Patient programs are crucial in the pharmaceutical industry as they promote patient adherence, offer education, and enhance overall health outcomes. These initiatives strive to provide patients with the essential resources, information, and assistance to manage their health conditions properly.
Nevertheless, the administration and implementation of these initiatives frequently encounter difficulties, mainly because of fragmented data across brand websites, Specialty Pharma, and Hub Vendors. This leads to inconsistent patient information and the incapacity to serve patients and caregivers effectively.
These problems can cause inefficiency in Patient Education Programs or delay prescription refiling, which results in less-than-optimal patient care and involvement. Additionally, not managing patient information effectively can lead to data privacy and compliance-related issues.
Advanced master data management applications are urgently needed to tackle these difficulties. This will simplify the process and guarantee the accuracy of a patient’s complete 360-degree view of the latest and greatest information throughout the organization.
Additionally, pharmaceutical organizations are constantly looking to innovate patient data ecosystems that can provide highly accurate, private, and protected information before implementing any healthcare intervention with patients.
Solution
The resolution to these difficulties is in the acceptance and execution of sophisticated patient master data management applications. These applications are specifically intended to guarantee the uniformity and availability of a patient’s 360-degree profile. They enable a complete and accurate patient profile by combining data from various sources, including brand websites and patient support applications.
These data sources provide information that master data management applications can use to create a complete 360-degree view of patients, which can then be used for patient support programs, analyzing cost-to-care, and other use cases to improve health outcomes.
By adopting a comprehensive strategy for patient data, pharmaceutical companies may develop and execute patient programs tailored to individual needs, resulting in improved patient care and outcomes.
Approach
Implementing state-of-the-art patient master data management applications in the pharmaceutical business requires a methodical strategy that can be broken down into five crucial steps:
1. Data integration
The first step entails consolidating patient data from many sources into a consolidated repository. To thoroughly understand each patient’s interactions and health history, it is necessary to seamlessly coordinate data from EHRs, pharmaceutical records, patient feedback systems, and other relevant sources.
Advanced integration and middleware platforms can streamline this process, guaranteeing rapid and precise data aggregation. One of the most critical steps in this process is to define the minimum data required to bring in patient information. Also, what data quality rules must each patient data attribute from various systems meet to be ingested in the Master Data Management application?
2. Data deduplication
This is the process of removing duplicate data and discrepancies, which is essential for ensuring the accuracy of patient records. Advanced data deduplication methods, including fuzzy and probabilistic matching algorithms and machine learning (ML) models, detect and eliminate duplicate entries, guaranteeing that each patient has just one precise profile.
This profile, or patient golden record, provides an organization with the latest and greatest information across the systems. This method raises the data quality and increases the dependability of the insights obtained from the data.
3. Data Enrichment
This involves enhancing integrated and deduplicated data by including further information from external sources. It may encompass demographic data, such as a recent address change or last name change.
Data enrichment enhances each patient profile with high-quality data and completeness, which leads to stronger confidence among users in various patient data-driven initiatives. This objective can be achieved using methods such as data mining, natural language processing (NLP), and integration with external data providers.
4. Data Governance
A solid data governance framework is crucial to guaranteeing the effectiveness of patient master data management initiatives. This entails establishing explicit guidelines, policies, and standards for ownership, access control, and privacy and including assurance for the ethical use of patient data.
An all-encompassing data governance plan should clearly define the roles and responsibilities of those involved, establish data standards, and address compliance obligations. Ensuring that all stakeholders conform to uniform standards and regulations is of utmost importance, and this may be achieved by conducting frequent training sessions and audits.
Implementation of the Patient Master Data Application
Implementing state-of-the-art patient master data management applications entails multiple crucial elements, each necessitating meticulous deliberation and implementation:
1. Technology selection
Choosing the appropriate master data management platform is an essential initial action. The platform must seamlessly integrate with current systems and can scale to meet increasing data requirements. Various leading Cloud SaaS platforms are available in the market, and while selecting a cloud platform, a detailed focus on the platform’s data privacy and protection capability must be placed.
Other important factors to examine are:
- The platform’s capacity to manage substantial amounts of data.
- Its capability to enable sophisticated matching and survivorship rules.
- Its adherence to industry norms and regulations.
Collaborating with proficient technology suppliers specializing in master data management solutions can offer crucial direction and help during this process.
2.I ntegration Process
Integrating diverse data sources is an intricate undertaking that necessitates specialized knowledge and meticulous preparation. Proficient technology suppliers can supply the essential tools for data profiling that can guide understanding upfront data quality issues, minimum data availability to define a patient record, and assistance to guarantee seamless data integration, leading to a consolidated and precise patient golden record.
This procedure frequently entails utilizing data integration platforms, ETL (extract, transform, load) tools, and application programming interfaces (APIs) to facilitate smooth and uninterrupted data transfer between different systems.
3. Data Governance Framework
It is crucial to create and effectively convey a thorough data governance strategy. This plan must delineate data ownership, the rules for accessing it, and the procedures for verifying its quality. All stakeholders and applications creating, reading, updating, and deleting patient master data must comply with the same standards and norms.
Regular audits, assessments of data quality, and training of stakeholders are essential for upholding data governance and guaranteeing adherence to the strategy. As part of the governance framework, capturing a patient’s consent is critical to maintaining transparency and trust for using patient information for improved care and support programs.
4. Compliance and Security
Implementing robust data security measures and ensuring adherence to data privacy standards such as the General Data Protection Regulation and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act is crucial. Pharmaceutical businesses must manage the intricate realm of data privacy while simultaneously upholding patient transparency to establish confidence. This entails using encryption, access limits, and periodic security audits to protect patient data.
Data-driven Patient Programs
Advanced patient master, data management applications, can improve the pharmaceutical sector’s patient program capabilities. By integrating and managing patient data, pharmaceutical businesses can gain a more precise understanding of each patient. A recent patient master data management application implementation by a global pharmaceutical organization reduced the likelihood of patient data privacy and compliance-related issues by more than 90%.
This was done by creating patient master data from various sources and linking that with explicit consent captured at the time of data collection at the Patient Education Portal.
This comprehensive approach enables the creation of tailored and efficient patient programs, leading to improved health outcomes, increased patient satisfaction, and stronger patient-pharma relationships.
As the sector evolves, modern master data management applications will be essential to maintain competitiveness and deliver optimal patient care. While these applications present challenges, they also establish a foundation for a future in the pharmaceutical sector that prioritizes data and patient needs.
