Six building blocks are needed to build a PSP
To build a strong PSP, you always start by having the patient and patient journey in focus.
In fact, a PSP is not much different from a strong customer loyalty programme such as Lufthansa’s Miles & More or Starbucks® Rewards and is fundamentally built around the same principles and goals, i.e. to give patients the best end-to-end customer experience possible, thereby improving their health and the likelihood that they will stay with you.
Still, a patient is not like a traditional consumer, which increases the complexity of building a PSP versus
a traditional loyalty programme.
Hence, if you want to build a successful PSP, you need the following six building blocks to be in place (see figure 1):
1. Set your strategic objectives
First, you need to establish a common view on where to play and how to win. Typical choices for a PSP include which patients to focus on, which products to include, how to involve HCPs, patient health objectives and commercial objectives, among other things.
For pharma and medtech companies, it is typically a new thing to move towards direct patient engagement, and it requires involvement of multiple stakeholders from many layers of the organisation. Therefore, it is often a challenge to be aligned on a clear direction from the beginning. In our experience, the right thing to do is to run dedicated strategy workshops with stakeholders from senior management, digital marketing, medical marketing, sales, IT and legal to set a clear direction before starting up your PSP journey.
2. Focus on enrolment
How do you get patients to sign up? In simple terms, you will not have a PSP if you do not get anyone to sign up, regardless of how personalised your programme is. It is the single most important building block, but also the most challenging one, as you need to win the hearts of the HCPs, who are typically the main drivers of enrolments. Ironically, most companies often struggle with this, as they tend to focus more on creating strong personalisation algorithms and content rather than ensuring that they get patients to sign up for the programme.
If you want to win the hearts of the HCPs, you need to engage your sales force, which is best done through PSP training sessions, integrating the PSP into the existing meeting cadence, PSP enrolment competitions and ongoing performance tracking.
3. Get your platform and communication channels in place
This building block is often quite resource-intensive, but it is necessary in order to run a PSP.
It is the foundation of storing patient data properly and handling your marketing automation touchpoints such as email and SMS, which are all essential if you want to enable personalised communication flows.
Companies often underestimate the complexity of this building block. As this is often the first time most companies deal with patient data rather than HCP data, it requires a fundamentally new way of thinking about data storage, data fields, processes and how to best integrate the PSP platform into the existing IT infrastructure.
4. Move from product-centric to patient-centric content
Most life science companies focus on communication towards their key decision-makers, i.e. HCPs. This
typically means that they use a language that is very condition-, product- and technically oriented,
which is very different from the language of a patient.
If you want to create new and relevant patient content, you must start by enabling a new and more outside-in way of thinking about communication. To do this, you must do market research and have strong customer-centric content skills.
5. Measure and track
Just like when you do change projects, you must also be able to understand and track whether the
PSP is performing as intended. However, since this is a relatively new discipline, most companies must do more development work, because they often start from scratch. This includes defining new KPIs, methodologies, data handling processes and building new dashboards. We have learnt that you need to view PSP insights as a project in itself.
If you want to build the right foundation from the get-go, you need a strong co-development plan, involving multiple stakeholders from performance management, customer insights, product marketing, CRM and sales as well as people from the management team.
6. Get the organisation and capabilities in place
You need a dedicated PSP team to make a PSP sustainable and get it anchored in the organisation. The best PSP organisation is one that is centred around patient journeys with all roles working with patient engagement.
This is the best way to enable seamless patient journeys with as little friction as possible. Note that it requires strong organisational design and internal stakeholder management skills – something that only increases with the size of your company.
Thus, make sure that you assign a senior person who has experience with customer experience and organisational design if you want to increase your chances of success.