SPEAKER:
Suzy Jackson, Chief Commercial Officer, Life Sciences, Fullspan Health (an RVO Health division)
KEY TAKEAWAYS:
• Current direct-to-patient programs focus transactionally on drug fulfillment, missing comprehensive patient support opportunities
• Integrated digital platforms consolidate vendors while capturing end-to-end patient journey data across touchpoints
• Cost transparency tools have saved patients $280 million; caregiver access improves adherence by 71 percent
• Only 62% of cancer patients believe pharma adequately cares for them, revealing significant experience gaps
• AI-driven personalization using first-party data from 70-80 million monthly visitors enables sophisticated patient routing
The direct-to-patient movement has reached an inflection point. While early DTP programs succeeded in getting medications into patient hands, they've stopped short of addressing the full patient journey—and patients have noticed.
"Only 62% of cancer patients believe that pharma does either a good or excellent job of taking care of them. That's one in three that don't think that—that's too many"
Suzy Jackson observed. The gap between transactional fulfilment and comprehensive care represents both a patient experience crisis and a strategic opportunity for pharma companies willing to reimagine what patient support can deliver.
Jackson distinguished between what she termed "DTP 1.0"—characterized by cash-pay, off-benefit models for specialty-light drugs—and an emerging "DTP 2.0" paradigm. "Direct-to-Patient 1.0 has been focused predominantly on getting a drug into consumers' hands at the best price possible. But the issue with this is that that's quite a transactional model," Jackson explained. The first generation solved the fulfillment problem but created a relationship that doesn't address patient finding, education, or long-term adherence.
The business case for evolution is compelling. Patient dissatisfaction signals both a quality gap and market opportunity, particularly as DTP programs expand beyond simple use cases into complex therapeutic areas.
"The opportunity is less about adding more triggers and more about making sure the ones we do have are meaningful, respectful, and create those better experiences"
Suzy Jackson observed. The gap between transactional fulfilment and comprehensive care represents both a patient experience crisis and a strategic opportunity for pharma companies willing to reimagine what patient support can deliver.
Jackson distinguished between what she termed "DTP 1.0"—characterized by cash-pay, off-benefit models for specialty-light drugs—and an emerging "DTP 2.0" paradigm. "Direct-to-Patient 1.0 has been focused predominantly on getting a drug into consumers' hands at the best price possible. But the issue with this is that that's quite a transactional model," Jackson explained. The first generation solved the fulfillment problem but created a relationship that doesn't address patient finding, education, or long-term adherence.
The business case for evolution is compelling. Patient dissatisfaction signals both a quality gap and market opportunity, particularly as DTP programs expand beyond simple use cases into complex therapeutic areas.
"A study showed that 56% of people using digital health tools were more adherent than they were before"
Jackson noted. This adherence lift translates directly to improved patient outcomes, stronger real-world evidence for market access negotiations, and better competitive positioning—all while addressing a moral imperative to serve patients more comprehensively.
Jackson illustrated this evolution through a detailed case study of "Jasmine," a 38-year-old single mother diagnosed with triple-negative breast cancer. The scenario highlighted friction points throughout the patient journey: two-week waits for appointments, 30-minute phone calls without context requiring callbacks, missed infusions due to childcare logistics, and exposure to unverified medical claims on social media. Each friction point represented both patient burden and clinical risk.
The DTP 2.0 vision reimagines this journey through integrated digital capabilities: symptom checkers that route to provider finders with embedded scheduling, QR code onboarding to personalized apps, AI-driven content serving, online communities for peer support, transparent pricing tools, home delivery pharmacy, and adherence dashboards with caregiver access. Rather than solving single pain points, the approach addresses the entire patient experience ecosystem. The transformation moves from reactive support to proactive journey orchestration, anticipating patient needs before they become barriers to care.
Most pharma patient support ecosystems involve 5-15 vendors delivering separate services: hub services, copay programs, adherence tools, educational websites, community platforms, and specialty pharmacies. Each operates in isolation, creating data silos that prevent comprehensive journey understanding and inflate costs through overlapping capabilities. "We finally have the opportunity to see the patient journey end-to-end, every single touchpoint. We end up reducing the amount of vendors, reducing overspend, and reducing overlap in patient care and services," Jackson emphasized. This visibility represents a fundamental shift from fragmented point solutions to unified patient intelligence.
Jackson's presentation emphasized that Fullspan Health's integrated approach consolidates these functions while capturing behavioral data at scale. "We've got about half a million people in our community, but we also have about 70 to 80 million people coming through our sites every month from our media perspective," she explained.
"Being able to understand that behavior and using AI to build more comprehensive views of the patient will be really, really important," Jackson said. She discussed sentiment analysis from community discussions, content personalization based on disease state and medication history, conversational AI trained on specific therapeutic areas to support self-management, and what she termed "Agentic AI" for routing patients through appropriate care pathways.
The data unification also enables, with user consent, closed-loop measurement that connects awareness activities through media properties to actual prescription behavior, adherence patterns, and patient-reported outcomes. This capability becomes increasingly valuable as payers demand real-world evidence and as privacy regulations make first-party data more strategically important than third-party targeting.
From an operational perspective, vendor consolidation reduces total cost of ownership, eliminates redundant patient outreach, and simplifies compliance oversight. The strategic value lies in the ability to identify intervention opportunities in real-time—recognizing when a patient researches side effects, engages with community members about treatment concerns, or misses adherence milestones—and delivering appropriate support before abandonment occurs.
Financial toxicity remains a primary barrier to medication adherence, yet many patient support programs treat cost as a separate workstream from clinical support and education. Jackson's presentation demonstrated how financial transparency can be embedded throughout the patient journey rather than existing as a phone-based service accessed only at enrollment. "This pricing tool has helped save $280 million for patients in the US," she noted. The savings came from transparent cost comparison, benefit verification, and 24-hour home delivery that eliminated pharmacy trips.
The Jasmine case study showed how patients could look up pricing for anti-nausea medications within the app and have them delivered within 24 hours—critical for rural patients 20 minutes from the nearest pharmacy. The platform also enabled FSA/HSA purchasing for supplements and therapeutic equipment recommended by community members, addressing the total cost of disease management beyond just drug acquisition.
Equally powerful is the leverage available through caregiver engagement. "Evidence shows a 71% improvement in adherence if caregivers are given access to adherence tools," Jackson explained. The Jasmine scenario included dashboard sharing with her sister, who received notifications for blood tests, infusions, and scans. For complex regimens requiring long-term persistence, designing for the care team rather than just the individual patient can dramatically improve outcomes.
The insight challenges the typical patient support design paradigm, which focuses exclusively on the patient. For oncology, rare disease, pediatrics, and elderly populations, caregivers often serve as primary treatment managers—making their access to information and tools essential rather than supplementary. The shift requires rethinking consent models, communication preferences, and intervention triggers to account for the distributed nature of treatment management across care networks.
During the Q&A session, Jackson offered candid assessment of current DTP implementation challenges. "I think there's been such a rush to get this out, especially with the threat of PBMs, that there's been not that much focus on the experience," she observed. This assessment suggests a window of opportunity for companies that prioritize patient-centric design over speed-to-market. The competitive pressure from pharmacy benefit managers has accelerated DTP adoption but may have compromised the quality of execution in ways that undermine long-term patient relationships.
The presentation also highlighted therapeutic area considerations for DTP expansion. While current programs concentrate on "specialty-light" conditions with straightforward diagnosis and treatment, Jackson argued that complex therapeutic areas represent the real market opportunity. She specifically mentioned women's health and what she called the "blush factor"—conditions where privacy concerns make digital-first experiences particularly valuable.
The implementation requirements differ substantially from DTP 1.0 models. Complex therapeutic areas require insurance integration rather than cash-pay models, support for multi-step diagnostic pathways, coordination with specialists, and long-term adherence infrastructure. Brands cannot simply replicate the playbook from erectile dysfunction or hair loss programs when addressing oncology, immunology, or rare diseases. The clinical complexity, stakeholder ecosystem, and duration of treatment demand fundamentally different capabilities.
"It's incumbent upon us, regardless of therapeutic area, to build seamless consumer-first experiences powered by leading digital health capabilities that drive better engagement, better outcomes, and higher patient satisfaction," Jackson concluded. The statement frames patient experience not as a nice-to-have enhancement but as a strategic imperative across all brands and therapeutic categories.
The path forward involves several strategic considerations: auditing current patient support against consumer digital experience benchmarks, mapping vendor ecosystems to identify consolidation opportunities, evaluating whether cost support is truly integrated or exists as separate phone service, assessing caregiver participation capabilities, and developing first-party data strategies that enable AI-driven personalization. Companies must also consider how to balance speed-to-market pressures with experience quality, recognizing that patient relationships are long-term assets that poor initial experiences can damage irreparably.
The companies that successfully navigate this evolution will differentiate not just on clinical efficacy but on the quality of patient experience they deliver throughout the treatment journey. As DTP programs expand from simple fulfilment to comprehensive journey support, the opportunity exists to fundamentally reshape how pharma companies serve patients—moving from transactional vendor to trusted partner across the continuum of care.
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