Across the board, Pharmaceutical companies are looking to reduce the amount of effort they put into case processing. Case processing comprises a huge amount of manual effort in pharmacovigilance, and with cases projected to increase by 20% every year, there has never been a better time to simplify.
With such a large goal in mind, how do we “eat the elephant?” Today we’re serving up your first course: patient support programs.
About Patient Support Programs
Patient Support Programs have become a vital part of the pharmacovigilance landscape. When it comes to patient engagement, there is no better option. In fact, PSPs and similar programs are consistently tied to improved adherence to prescriber guidelines, increased efficacy of the treatment, enhanced safety of using the product, and can even reduce the all-around healthcare costs for patients.
As pharmacovigilance entities are striving to reduce the attention they give to high-volume activities like adverse event case processing and manual aggregation of reports, having a resource like PSPs that improve patient engagement, communication and all-around safety is increasingly valuable.
So, where’s the rub?
Patient support programs can introduce a lot of complexity into the daily operations of your pharmacovigilance team. For one, Patient Care Providers must report adverse events gathered through the patient support programs. According to Orbit’s research, these cases can account for 25-40% of your total caseload, and like many solicited events they are generally non-serious, expected and listed.
Essentially, in an attempt to increase the attention into patient engagement, your PV team is also increasing their workload when it comes to more menial tasks like processing these adverse events.
Additionally, the vast majority of Patient Support Programs are provided by vendors, who each have different methods of recording adverse event reports and sharing them with you. PSPs often create too much data from too many sources for your operational infrastructure—a classic vendor management problem. How can you streamline data sharing and reduce friction around case intake and pre-processing?
