Where Operational Friction Creeps Into Patient Support Programs

Medication non-adherence dominates conversations about patient support, and for good reason. Research estimates it costs the U.S. healthcare system between $100 billion and $300 billion every year, making it one of healthcare's most expensive challenges.

Pharmaceutical companies have invested heavily in patient support programs that provide education, refill reminders, and nurse outreach. But while these programs are designed to remove barriers to therapy, they also create operational work that's rarely measured.

The question is no longer whether patient support improves outcomes. It's whether those outcomes can be achieved more efficiently.

‍The Price of Inefficiency

Healthcare is already recognizing the impact of administrative burden. Research shows that operational inefficiencies consume a significant amount of clinical time and resources, including:

15 hours — Median nurse time spent per physician each week on drug utilization management activities.

$75,927 — Average annual administrative cost per physician practice.

$43 billion — Estimated annual staff time spent on administrative work nationwide.

Patient support programs face many of the same challenges. Every manual outreach attempt, unanswered patient message, and repeated follow-up adds to the operational workload of teams already working to improve patient outcomes.

The opportunity is to stop treating every patient interaction as if it requires the same level of human intervention.

‍Improving Engagement Without Increasing Work

We recently partnered with a specialty pharmaceutical brand to rethink its engagement strategy by matching patients with the communication channel they were most likely to use.

The results included a 4.7× higher patient response rate, refill confirmations in an average of two days, and just 1.8 nurse outreach attempts per patient.

Download the case study to see how a smarter engagement strategy helped reduce operational burden while improving patient response.