How to Leverage Salesforce to Commercialize Specialty Pharma Products

Success metrics for treating complex health conditions are moving targets. Healthcare providers (HCPs), drug manufacturers, and payers within the specialty pharmacy ecosystem strive every day to get it all right. From a high level, the process entails the creation of effective therapies and distribution to patients via compliant channels. But it only gets more intricate from there. 

Specialty drug manufacturers need to target HCPs and patients with precision. Patients require high-touch support to ensure compliance and optimal health outcomes. And payers need thorough accounting of health journeys to reduce costs and liabilities. One stakeholder in the mix — the independent specialty pharmacy — is increasingly becoming mission critical to this equation. More specifically, the specialty pharmacies that can offer dynamic hub services to manage the complexities. 

And specialty pharmas leveraging Salesforce are well-positioned to meet manufacturer needs better and ensure transparent, smooth coordination of care. Salesforce-powered hub service solutions help pharmas serve the multiplex of patients, insurers, prescribers, and manufacturers in ways that lower cost, limit risk, and create better health outcomes. 

How Salesforce solves commercialization Challenges

Manufacturers are asking a lot of specialty pharmas right now: consistent, reliable access to HCPs, targeted distribution of therapies, and clear reporting on the efficacy of treatments. In 2021, the pharmas best positioned to conduct this high-touch process are those using agile, cloud-based solutions like Salesforce. 

Salesforce’s Sales Cloud and Health Cloud increase the capabilities of such pharmas in three key areas:

Distribution channels

Distribution in the specialty pharmacy realm is uniquely hard. Patients suffering from “orphan” diseases (conditions affecting less than 200,000 people in the US) are often spread out widely across the nation. Doctors and hospitals serving them may have smaller patient caseloads, but must in turn stretch resources and more precisely monitor health journeys. 

With Sales Cloud’s customer relationship management (CRM) and lead generation capabilities, specialty pharmas can help manufacturers target prescribers by location and medical specialty. This gives small, widely-dispersed patient populations improved access to breakthrough treatments, and empowers local medical specialists to better serve them. 

The specialty pharma that coordinates drug commercialization via Sales Cloud, in this case, becomes an invaluable connector and partner for manufacturers in disease management.

Patient support

Patients with complex diseases need high levels of support. This means close supervision and care in day-to-day symptom and treatment management, as well as thorough patient education and easy access to the healthcare team. 

Specialty pharmas that can dispense this kind of high-touch care have the advantage. Those whose services are powered by Salesforce are best able to ensure fills and refills never miss a beat, provide detailed dosing instructions, ensure treatment adherence, and supply an online hub for on-demand patient access to information and messaging services.

Salesforce Health Cloud streamlines all of this. Given the high cost of specialty drugs, tracking every single dose is crucial to ensuring treatments work — which, in turn, is important for manufacturers to assess. With Health Cloud, specialty pharmas can deliver on these promises.

Payer compliance 

The cost of specialty treatments also represents huge risks for payers. Medications have to work, doses should never be missed, and patients should be fully informed on how to properly take drugs. Payers need visibility into this health journey data to verify therapy outcomes and mitigate risk. 

Specialty pharmas using Health Cloud have deep insight into all such patient information, along with prescription and prior authorization data, and can compliantly report to payers in full detail. This eliminates obscurity and ultimately gives payers greater confidence. 

In addition, Health Cloud’s health insurance data model allows for custom reporting in any unique coverage situation, no matter the complexity of a payer’s authorization and verification needs. 

Hub services built on Salesforce: A key value add in a patient-centered ecosystem

Accurate distribution, patient support for treatment adherence, and payer compliance are chief concerns of today’s specialty drug manufacturers. While those obstacles have been hard to overcome, manufacturers are increasingly turning to specialty pharmas that are equipped to help them achieve it all. 

By using Sales Cloud to commercialize novel therapies, and by leveraging the deep life sciences specialization inherent in Health Cloud for distribution and payer compliance, specialty pharmas have the upper hand in moving treatments to market. And even more, Salesforce-powered hub services can help these pharmas manage all third-party relationships with cost-efficiency and transparency. As a result, patients have a better outlook. 

At Wilco Source, addressing industry challenges like these has been our north star. We’ve brought our domain expertise to bear in developing our Hub Services Solution, designed around specialty pharma workflows for quick customization and implementation. 

If you’re in the specialty pharmacy industry, and interested in software that expands capabilities within healthcare microcosms for better patient outcomes, Wilco Source is here to help.