Capturing the patient voice in market access communications

Patients have unique perspectives on their conditions that, when incorporated into value communications, can provide an authenticity and salience which would otherwise be lacking. Who knows better the humanistic burden and unmet need than the patients themselves?

However, it has become increasingly common for these voices to be lost in an ever-growing volume of data necessary to satisfy payer evidence requirements. As an example, the function of the global value dossier (GVD) has been gradually shifting from the original concept of a narrative-based document telling a clear value story to that of a repository for clinical and economic data to support reimbursement submissions. But with the focus shifting away from patient perspectives and towards greater clinical and economic detail, something valuable has been lost in the process.

Patient perspectives serve to anchor in our minds the tangible significance of the relevant disorder, and thereby effectively illustrate the burden of disease and the impact of treatment in ways that statistics cannot.  In addition, the importance of patient advocacy is only going to increase. Failing to consider or reflect this in your product value strategy and value communications will be a missed opportunity.

It is clearly of great importance to ensure that payers and healthcare professionals are kept fully informed of all the relevant data relating to emerging pharmaceuticals. Yet without retaining the patient perspective as part of this discussion, and being considered more than just an anecdote, market access communications are at risk of reducing patients to mere statistics and thereby reducing the impact of product-specific value messaging and the perceived importance of patient access. 

Despite this, providing such patient perspectives without forethought to their optimal placement and impact on the adjacent content in a document designed to convey robust clinical evidence could have the deleterious effect of diluting relevant clinical data with anecdotal evidence. 
Pharmaceutical companies are therefore faced with a dilemma: Is it possible to reconcile these competing goals: 

1. Achieve ever-increasing detail in market access communications to meet payer expectations, without losing the impact of patient perspectives
    
2. Provide patient perspectives to supplement and support clinical information without diluting the population-level clinical significance with perceived anecdotal evidence

At Parexel, we have been re-building the concept of value communication from the ground up, to ensure that it is fit for purpose in an ever changing and increasingly demanding market. By reconciling and integrating the patient voice into our market access communications, we’re able to create impactful value strategy tools that are accurate, insightful, and engaging.

Look out for our launch of a new approach to the GVD over the coming weeks, or contact ebony.samuels@parexel.com to discuss how we could transform your GVD today. 

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