SPEAKER:
Suzy Jackson, Chief Commercial Officer, Fullspan Health
KEY TAKEAWAYS:
- 81% of patients are open to pharma digital tools when content is medically vetted and privacy-protected
- The trust gap is conditional and solvable - it cannot be used as justification for disengagement
- Regulatory compliance is pharma's structural moat against big tech, not its innovation ceiling
- Diagnosis delays averaging over a year demand pharma-provided navigation, not passive presence
- Shift KPIs from impressions to utility: speed to diagnosis, first fill, and first HCP appointment
"For too long, I think as an industry we've operated with a collective sense of imposter syndrome. We've sat in our boardrooms and wondered whether we're liked or whether we're wanted. While out in the real world our patients are screaming for help and assistance."
Suzy Jackson, Chief Commercial Officer of Fullspan Health, opened her Reuters Events: Pharma USA presentation with that framing, and it landed because it named something executives recognize but rarely say aloud. The boardroom anxiety is real. It shapes investment decisions, restrains digital roadmaps, and produces patient engagement strategy that prioritizes legal defensibility over clinical utility.
The survey behind her argument, nearly 1,500 patients fielded in December 2025 and first presented at Fierce JPM Week in January 2025, was commissioned by Fullspan Health, which sits within the RVO Health ecosystem, reaching tens of millions of patients across health content and engagement platforms. The findings align with a broader body of health communication research showing patients are consistently more open to pharma engagement than the industry assumes, and that the conditions for that openness are achievable. Jackson's imposter syndrome diagnosis locates the problem in organizational psychology rather than market reality. Companies don't under-invest in patient digital tools because the data tells them to. They under-invest because the culture defaults to caution, because legal review cycles outlast product cycles, and because "patients don't trust pharma" functions as a conversation-stopper that forecloses strategy before it starts.
The Trust Excuse Has an Expiration Date
The industry's default defense for patient engagement restraint has always been trust. Pharma ranks poorly in public trust surveys. Patients are wary of commercially motivated health information. The gap is real and historically earned. What Jackson's data reveals is that the gap is also conditional, and the conditions are well within pharma's operational capacity to meet.
"81% of patients said they were open to pharma providing digital resources to them that weren't just information, so tools and technologies." The headline number is striking, but the mechanism behind it matters more. When the survey probed what would change patient receptivity, the answer was specific: "Overwhelmingly if the information that was provided was appropriately medically vetted, it was HIPAA compliant and all the tools were privacy protected, that mitigated that gap in trust that patients have. So we cannot use this as an excuse anymore to say we're taking a step back."
The word "mitigated" is precise. The trust deficit doesn't disappear. It gets neutralized by operational credibility. Patients are applying a rational test: is this tool built to help me or to sell to me? Medical vetting and privacy protection are the signals that answer that question in pharma's favor. These are not exotic requirements. They are the baseline of what any pharmaceutical company's medical-legal-regulatory review process is already designed to produce. The compliance infrastructure that teams routinely experience as a constraint on innovation is, from the patient's perspective, the proof of legitimacy they're waiting to see.
The 81% figure should change what gets funded. Patient portals with branded disease education have been the default investment for a decade. What the data actually supports is clinical utility infrastructure: tools patients return to because they solve a problem, not because they carry a logo. The distinction matters because no amount of brand advertising closes a trust gap that patients close only when they experience something that demonstrably works in their interest.
Discover more on this topic at Pharma Customer Engagement USA 2026 (October 27-28, Philadelphia) - where commercial, marketing, medical, data and AI pioneers converge. Explore the agenda here.
Big Tech Has Reach. Pharma Has Something More Durable.
The competitive framing Jackson offered is the argument most likely to move an executive who has already accepted the trust data. "Big tech is for counting steps. Pharma is for saving lives. They have the reach, sure, but we as pharma have the rigor. Patients want the physician-approved and evidence-based tools." The line is deliberately sharp, but the underlying logic is structurally sound, with one important caveat her version underweights.
Big tech's health ambitions are accelerating in ways that complicate a static "reach vs. rigor" framing. Apple has hired hundreds of clinicians and researchers. Google's partnership with Mayo Clinic and the rollout of health features in Gemini represent direct moves toward clinical credibility. Amazon's acquisition of One Medical gave it a primary care infrastructure. The window in which pharma can claim rigor as an unchallenged differentiator is real but narrowing faster than most pharma digital investment timelines would suggest.
What makes the compliance moat argument durable is the regulatory framework governing pharmaceutical communications. Jackson proposes that pharma lean into this: "What if we reframe that and said that that step is our competitive advantage, that is our competitive moat. No longer do we have to be big tech's boring cousin. We can lean into that compliance to be the safety and create the best solutions for our patients." MLR review, properly positioned, is a signal of rigor that a health tech company or consumer platform cannot authentically replicate without becoming, functionally, a pharmaceutical entity. That is the moat. It is not infinite, but pharma is currently failing to exploit it.
The urgency is quantifiable. With 38% of recently diagnosed patients already using AI monthly to understand treatment options, interpret lab results, and discuss symptoms, the question of source quality has moved past hypothetical. Patients are getting AI health guidance now. The variable is whether that guidance comes from a source with clinical accountability or from a general-purpose model optimized for engagement.
The Diagnosis Desert Demands Navigation
The access and diagnosis data Jackson presented shifts the argument from competitive positioning to moral urgency. "55% of the people we surveyed had waited over a year for diagnosis. 30% of the people we surveyed had waited over three years." Those numbers describe a system failure that pharma's current patient engagement posture, largely passive and largely informational, does nothing to address.
The diagnosis desert is not evenly distributed. Jackson's point about the one in seven Americans living in healthcare deserts concentrates the access failure in populations that are simultaneously the hardest to reach through traditional commercial channels and the most dependent on digital alternatives. Her proposal to shift prescription routing control toward patients in these geographies, enabling them to find in-network pharmacies, understand prior authorization status, and navigate fulfillment without requiring an HCP intermediary at every step, is conceptually compelling and operationally complex.
The complexity is organizational before it is technical. It requires commercial, medical, and patient services functions to share accountability for outcomes in ways that current structures actively resist.
The infrastructure argument is grounded in a behavioral reality easy to overlook from a commercial strategy perspective. As Jackson noted: "When you're at your kid's basketball game, you're not going to be stepping out to call a call center, but you could look down at your phone and send a few messages. Those are the kind of realities of patient care these days that we need to move to." The call center model assumes patients organize their lives around healthcare touchpoints. The mobile model assumes healthcare must fit into the life already being lived. That shift in assumption has radical implications for what "patient support" infrastructure looks like and how it is funded.
"It's time we provided a map in a desert, not just watch our patients wander around and hope they find an oasis." Pharma has spent years building oases (branded disease education sites, condition-specific apps, call center lines) and waiting for patients to find them. The companies that build navigation infrastructure first will own a layer of the patient relationship that branded content programs have never been able to reach.
Utility Is the New Reputation
The measurement argument is where Jackson's provocation becomes a prescription, and where the organizational challenge becomes unavoidable. "Reputation isn't going to be driven by a billboard on a highway. It's going to be driven by a patient opening an app and seeing that their prior authorization was just approved." If reputation is built through functional value delivery, the investment calculus for patient digital infrastructure changes entirely. It stops being a cost center attached to brand spend and becomes a driver of adherence, persistence, and revenue.
The KPI shift Jackson prescribes follows from this logic: "Changing your KPIs to focus on things like utility, speed to first appointment with an HCP, speed to diagnosis, speed to understanding condition, cutting time to first fill, the actual utility of your tech is where the true difference maker lies for all of you." These are outcomes-based metrics, and adopting them requires commercial organizations to accept accountability for patient behavior at points in the journey that marketing has historically defined as outside its scope. That boundary negotiation between commercial, medical affairs, patient services, and market access is the real implementation challenge, and the one Jackson's presentation does not resolve.
The whole-person engagement argument extends the commercial logic further than most organizations are currently structured to support. Jackson argues that pharma must engage patients through coaching, communities, lifestyle content, and moderated peer events as the adherence mechanism itself, not as ancillary brand-building. The evidence base for community-driven adherence is growing, but it remains underweighted in commercial investment decisions that still prioritize HCP channel spend by a wide margin.
What the survey data and the competitive analysis together suggest is that the patient relationship is becoming a primary commercial asset in a way it has never been before. The shift toward outcomes-based contracting, the growth of direct-to-patient channel options, and the regulatory evolution around digital therapeutics all point toward a future in which the quality of a company's patient relationship is legible to payers, health systems, and regulators. Pharma that builds that relationship now, before the measurement infrastructure to value it exists, will hold a position that late movers cannot purchase.
"2026 is the year to stop being attractive and start being essential." Attractive means patients might use your tool if they happen to find it. Essential means patients cannot manage their condition without it. The distance between those two positions is primarily organizational: a willingness to accept that patient outcomes are a commercial accountability, not a CSR aspiration. For an industry that already holds the clinical credibility patients are asking for, that willingness is the only thing still missing.
To get you highlights of Pharma USA 2026 faster, we are using generative AI technology to summarise the transcripts of the sessions. If you have any feedback about the summary, please contact lucy.fisher@thomsonreuters.com.
Discover more on this topic at Pharma Customer Engagement USA 2026 (October 27-28, Philadelphia) - where commercial, marketing, medical, data and AI pioneers converge. Explore the agenda here.
