Patient centricity: Change behavior using KPIs
KPIs are necessary to drive patient centricity, but senior management buy-in still important in putting patients at the heart of your organization.
If you don’t measure something, it will not happen and it will not improve, said the participants of an eyeforpharma webinar called "Engrain Patient Centricity throughout your company". You need KPIs to work out why some areas of your business are not getting better, as well as to understand how to invest your resources into developing a stronger strategy.
Start with little things. For example, most companies use a target product profile, which is used as a “compass” for the product development from the start of the research, and is ultimately employed as a leaflet for that product. “[The question is]: has your company got the mandatory paragraph of patient input in your target profile?” asked Lode Dewulf, Chief Patient Affairs Officer, UCB. “If you had decided to include it, it becomes very easy to measure it numerically – what percentage of compounds have this in their target profile – and then you can also have some quality input,” Dewulf explained.
A similar principle applies to employees. At the start, objectives related to patient value must be set for each person within the organization. Measuring success then becomes easy, and you can clearly see when you go from zero to five percent, to, hopefully, statistics ranging in the eighties and nineties. Once that’s done, you have a good volume of good practices, which you can then use to define qualitative metrics. “In each area, you need to ask yourself: what percentage of our protocols has patient input before it is a draft protocol? What percentage of promotional materials has patient input before they are first sent off to design? From the numbers, you define best practice guidelines. This is the next big thing in pharma. We need to start doing this as an industry, instead of just talking about it", Dewulf concluded.
Be patient
The most important part of a patient-centric organization is that the patient interaction and the patient value are not seen as a solely financial, commercial, or promotional activity. In such a case, you have a real problem in the organization".
Patient value doesn’t necessarily translate into immediate profit. Some of the short-term measurements pertain to helping patients, e.g. was a given promotional material informative? Is this consent-form patient-friendly? But don’t get carried away. “Patient value is a part of a bigger value chain, and every part of the company needs to define it according to their business process, and you must avoid a situation in which only one function such as commercial dictates what patient value is. The most important part of a patient-centric organization is that the patient interaction and the patient value are not seen as a solely financial, commercial, or promotional activity. In such a case, you have a real problem in the organization,” said Tony Hoos, Medicines4Patients (M4P) Consulting, London, Former SVP, Office of Chief Medical Officer, GlaxoSmithKline.
When discussing finances, remember that there are things that have importance beyond money. Dewulf compared building patient-centricity to building employee satisfaction with an employer. Both are more than money. “Of course the financials have to be right, and they have to be paid on time, and you want to see some progression, but ultimately this is not what’s keeping you with a certain employer. When the (financial) basics are right, it is the intangible aspects that are not related to money that keep you with this employer, and the same applies to patient value,” he stressed.
Management buy-in
The fact that money can only follow over a long-term period means that you need overview and guidance from the top. Shire provides an interesting example of involvement from the top. Tom Croce, Head Global Patient Advocacy, Shire Pharmaceutical, explained: “Shire just created the Patient Advocacy Department, [understanding] the need to bring patient voice into the company, but instead of handing down a set of goals and objectives, they trusted me with creating them, showing their commitment, but also openness to the dialogue with patients.”
Dewulf agrees and also supports the bottom-up approach. “You cannot expect the executive committee or your CEO to really know the details of everything and be very clear in the definition, but what you can do and expect from them is that they commit to it in the same way twenty years ago companies committed to being compliant with regulations on promotion. So it’s a combination of bottom-up and –down.”
Hoos agreed. “The general attitude needs to come from the top, otherwise it’s very, very difficult to move the organization. Almost like a mission statement, this needs to come from the top of the company.”
Strong strategy regarding patient centricity depends on management buy-in and quantitative as well as qualitative feedback. Companies need to be open to dialogue, and measure their own performance in order to drive behavior change.