Reducing Adoption Barriers in Specialty Therapy Launch

To learn more about the origins of this customer story, check out this related post from March 2022.

A leading life sciences manufacturer wanted to better streamline adoption of a newly launched infusion therapy for an elderly patient population. Through partnership with Authenticx, a core strategic question emerged: what obstacles hinder these at-risk patients from starting therapy? 

Authenticx in Action  

In the 8-month period following therapy launch, Authenticx analyzed thousands of conversations between patients, caregivers, healthcare providers, infusion site staff, and the organization’s support specialists. Within the first 30 days of this targeted listening, they uncovered three significant points of friction in the patient journey:  

1. Completing Consent Forms: patients and caregivers faced barriers accessing and submitting a variety of online forms and signatures for consent. This barrier was compounded by an older patient population that relied on caregivers for support but was not always equipped to provide consent.  

2. Accessing an infusion site: patients and caregivers received conflicting information around sites’ ability to administer the therapy, which in some cases required them to travel a great distance to access the nearest available site. This difficulty extended to patients who were traveling and found themselves stuck trying to find infusion sites away from home.  

3. Paying for the medication: With the launch of the new drug, patients and caregivers found themselves stuck trying to navigate costs and coverage. They faced issues with Medicare process complications and understanding costs and coverage for the required diagnostics.  

By listening at scale, Authenticx enabled the organization’s leaders to zoom out and see a full picture. At the time of discovering these barriers: 

• One-third of conversations containing the topic of consent forms went unresolved  
• In conversations containing the topic of infusion sites, nearly 3 in 4 patients (71%) expressed that they had not begun therapy because were having trouble finding a site 
• When looking at the full patient journey, those who were in the diagnostic stage experienced the most friction 

Results  

Armed with these insights, marketing and patient support leaders at the organization refined the consent form process via simpler online instruction paired with enhanced coaching for support specialists. The marketing team also updated the Infusion Site Locator tool on the therapy’s website, ensuring that the information they provided matched what patients and caregivers were hearing from the sites themselves, and they worked to clarify costs and coverage with patients and providers. By doing so, they saw: 

• Conversations with unresolved consent fall by more than half, from 33% to 14% 
• Conversations containing trouble finding an infusion site drastically reduced, from 71% to 12% 
• An influx of new calls from non-participating infusion sites inquiring about how they could begin administering the therapy 
• Clarity on what insurance will and won’t cover during the diagnostic stage  
• New opportunities to support front line staff 

Authenticx insights helped pinpoint tactical actions the manufacturer could take to streamline adoption and increase access — ultimately enabling more patients to successfully receive care.  

About Authenticx

Authenticx was founded to analyze and activate customer interaction data at scale. Why? We wanted to reveal transformational opportunities in healthcare. We are on a mission to help humans understand humans. With a combined 100+ years of leadership experience in pharma, payer, and healthcare organizations, we know first-hand the challenges and opportunities that our clients face because we’ve been in your shoes.

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