In today’s rapidly evolving world of healthcare, disease indications, and drug treatments, patient journeys are becoming more complex. As the patient experience and treatment options evolve, Life Sciences companies are taking a closer look at how they are incentivizing their field teams to influence patient and prescriber behaviors along the way.

During a recent Fierce BioTech panel, experts from Aurinia Pharmaceuticals, Janssen, and TGaS Advisors, a division of Trinity Life Sciences, discussed their thoughts on how to evolve incentive structures to better align with the modern patient journey. Take a look at three examples from James Castello, Vice President of Incentive Compensation Practice at TGaS Advisors, of how to use patient journey insights to determine alternative performance metrics that can influence patient adherence, enrollment, and health outcomes.

Example 1: Supporting Patient Adherence

This client saw poor patient adherence due to its drug’s initial side effects. However, by looking at data from clinical studies, they knew that if a patient continued with the treatment, the side effects would dissipate and they would see improved outcomes. Rather than rewarding the sales representative upon a new patient acquisition, the client shifted the incentive compensation to the second or third refill. This kept the sales representative engaged with the HCP to support patient adherence.  

Example 2: Educating HCPs

In this example, a client found a way to measure whether doctors were appropriately titrating medication for babies with a rare disease. As the babies grew, the dosage needed to increase.  The client used these insights to establish a compensation model to ensure its sales team could educate and influence the HCPs as the patients progressed under their care. 

Example 3: Defining Team vs. Individual Metrics

In the case of rare or aggressive diseases, patients often travel to nationally recognized disease centers for initial diagnosis or treatment. This begs the question of whether to compensate at the individual territory level or at a team level. This is one example of why it’s important to understand the patient journey to determine the most effective measurements for your incentive compensation plans.

Historically, the patient journey has been relatively straightforward, following a linear trajectory from diagnosis to treatment. Thus, traditional rewards based on the number of HCP engagements and prescriptions were enough. Now that today's patient journey often involves multiple specialists and various, more complex treatments, the examples above serve as a testament to the importance of understanding the patient journey when designing incentive structures. 

Komodo Health offers the deepest, most granular insight into the patient journey. By bringing together real-world data from a multitude of sources, including both open and closed claims data for both medical and pharmacy, you can gain the most complete view of the patient. To learn more about what new insights you can uncover with our data, check out What Insights Are You Missing? New Data Investments To Drive Crucial Insights for Life Sciences.

About the Author: Meghana Sundaresan has extensive experience working with several pharma and biotech organizations to design commercial strategies for launching therapies and repositioning existing offerings to optimize growth. She now works closely with Komodo’s Commercial customers to meet their critical data and analytics needs. 

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