Why the patient experience should be a biotech’s North Star

Depending on your age, you might remember a time when customer service was anything but customer-centric. For many industries, long wait times, convoluted processes, and general frustration were the norms. But in the last 20 years or so, things started to change, as technology began to unlock opportunities for customer service to become more customer friendly. Amazon was one of the frontrunners, setting a new standard for customer centricity and removing friction in basic transactions; others like Apple introduced a more personalized experience via chat, phone, and in-person services. And many others have followed suit, as the trend evolved into a new standard that consumers have grown to expect.

But it’s not just about consumer goods. There’s been a parallel evolution happening in healthcare, with organizations evolving their services to be more accessible, streamlined, and patient-centric. Some of this is because of the new capabilities that technology enables, and some of it is because it’s just the right thing to do. People seeking healthcare should always have the simplest, most streamlined experiences possible. Cleveland Clinic and Kaiser Permanente are notable examples of organizations putting the patient’s experience at the center, removing barriers to finding clinicians, making appointments, seeing providers remotely, receiving care after hours, accessing records, and generally simplifying the user experience.

Biopharma and biotechs are also implementing more intuitive services, including direct ways for patients to receive innovative treatments, like LillyDirect. At Pacira, we’ve been working on the patient experience for many years – in fact, we were founded on the commitment to create better and safer solutions for patients’ pain. As we’ve grown, we’ve expanded this commitment in every direction – not only as we develop new therapies for additional pain types, but across all our communications and platforms for patients and providers.

In the last year, we’ve been working on the next phase of growth, which includes new patient-focused initiatives. To develop these, we focused on questions like, “How can we make navigation faster and easier?” “How can we provide information that is more personalized that resonates and educates?” “How can we facilitate patients sharing information and personal experiences with each other?” A few of the projects we’re working on right now are:

• Patient Hub – We’re creating a highly navigable platform that provides tools to help people find healthcare facilities, locate doctors who use Pacira’s non-opioid treatments, and understand how insurance coverage works, among other offerings.
• Patient Counsel and Ambassador Program – Through this online program, patients can share personal stories and experiences with pain care around surgery or other types of pain. They can also discuss how non-opioid options worked for them, and the critical importance of discussing them with the care team early on.
• Multimedia – Through video, website, and social media, we’re creating more patient-centric storytelling, where patients can be both the subjects and creators. For example, we’re adding a QR code to the wristbands patients wear in the hospital when they receive one of our non-opioid treatments as part of their surgical pain management, to enable them to quickly share their experiences.

Again, this is just a sampling of our current work, and it all feeds into our larger plans in 2025 and beyond. In tandem, we’re creating personalized experiences and tools for providers, removing roadblocks and time-consuming elements of their roles. (We’ve built a chatbot into our professional sites that can greatly shorten navigation time and streamline the user experience and are in the middle of creating other tools for clinicians and administrators – but more on these initiatives in the near future.)

In healthcare, customer experience in all its forms should be the center of our efforts. For the marketers out there, I always like to say that the customer experience is your brand plan – they’re one and the same. But for the biotech and biopharma industry at large, reducing pain points and streamlining experiences should be baked into the definition of patient-centric care – and at the heart of our mission to serve patients.