October 31, 2013

Creating Value with Hub Models: Part 2 - Outcomes for All

By Lash Group

In Part I of our Hub Models executive brief series, we examined considerations for the strategic build and desired outcomes of a centralized approach to patient support programs. In Part II, we’ll evaluate proven outcomes and benefits across the healthcare continuum.

Pharmaceutical manufacturers are often tasked with adding value within existing patient/provider relationships where their customers have competing priorities. For example, patients may consider a product valuable if it is low-cost, while healthcare providers and/or payers rank product cost lower on their list of priorities. With its centralized approach and streamlined access, the hub model makes it easier for manufacturers to interject value on two fronts: producing benefits for all stakeholders and generating better outcomes for their products.

Advantages for patients

One inherent benefit of the hub model is that messaging and communication come from one source – it’s a durable approach that lets manufacturers stay on top of the messaging from the decision to treat to the time therapy is complete. Lash Group has highly skilled associates who provide end-to-end, personalized management directly through the hub, rather than acting as a triage to get the patient to a solution. The hub serves as a single point of contact where patients can get answers to any questions, thereby improving the patient experience and perception of the product and care.

The biggest driver in making the hub model work for patients at Lash Group is our patients first service philosophy, which ensures that your patients always have an experience that assures ongoing trust in your brand and support throughout the duration of therapy. This philosophy means that Lash Group applies best-in-class technology and proven program performance indicators to ensure that patients not only experience program effectiveness, but also quality of service.

Adapting to the prescriber workflow

Lash Group's infrastructure includes both relationships with suppliers and forward-looking technology. The flexibility of our technology and program design capabilities, based on years of experience in designing these programs, allows us to create a solution that fits multiple players within the industry. And our relationship with our sister companies allows us to adopt those changes more quickly and respond to manufacturer needs more efficiently by leveraging the vast resources of AmerisourceBergen. Most of all, flexibility means the ability to design programs that produce outcomes others cannot. As more and more prescribers look to hub models as a way to collaborate in patient care, the flexibility to integrate with the prescriber workflow will be critical.

Outcomes: Improving Access

The hub model is an effective way to manage product access as well. Lash Group partners with manufacturers throughout the commercialization process to maximize patient access and reduce the administrative burden for manufacturers and their stakeholders. Realizing that there will be both planned and unplanned barriers to accessing a product – payer issues, patient education, etc. – the hub model allows us to identify barriers more efficiently, then contain those that are unplanned and simplify those that are planned. What’s more, the flexibility of the hub model means that, whether the barrier is planned or not, the solution is coming through a centralized spot.

Outcomes: Proven results

There’s more to the hub model than patient and provider education and communication. Lash Group data demonstrates that addressing multiple access barriers through one solution can lead to improved product outcomes. Moreover, single solutions (e.g., copay support, clinical adherence) are most likely to incrementally improve outcomes; however, when strategically packaged, outcomes are even better. When the program primarily serves as a support mechanism to address patients and HCPs as needs arise, the strategic positioning and subsequent marketing of the program/hub can impact services and utilization significantly. In fact, when combined with specialty pharmacy, the hub model can increase duration of therapy as much as 25 percent. For example, one manufacturer had multiple optional support offerings, strategically packaging the services showed an improvement in Medication Possession Ratio as compared to the product baseline.

The Lash Group Difference

An important feature of the hub approach is integrated, high functionality databases tailored to appropriate stakeholder needs, including territory files, payer accounts, daily operational reports, executive dashboards, cost mitigation and alternative funding success rates reports. And the reporting comes from a centralized location so manufacturers get consistent data on product performance and duration of therapy, whether clinical- or provider-related. It is a package that cannot be duplicated easily if a manufacturer is working with different service providers to manually compile data. What the manufacturer receives from centralized reporting is also segmented and actionable, meaning strategy changes take place in one spot instead of trying to get multiple suppliers and individuals on board with a new strategy.

Because Lash Group offers programs that support the entire product lifecycle, we can gather data at different points of the process – beginning of treatment, middle and end – and support existing processes for a broader view of program results.