The Customization Trap and What It Means for Life Sciences

“Customization” is often thrown around in the world of enterprise software with little regard for its meaning and long-term implications. Its initial allure is clear: to develop (from scratch) something that fits your specific business needs.

The challenge, however, is finding the balance between bespoke and “best practice.” How often are your needs really that unique? And what specialized knowledge does it take to execute the customization? The initial build is one thing, but who is going to maintain or update the custom software? And how reliably are you, or outside vendors, predicting the total cost of ownership?

For our purposes here, we're defining “customization” as custom code to enable functionality that is otherwise not available in the software. Custom software requires building and maintaining from scratch every time; if you’ve done it once, you’ve done it once.

At Courier Health, we’re passionate about this topic because we’ve seen firsthand the pains and challenges associated with custom-only software within biopharma. For too long, life sciences companies, particularly Market Access and Patient Support teams, have lacked the modern software they need to do their jobs efficiently. The result is a mess of clunky, custom, expensive tools that hinder visibility into the patient journey and negatively impact overall patient outcomes.

The life sciences companies we work with are at the forefront of developing and delivering game-changing treatments that positively impact millions of patients (and their loved ones) around the world. In our minds, that should be the hardest part, not having to contend with siloed systems and manual workflows along the patient journey to start and stay on therapies. For us, any delay in treatment or discontinuation due to an addressable reason (read: outdated, customized-beyond-recognition software) is deeply felt.

The Customization Trap

While “customizable” might seem like a positive thing on the surface, conjuring images of personalized dashboards and bespoke applications, there’s a direct relationship between customization and complexity.

The more customized software is, the more complex it becomes, making it challenging for admins or internal developers (let alone business users or daily end users) to understand, troubleshoot, and maintain.

Customizing software from scratch inevitably requires extensive lead times, in addition to finding and managing outside implementation resources to plan and deliver the custom work.  Beyond lengthy implementation timelines, customization is a slippery slope that sets organizations down a path of further custom builds, code fixes, manual workarounds, and more. As we said above, with custom software, if you’ve done it once, you’ve done it once, which does nothing for your drug pipeline or future launches.

The phrase “death by customization” was coined for this exact reason, describing the all-too-common situation where software applications require such heavy customization to support a company’s needs that they eventually collapse under their own weight.

Custom software is inherently rigid and brittle, unable to scale up (or down) as needed. When it comes to supporting the complex patient journey, this means that every rule or logic change (e.g., new territory mapping or changing SOPs) increases the likelihood of breaking the system. This, in turn, requires even more time, money, and human capital.  Eventually, the software becomes an unrecognizable, Frankenstein-like creation that is too unwieldy to manage and too custom to “play nice” with new software tools or third-party integrations when they're inevitably introduced.

Lastly, perhaps the greatest risk to your business is how custom software locks your organization into a certain, rigid way of operating and engaging patients that is entirely at odds with a test and learn, continuous improvement mindset.

Software should work for and with you, not against you. If your custom solution has locked you into a certain way of operating that’s at odds with your mandate to improve the patient experience, it’s time to look elsewhere.

Biopharma’s Move to Purpose-Built

Across industries including life sciences, “bigger is better” thinking has been replaced with more thoughtful, nuanced approaches. In biopharma, this is impacting everything from R & D efforts to commercialization models to patient engagement and support.

The most innovative life sciences companies are focusing on the overall patient experience as opposed to thinking in discrete statuses or tasks. This new way of thinking requires new systems that upgrade workflows, unlock efficiencies, and enable higher-order, more strategic thinking. Biopharma leaders and their teams can’t be bogged down with outdated, cumbersome, custom software that fights against their patient-centric business aims (and the tides of change).

This shift towards purpose-built underscores the difference between general-purpose, customizable solutions of the past and flexible, configurable solutions of the future.

“Configuration” uses internal capabilities and tools in the system to change certain features or functionality to fit business/team needs. A configurable solution uses the inherent power and flexibility of the platform to add or change fields, build and modify workflows, or dictate permissions.

A configurable solution is flexible and adaptable, designed to support different use cases or user groups out-of-the-box. For this reason, truly configurable solutions require a nuanced, purpose-built approach that reflects the needs and realities of the industry, use cases, and user groups.

As the first modern technology purpose-built for biopharma Field Access and Patient Services, the Courier Health Platform is designed specifically to handle patient data and power the patient experience. With this powerful, flexible core, it’s easy to configure the offering to support different patient engagement models and diverse product portfolios.

This provides a paradigm shift to how biopharma companies engage and support patients. Instead of piecing together various capabilities and hoping that the custom code doesn’t break upon launch (and then again with each subsequent change), with Courier Health, you can easily configure different journey stages, HUB or distribution partners, workflows and more. In addition, tooling like our Workflow Builder enables continuous testing and learning for each business unit, team, or individual drug – a level of agility that is nearly impossible with traditional solutions.

We often say that customizing general-purpose tools does not equal software. If you’re interested in making the shift to purpose-built, alongside a solution and team that works for and with you, get in touch.

‍A version of this post was originally published on LinkedIn.