Nuvera would like to congratulate our team on their engaging and informative presentations at the Patient Support Services Congress last week. It is always exciting to see a fully captive audience when presenting.
Ed Gajewski facilitated a panel discussion with key thought leaders from the manufacturing side to share their insights on how they continue to evolve their approach to support services to enhance the patient experience. The three panelist, Natasha Ammenheuser from Boehringer Ingelheim, Chad Bower from DSI, and Jeff Park from Cytokinetics, have worked across all aspects of the product life cycle and shared their thoughts on how patient support should go beyond the typical patient support program. Key themes that they all highlighted were the need to invest in an early treatment blueprint or customer experience. This is critical for two reasons; one, it allows the organization to truly look under the hood to understand how things are working and two, it brings the organization together and aligns on a north star. The second common theme was cross functional collaboration and giving those partners a seat at the table. Not only does this foster a greater understating of the product for everyone, but it also ensures alignment and adoption at an early stage.
Derek Cothran and Jens Kulstad took the stage next to highlight trends uncovered in the PURE Report and share the winners of the 2023 Best-in-class Annual PURE Awards in oncology, neurology, and immunology. The PURE Report in an independent industry benchmark of patient and HCP satisfaction, utilization, and evolving needs across patient support programs and the overall treatment experience. They announced the Annual Best-in-class Pharma Support Program award winners and the newly released Spotlight winners. The 2023 winners for Best-in-class Pharma Support Program are Bristol Myers Squibb in Oncology, Genentech in Neurology, and Abbvie in Immunology. The Spotlight award was created to highlight the small to mid-size biotech companies. The 2023 Spotlight winners are Daichi-Sankyo in oncology, Neurocrine in neurology, and Incyte in immunology.
Finally, Farris Ibrahim co-presented with Kim Spalter and Lori DeLorenzo from Bayer to share the importance of strategically planning patient support ramp up and deactivation. Their discussion emphasized three main considerations. First, when building a patient support program an organization should map the holistic experience and set support experience goals. Second, understand the need to modify your program as it evolves but reducing the impact of service deactivation is key. There will be discomfort with change, but it is important to be patient. Finally, establishing behaviors and communication are essential to reduce the impact of change for both internal cross-functional teams and external stakeholders.
It was a great conference and opportunity to catch up with so many colleagues across the industry.