|
Persistency and Compliance Strategies
For chronic therapies, persistency (the rate of patient retention) and compliance (a measure of missed doses, drug holidays, etc.) are critical measurements. Low persistency or compliance diminishes the ability of drug therapies to treat important conditions. This can prove costly to the patient and to the healthcare system.
A number of data vendors have emerged over the past several years to track persistency and compliance. There is a wide variety of methodologies and quality of data among these vendors, and all have some bias. Therefore, it is essential to understand the strengths and weaknesses of each source to gain the most insight on patient behavior. Furthermore, these sources can measure "how much," but they often lack the ability to answer "how come."
Trinity has focused on persistency and compliance since our inception in 1996. Building the proper data "infrastructure" is only the first step. Our goal is to provide actionable insights that improve, not just measure, patient retention. It is critical to understand the reasons behind this behavior, and to quantitatively segment them into meaningful groups. This in turn leads to recommendations on sales strategies, marketing messages, and retention/compliance programs.
CASE EXAMPLE
Situation
After working with our client to measure persistency and compliance, we found that an unexpected number of patients were discontinuing their product, a specialty injectable treating an autoimmune disease. Our client sought solutions to demonstrate the benefits of long-term therapy to patients.
Approach
Using innovative data sources, we segmented the market based on reasons for discontinuation. We identified two key groups for immediate action: patients within their first three months of therapy who did not know what to expect, and patients on chronic therapy who had a sudden worsening of their condition. In both cases patients, not physicians, drove therapy changes. We advised our client to create patient-directed programs through HIPAA-compliant third parties such as retail and specialty pharmacies.
Result
Our client saw immediate and long-lasting benefits to persistency in those channels where programs were instituted. Discontinuation was reduced by 20-30% in most programs. Programs were cost effective and consistently demonstrated ROI of 600%-1000%.
|
