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Patient Services and Field Access teams face a tough reality: They’re on the front lines of improving patient access and adherence, yet they often rely on fragmented, outdated tools that weren’t designed for the complexities of modern specialty therapies.
The result? Limited visibility and operational inefficiencies, and, most concerningly, missed patient milestones.
The stakes are high in biopharma. A staggering 84% of healthcare providers report difficulties initiating patients on specialty medications, while 30% of patients never start their prescribed treatment, and 66% discontinue by month 12.
These challenges highlight ongoing patient adherence barriers that prevent patients from successfully starting and staying on their prescribed medications.
Poor medication adherence negatively impacts patient outcomes, which has broader implications for the healthcare industry.
What’s more, adherence challenges are rarely patient behavior problems—they’re program execution problems, and solving them requires more than generic approaches or legacy technology tools.
This article explores what biopharma companies should look for in patient adherence solutions and why technology alone isn’t enough. Improving patient access and adherence requires an approach that integrates the right people, processes, and tools across the entire patient journey—and a modern platform that is purpose-built for the unique workflows of biopharma commercial teams.
Specialty therapies come with complex logistics: High costs, payer hurdles like prior authorizations (PAs) and step edits, and complex medication regimens that require thoughtful coordination. Medication compliance is a critical success factor.
Generic technology tools fail to support the non-linear, multi-stakeholder nature of the complex specialty patient journey. As a result, Field Access and Patient Services teams are left switching between portals, manually logging activities, or tracking next steps in Excel spreadsheets.
Without real-time visibility into the patient journey, critical information falls through the cracks. Escalations get missed, onboarding stalls, and patients abandon therapy before ever getting started.
As highlighted in pharma patient services trends, patient expectations are rising alongside therapy complexity. Legacy tools built for sales or HCP marketing—not for patient support—simply aren’t enough to navigate these realities.
Managing adherence for specialty drugs isn’t about generic task management. It requires orchestrating high-touch, personalized journeys across a complex ecosystem of internal teams and external partners. This includes supporting prescribed medicine schedules and enhancing medication adherence through configurable workflows and automated patient interventions.
Purpose-built patient adherence solutions like the Courier Health Platform directly address these operational gaps—delivering the visibility, control, and automation biopharma teams need to navigate complex patient journeys.
The following sections break down how Courier Health’s integrated solutions empower Field Access, Patient Services, and Patient Marketing teams to streamline processes and improve outcomes at every step.
When teams toggle between multiple systems to understand what’s happening across patients and providers, they lose time and insight. A unified command center provides a single source of truth, connecting patient, provider, and healthcare organization (HCO) data across vendor partners like HUBs, SPs, and copay assistance programs.
This level of coordination helps promote medication adherence by ensuring that no critical patient touchpoints are missed, such as an outdated script on file at an SP or a delayed PA status.
In one Courier Health case study, Field Reimbursement Managers (FRMs) doubled their patient capacity during annual re-verification periods by consolidating workflows. This is particularly impactful when 93% of physicians report that prior authorizations (PAs) delay care.
Manual SOPs slow teams down. These outdated processes often remain too linear and static, even as the patient journey and patient needs have become increasingly dynamic.
Courier Health’s automation engine automates repetitive tasks, integrates omnichannel communications, and dynamically recommends the next best action based on real-time data inputs, such as whether a prescription has been filled or how many days have passed since the referral.
This functionality supports effective medication therapy management and strengthens medication adherence solutions, driving better health outcomes for patients on specialty therapies. This ensures teams can focus their time on high-value patient and provider interactions requiring human empathy and judgment.
“With Courier Health, we can turn any spreadsheet into an automated workflow.” -Market Access Lead
Teams lose visibility and core data when communication happens outside the core CRM. Manual logging of activities is burdensome, resulting in incomplete or inaccurate documentation.
As a result, program leads lack visibility into how their teams engage and support patients and providers at any time. This compounds over time, with teams unable to measure and understand how many touches it takes to achieve key milestones, such as a new patient welcome call or adherence check-ins, for example.
Courier Health streamlines patient, provider, and office engagement with embedded communications tools. With activity data automatically captured and stored, teams can begin iterating on program tactics to optimize engagement. This promotes internal and external team collaboration and enhances patient education, all of which help improve medication adherence.
Most teams discover adherence risks such as insurance issues, side effects, or refill and delivery logistics too late, long after a patient has stalled at a critical step. Identifying these patient adherence barriers early enables faster, more targeted intervention, helping prevent therapy disruptions.
The Courier Health Platform surfaces at-risk patients so teams know where intervention is needed and how to prioritize their time. With built-in adherence and compliance insights, the platform recommends actionable, tailored next steps so users can deliver more efficient, effective outreach and support.
In one example, patients supported by teams using Courier Health were 16% more likely to start therapy thanks to proactive, intelligent Recommended Actions.
In today’s environment, features like being HIPAA compliant and offering secure messaging tools are table stakes.
To upgrade the overall patient experience and improve patient adherence, biopharma teams need next-generation solutions that deliver operational value where it matters most:
Courier Health stands apart because it wasn’t adapted from a sales tool, it was built from the ground up as a purpose-built, patient-focused CRM for specialty drugs.
Courier Health delivers:
Courier Health is more than a CRM—it’s an internal patient command center designed to bring visibility, control, and compliant coordination to every patient journey.
To understand the platform's practical impact, it helps to look at how real biopharma teams are adopting the system to develop and deliver patient engagement solutions emphasizing personalization, speed, and impact.
A large market specialty biopharma company using Courier Health doubled patient volume during annual reauthorization by replacing spreadsheets and manual tracking with centralized, automated workflows and next best actions.
Another biopharma company with a specialty-infused product adopted Courier Health in part for its proactive alerts that surface priority action items for users.
A large patient population allows the team to be more efficient and strategic. The result is a 16% increase in patient starts, improving overall patient care and program outcomes.
Improving patient access and adherence starts with rethinking your infrastructure. The most effective patient adherence solutions equip your teams with the tools and insights they need to deliver high-touch, proactive support at scale.
By adopting a platform like Courier Health, biopharma teams can:
These capabilities support comprehensive medication therapy management and directly address patient adherence barriers, promoting medication adherence and achieving improved patient outcomes.
What’s good for patients is good for business. Now is the time to assess whether your current approach is holding you back.
Contact Courier Health today to see how a patient-first CRM can help your patients start and stay on therapy.
True patient-centricity. Everyone says it, but few deliver. Upgrade your patient experience with Courier Health.
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