By CHRIS ZANT

                                   SPONSORED CONTENT

In my personal time away from my role at Deloitte, I am a private pilot and passionate volunteer for a charity that facilitates free air transportation for children and adults with medical conditions who need to get to treatment far from home.  In my interactions with these patients I hear how important communication is to their well-being. I also hear how outreach from life sciences companies enables improvements in their lives and puts them back at the center of the health ecosystem.

It is not controversial to say that patients must be at the center of the current and the future healthcare ecosystem; however, it may be to admit that today they are not well served by this ecosystem. The need to enable and effectively support care coordination across health care professionals (HCPs), providers, and other care team members to drive effective and appropriate use of pharmaceutical products is something I hear my clients in health care asking for on a daily basis. My clients ask for strategies that will enable them to build loyalty through extraordinary execution of their patient engagement programs, and through that loyalty drive adherence and better health outcomes. This ability to deliver consistent, high-quality, reliable service across all channels of engagement is a game changer. Recently Deloitte Consulting leaders discussed this subject on a webinar for our clients.

When these programs are well implemented they provide transparent information to build trust, while anticipating how to proactively respond to patients’ and their care team’s needs.  Insight and strategic intelligence enable our clients to demonstrate measurable benefits of their treatments and to provide guidance about how cost aligns to outcomes.

So what does a great patient engagement program platform look like? It provides consistent high-touch interactions across channels (e.g., companion app, portal, phone, text, and chat).  It enables the care network to collaborate with HCPs, families and other care team members. It provides a vehicle for internal and external data analysis to bring unique insights into patient treatment and interactions and demonstrate real-world evidence. All it does all of this while aggregating patient data from multiple sources and connecting both pharmaceutical and external vendor data to create a single view of patient interactions. All of these capabilities are easily empowered by a cloud-based, scalable technology platform like Salesforce Health Cloud. In fact, Deloitte Digital announced our approach to the market on March 2 of this year and will soon be making another major announcement as our platform advances.

In my personal interactions with the patients I fly, I can see the importance of a well-defined patient engagement program that feeds real-world evidence and intelligence back into the product-development lifecycle. This output data of the health care system is the key to creating a learning loop that will enable life sciences companies to continue to make quantum leaps in gaining the best possible outcomes from current products and feeding the funnel to find new treatments for these families.  Hopefully this means better results for patients and fewer flights for me.

Chris Zant is a Principal in Life Sciences for Deloitte Digital.