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Beyond the Pill:

Gala Farooq

The growing prevalence of chronic conditions and focus on value-based, patient-centric healthcare have intensified the need to provide beyond-the-pill services that support patients through their treatment journeys. Such services enable manufacturers to support patients in terms of access and adherence, and ease the burden on healthcare providers, thereby enabling meaningful non-clinical differentiation. Patient service programmes are also gaining critical importance for assets with high list prices, and it is possible that such support programmes may become part of access negotiations in the future as a way of reducing treatment-associated costs and hence demonstrating value to payers.
However, provision of such services is complicated by various regional regulations which seek to prevent direct financial support and ‘incentivisation’ of drugs, with EU markets such as France proving most resistant to manufacturer-provided services. Pharma therefore needs to tread carefully, defining market-specific service offerings to ensure compliance. Local regulations also impact executional approaches, with manufacturers seeking to mitigate the risk of anti-kickback lawsuits via asset-agnostic, umbrella programmes which avoid drug-specific branding, and collaborations with patient advocacy groups to avoid direct patient-manufacturer interaction.

At Eradigm, our expertise spans both high-level strategic recommendations and grass-roots implementation tactics, with experience across indications including immunology, cardiovascular diseases, rare diseases, oncology, and cell and gene therapies, with capabilities including:

  • Landscape mapping to benchmark existing competitor services, by identifying the various touchpoints across the patient journey, cataloguing the nature of services provided by competitors, detailing competitor operational approaches such as use of third-party vendors and patient advocacy groups, and highlighting any market-specific nuances.
  • Opportunity assessments to enable curation of a gold-standard patient support offering per market, by collating healthcare provider and patient feedback of available patient services, identifying which services are a ‘cost of entry’ and which are ‘best-in-class,’ and flagging current gaps in competitor patient services.
  • Strategic recommendations to develop optimal go-to-market models and maximise non-clinical differentiation, by providing a roadmap for branding and market-specific execution.

Case Studies

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Circle Lead Bio: Gala Farooq

Gala Farooq, PhD, is a Senior Consultant and the lead for Patient Services projects at Eradigm. During her time at Eradigm, she has developed deep expertise in using competitive intelligence lenses to assess manufacturer service provision across markets. She has provided multiple pharma clients with targeted recommendations for services curation and implementation across the US, EU and APAC regions, and specialises in the curation of global, franchise-level patient services programmes which maximise commercial positioning and non-clinical differentiation while following market-specific regulations.