Customer Centric Transformation in the Pharma Industry

Productivity lies in focussing on patient and customer needs!!!

Pharma and Health Care sectors may be late entrants to tap the ground-breaking potentials of digital technology.  It has, however, over the past 2 decades, transformed patient interactions to epic levels.  High tech digital experiences such as ‘to-the-minute patient medical history tracking’, are today’s minimum health care benchmarks.  Further, personalized, interesting patient interactions are being delivered through digital marketing tools for futuristic and effective patient outcomes.

However, what health care marketers still must work on is, maintaining the end-to-end continuity in technology-based patient care.

Organizational consumer fascination philosophy

It is to be understood by every healthcare and pharma personnel that merely gathering data to gain insights into consumer/patient requirements is hardly adequate. Digital experiences have augmented patient expectations from pharma and health care offerings.

It has now become a basic need for every Enterprise personnel to become extremely sensitive and obsessed with their consumer needs.

Strategically design patient/customer experience

The primary initiative required to bring in customer centricity is, to create optimal patient health care journey and patient experience enhancements:

• Draw tactical plans such as reducing time spent in receptions and waiting areas.
• Maintenance of continuity for every patient health care journey:
  • For instance, a patient may be continuing treatment/medication between his/her clinical visits.  Here, what marketers require doing is to be in touch with the patient for the complete period of the chronic condition, even during times they are at home, between their healthcare center visits
  • Today’s digital technology capabilities have an entire gamut of options for providing continuous contact with patients

Healthcare marketers require to put in place a strategic continuous-patient-interaction plan for an effective patient experience such as being equipped with CX competencies.

Patient journey mapping

To improvise on patient contact and touch-base throughout their medical condition periods, enterprise experts use the process of patient journey mapping.  This is also synonymously called healthcare process mapping.

The process draws out a Patient Journey Map to outline the touch-base stages of a patient at every phase of their communication with the health care center.

With this, the health care center will be able to develop a strategic plan to maintain patient touch-base during the entire course of their health care period.

Patient journey map intent

• Continuously reach out to patients throughout their health care period
• Identifying issues with health care being provided to the patient
• Driving the operations and marketing team; reach out to patients; resolve his/her health issue

Patient journey maps help health care marketers derive delightful patient meetings and durable relationships between patients and health care providers.

Continuous, defragmented teamwork with digital CX capabilities

Building a continuous, digitally connected, coordinated health care team environment is a mandatory part of every Enterprise.

• Across the health and pharma world, marketing strategists have discovered newer, digitally connected capabilities for a wholistic, consumer-centric transformation
• Enterprises can build their digital, coordinated CX capabilities either as an intra-network, or partner with suitable digital marketing organizations

Customized patient engagements through Enterprise CX

Pharma/health care products and services have for a long time now, being created for a group of similar consumers with generically similar conditions.  Market researches over a couple of years now are increasingly emphasizing on individualistic, customized patient health needs.

Digital pharma market pundits are betting heavily on individualized digital offerings, based on patient’s specific goals, health condition, and inclinations. This requires designing and building digital Enterprise CX around individual health requirements and lifestyle.

For this, an intense, digitally aided study of patient profiles, across demographic boundaries, their health needs and approach towards individual health, is required.

1.Directed, digital data collection techniques

Many futuristic pharma companies have oriented themselves in working towards targeted data collection techniques.

• The intent of intuitive, responsive techniques is to deliver gratified patient outcomes and experiences.These digital techniques target specific segments of consumers/patients instead of an entire population
• The imperatives of such customized techniques allow health care and pharma enterprises to deliver newer services and products to a wider patient population and costing precision for the enterprise

2.Wearable technology devices for customized patient engagements

The use of wearables technology devices has revolutionized patient care to exponential extents through automatic data analytics.

Wearable device benefits

• Use of wearables help to easily treat patients with chronic medical conditions such as blood pressure, diabetes, obesity etc
• Medical practitioners and nurses use analytics capability and wearable device competencies for patient diagnosis and treatment at revolutionary speeds
• Across the globe, use of wearable technology devices by patients and medical practitioners have drastically reduced patient readmissions and adverse medical sequelae

How wearables work?

• When patients start utilizing the wearable devices, patient data is integrated to the Electronic Health Record (EHR).  Physicians thus have regular access to the patient data whenever they need
• For instance, doctors can access patient’s blood pressure readings, or physiotherapists can access exercise and diet regimes of their patients
• Ground-breaking partnerships such as Google partnering with Fitbit have delivered exceptional patient engagements

3.Use of Omni channels for superior patient experiences

By using Omni channels medical agents need not directly meet patient requirements with traditional telephonic and allied devices.  Instead, exceptional patient experiences are driven through internet-based tools such as emails, SMS, webchat and social media platforms that are used to interact with patients.

4.Power of Minimal Viable Product’ (MVP) approach & Universal health care

Rather than undertaking improvisations in bits and pieces to cater ‘for the time being’, enterprises have started leveraging on the MVP approach.  The first release the novel base-product with all basic requirements intact, releasing it as the first, 1.0 Version.  They then undertake updates to the first version, perfecting it step-by-step and start releasing subsequent versions periodically as and when it is updated.

5.Using Insights Operating System (IOS)

An IOS is a fantastic digital tool that helps health care and pharma enterprises to process the ocean of gathered data and converting it into the correct, perceptive and analytics-driven information, that can be used for precise decision making.  The IOS uses a sequential process to achieve this result:

• The IOS is built with a core “Consumer Intelligence Engine” that generates intuitive analytics and information for the decision-makers
• A set of all “Repeatable Processes” must be configured within the organization where every department and unit can share and use consumer insights data from each other
• Such steps induce a culture of consumer obsession among every person in the organization, thus making a customer-centric enterprise

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