Why Pharma Needs to Invest in Experience Design

Create patient personas representing your largest patient segments. When sketching the personas, first consider demographic clusters including gender, sexual orientation, economic status, age and other relevant characteristics. Once you identify the target demographic, begin sketching out its non-clinical characteristics including interests, needs and desires. Ethnographic interviews are an excellent research tool to assess non-clinical attributes of a patient population (learn more about frog’s favorite research resources here).

This exercise will give you a much clearer picture of the competing life priorities that may impact medication effectiveness, and the process itself builds empathy with the target population, helping researchers better understand how different drug delivery mechanisms may fit into patients’ lives.

Once patient personas have been defined, create a patient journey map to clearly outline the competing priorities at all stages of the medication experience. The patient journey map should be exhaustive, beginning when they first realize they need medical attention and ending when they need to refill their prescription. Through this process pharma companies can create a list of both the riskiest non-adherence areas and the contexts that lead to those risks. Understanding the context is critical to creating innovative mechanisms to promote adherence.

Also consider launching a quantitative survey as a supplement for qualitative research in order to quantify or measure the reasons for non-adherence. When assessing the results of such a survey, be careful not to prioritize solving the most commonly cited reason for non-compliance simply because it is the most common–you must also consider which opportunities may be the easiest or most difficult to solve for. Motivating human behavior is no simple feat, and will require significant investment in design to meaningfully move the needle. If there are reasons cited for non-adherence that are beyond your control, de-prioritize them in favor of others where your influence will be greater.

Given the multitude of drop-off points for some medications, the ideal drug delivery system should avoid dependence on patient intervention to promote effectiveness. Therefore, when it is clinically viable, pharmaceuticals should prioritize designing drug delivery mechanisms that do not require repeated patient intervention. A prime example of eliminating patient intervention is the IUD, which has become the fastest growing method of birth control. Between 2002 and 2017 the use of IUDs increased from 2% to 14%, while the use of birth control pills decreased by one-fifth. Because the IUD removed the need for patients to remember to fill and take their prescription during regimented intervals, it is 20 times more effective than the birth control pill.

When the delivery mechanism–a pill, in the case of most pharmaceuticals–cannot be changed, companies can use divergent thinking to redefine the patient experience instead. Divergent thinking challenges business leaders to explore a wide variety of solutions without restraint. The objective of divergent thinking is to define the realm of possibilities and then narrow them down to identify those innovations most likely to affect medication adherence. 

There are many examples of innovative medication adherence solutions on the market today. For example, AdhereTech’s tech-enabled pill bottles have improved adherence by 15%. Gamification is another viable path, as demonstrated by Walgreens’s efforts to incentivize medication adherence through gamification adjustment. There are also opportunities in the medication delivery space, as we’ve seen with Amazon’s purchase of PillPack for $753M. 

frog’s own healthcare practice regularly works with pharmaceutical clients to improve the effectiveness of their life changing therapies in the ways described above. In our experience, decades of R&D investments often cause these clients to over-index on the clinical efficacy of their therapies. While efficacy is absolutely critical, it is table stakes, particularly in hypercompetitive markets. That’s why we recommend our pharmaceutical clients consider patient experience as the key factor in improving medication adherence. Practically, this means a substantial investment increase throughout the drug development lifecycle in order to identify medication drop-off points and address them through thoughtful experience design, helping patients see the full potential of their therapies. 

Some might balk at this new and increased development price tag, but If pharma companies brought the same level of rigor and creativity to medication adherence strategy as they do to the drug discovery process, they would create tremendous value for the entire healthcare system. Greater medication adherence would not only drive greater customer lifetime value for pharma, it would also yield better health outcomes, likely reduce per capita health costs and improve patient experience, finally bringing the baton across the finish line.