

4. Engagement in the technology. Synchronize patient/prescriber experience with the non-healthcare consumer experience.

Technology continues to augment and amplify consumers’ experiences in their everyday lives, from shopping to schooling to socializing. As a result, specialty brands face increasing expectations to synchronize the patient’s journey with the consumer’s non-healthcare journey. We don’t have many chances to impress stakeholders, and if a heavy reliance is placed on individual staff members to “wow” customers, then consistency and quality can suffer. Additionally, despite an investment in digital tools, if the experience fails to meet customer expectations, then adoption (and thereby results) will be weak.

In making decisions to engage patients, are the right questions being asked? Are the right answers available? Is there sufficient time to vet solutions?

In order to achieve your critical business goals, resources must be allocated effectively, and potentially reallocated to address fluctuating business dynamics. A practical solution-based approach would be to consider that success is a function of domain expertise, investment, effective execution, and favorable external factors. The solution would be to have the right data deriving the right insights and recommending the right actions. This will drive results that are powered by technology while allowing for resource allocation towards more intensive information gathering and more effective decision-making.

We dug in deeper to this topic at the recent Fusion 2021 conference; if you missed this year’s sessions, click here to watch them on demand!