Innovate4Outcomes: How to Improve Patient Outcomes

By Adam Sokol, Vice President, OptimizeRx

As a Vice President of sales at OptimizeRx, I have taken a passionate interest in understanding how to aid both our Life Sciences and clinical partners in improving successful patient outcomes.  Providers report Patient Support programs, if adopted by patients, can play an important role in furthering positive patient outcomes. At our recent event, #Innovate4Outcomes, in partnership with FiercePharma, we investigated what can be done to better empower patients to utilize available support programs. 

The wide variety of programs currently available cover everything from colonoscopy preparation (i.e. how to correctly administer the at-home mixture and what to expect) to emotional and medication support throughout the oncology process for cancer patients. So how can we increase the adoption of these programs for the patients they are intended to support? 

In order to find viable solutions, my team first looked at what drives the problem of limited adoption. Here’s where we landed: 

• Not Enough Time: Clinicians are already short on time with their patients. That isn’t going to change. When a clinician has twenty minutes to collect vitals, review medical history, listen to the patient’s description of the issue at hand, give a diagnostic exam to assess said issue, diagnose or track progress or decline, and prescribe or adjust a treatment plan, there is little time to discuss a support program in addition.
• Health Literacy: Doctors are already limited on time. See my point above. Yet we are still leaving it up to the doctor to educate patients on available support programs. There are often no support coordinators available to help patients enroll in programs. Not to mention, how many times does a patient walk out of a doctor’s office with a diagnosis and a limited understanding of what said diagnosis means?
• Way too much information happening: The gap between appointments should be seen as an opportunity to collect information on a patient’s symptoms and what is happening that could be critical to a patient’s ongoing treatment. However, gathering this information comes with additional challenges, if a caretaker is involved and is unable to collect all of the information, or the patient and/or caretaker have a low health literacy rate, gathering the critical information may be difficult. Rather than using the gap between appointments as an opportunity to collect information, often it becomes a missed opportunity where a lot of information is lost.