Complete the form below to receive the white paper.
.png)
Patients navigating specialty therapies face a web of obstacles that hinder their ability to start—and stay on—treatment. Whether due to administrative hurdles, cost barriers, or fragmented support, these challenges have serious consequences. 30% of patients never begin their prescribed therapy, and 66% discontinue within a year.
Improving patient adherence isn’t just a clinical concern—it’s a commercial imperative. For biopharma companies launching specialty therapies, failure to keep patients on treatment directly undermines patient outcomes and overall program performance.
Yet, these drop-offs are rarely due to a lack of intent. They stem from system breakdowns: Fragmented workflows, disconnected data, and limited visibility into where patients are in their journey.
In therapeutic areas that require sustained support and coordinated intervention—like oncology, rare disease, and immunology—these breakdowns compound quickly. Patients fall through the cracks, field teams chase incomplete information, and support teams are forced to react instead of proactively guiding patients forward.
The stakes are particularly high in specialty pharma, where therapies are complex, high-cost, and often life-altering. These health outcomes and challenges demand a proactive, patient-centric approach that legacy CRMs and outdated systems simply can’t support.
Here are five key strategies biopharma teams can implement today to minimize the likelihood of patients falling through the cracks, improve adherence, and deliver a better patient experience.
Many patients prescribed specialty therapies reach this point only after years of systemic delays—misdiagnoses, fragmented care, and limited specialist access that prolongs the path to treatment.
Commonly, it can take half a decade between experiencing initial symptoms and receiving the correct diagnosis.
Whether it’s for one of the 7,000 rare diseases or an innovative approach to chronic conditions, by the time patients and loved ones are prescribed a novel treatment regimen, they may already be fatigued, anxious, and/or overwhelmed.
In addition, the logistical friction of navigating insurance, coordinating care with providers, and overcoming financial obstacles makes the path to starting and staying on therapy feel steep.
Even when patients begin a medication regimen and prescribed medications are filled, complex protocols or perceived side effects often lead to early abandonment. This is bad for patients, and it’s bad for the broader ecosystem of partners designed to support them (providers, manufacturers, etc.). What’s more, all of this amounts to larger system health care costs.
Key reasons for early disengagement include:
Medication nonadherence leads to worse outcomes and wasted resources—especially for patients with chronic diseases who often endure years-long delays in diagnosis and access. A growing body of healthcare research confirms that poor adherence undermines individual outcomes and limits the data insights biopharma manufacturers need to continuously innovate going forward.
Fragmented systems prevent biopharma teams from acting in a timely, tailored fashion. According to Courier Health’s State of Patient Centricity in Biopharma 2025 report, 50% of respondents toggle between five or more systems each day to manage patient needs.
The result is that crucial patient-facing teams spend more time figuring out who to help and how, as opposed to strategically engaging patients and providers.
With a purpose-built patient CRM, Patient Services and Field Access teams gain real-time visibility into the end-to-end patient journey.
For example, if a PA is approaching expiration, the system can flag it in advance, giving Field Reimbursement teams time to act before there’s a potential denial or gap in coverage. End-to-end visibility and predictive analytics allow teams to intervene before they impact access and a patient’s health.
Real-time data and centralized coordination are essential to managing the pharma patient journey from diagnosis through access, initiation, and ongoing adherence.
Connected pharmaceutical patient engagement solutions also empower Patient Services teams to act quickly when issues arise, like delayed shipments or outdated scripts on file at the SP. These insights enable Patient Services Managers to proactively reach out to patients or teams, resolve priority issues, and more efficiently and effectively manage the patient journey.
Helping a patient start and stay on a specialty therapy involves tight coordination among patients, healthcare providers, health systems, payers, manufacturers, and other stakeholders. Disconnected, outdated tools increase the likelihood of missed communications, poor handoffs, inconsistent messages, and patient confusion.
A patient-focused CRM integrates email, phone, SMS, and other communication methods into a single robust system, streamlining coordination and documentation across the care team. It automatically captures every interaction or activity, so patient-facing teams can focus on higher-value tasks like patient welcome calls or account engagement. This also centralizes patient information, ensuring nothing is lost when team members go on leave or shift roles.
Embracing a digital-first, omnichannel solution to power your patient experience helps:
When stakeholders are connected and empowered with a real-time digital flow of data, the likelihood of patients starting on therapy increases—the first step towards boosting adherence.
Patients don’t disengage because they don’t care—they disengage because they feel unsupported, overwhelmed, or life gets in the way of keeping up with the steps and hurdles involved in their treatment plan.
This is why delivering the right message, at the right time, through the patient’s preferred communication channel isn’t just a nice-to-have—it’s essential.
For a working mother who’s a primary caregiver and unavailable during business hours, a well-timed email in the evening makes all the difference.
For a college student managing a rare condition, a quick text message is more likely to prompt action than a phone call or paper mail. Meeting patients where they are minimizes friction and significantly increases the likelihood of meaningful engagement, but delivering personalized support at scale is impossible without the right technology.
Automated omnichannel workflows can trigger and personalize reminders, share tailored patient education materials, and flag issues requiring manual intervention. This means that human teams can focus on high-value moments—addressing patient concerns, meeting with a patient in person to show them how to correctly handle self-administered medications, and providing holistic support.
Empowering internal teams with purpose-built technology is critical to scaling high-touch, white glove patient services models across larger patient populations. By automating manual tasks and empowering teams with actionable insights to better tackle their day-to-day, biopharma companies can ensure patients feel seen, heard, and supported throughout the treatment regimen, boosting overall medication adherence.
You can’t manage what you can’t measure—and in specialty pharma, what goes unmeasured often leads to avoidable treatment failures. Too many Patient Services and Field Access teams operate without real-time visibility into where patients are getting stuck, what’s driving denials, or which support strategies are truly moving the needle.
That’s why Courier Health starts with a simple principle: Centralize data, generate actionable insights, and drive continuous improvement.
Effective measurement requires more than simple KPIs. Biopharma teams also need a unified view of the end-to-end patient journey, including patient progress, team and workflow efficiency, and provider-specific patterns like recurring access barriers or low PA first-time success rates.
Without this level of granularity, it’s impossible to pinpoint where programs are falling short or how to intervene before SOP breakdowns escalate into systemic issues.
The Courier Health Platform is built around an agile, test-and-learn model:
The result: Biopharma teams move from static reporting to a dynamic operating system for patient engagement—one that helps them iterate faster, personalize support, and prevent downstream issues before they compromise access or patient medication adherence.
Field Access and Patient Services teams are no longer just operational support functions—they are strategic levers for driving launch success and sustained patient care. Yet their role is often undervalued or underutilized relative to their impact.
Many more biopharma executives now recognize these teams as essential to improving patient outcomes.
As Adama Sall, Vice President, Head of Patient Experience and Access at Madrigal Pharmaceuticals, puts it:
The old school thinking is that patient support is a more check-the-box part of operational readiness for launch, but leading organizations today know that patient access is strategic and an accelerating factor for launch. When you think about it, it’s the team that is going to pull through patients to therapy, and then, if it’s done well, help them stay. It’s integral.
Field Access teams align internal stakeholders, educate external partners, and proactively coordinate resources to remove access barriers. Patient Services teams provide high-touch support, navigating affordability challenges and helping patients and caregivers navigate complex, fragmented healthcare systems.
But to operate at a strategic level, these teams need purpose-built infrastructure that gives them visibility, control, and the ability to act in real time.
That means:
When these internal teams are empowered with centralized systems and data, they become drivers of commercial success. Giving Field Access and Patient Services leaders a seat at the executive table ensures the commercial model reflects what patients really need to start and stay on therapy.
Improving patient adherence requires more than good intentions, it demands infrastructure that’s purpose-built for the complexities and realities of the specialty patient journey.
Courier Health’s purpose-built patient CRM for life sciences delivers visibility, control, and compliant coordination for Field Access, Patient Services, and Commercial Operations teams. Equipped with the right tools, these critical roles can focus on what matters most: Helping individual patients navigate their unique journeys with clarity and confidence.
Contact us today to see how Courier Health can help streamline coordination and elevate program performance.
True patient-centricity. Everyone says it, but few deliver. Upgrade your patient experience with Courier Health.
Contact Us
