Patient-Directedness in Practice

This event allows our company—including members of our senior leadership team—to directly collaborate with the patient community to capture insights, identify opportunities for action, and co-create solutions that allow us to bring the patient along us in every step of our journey to create, improve and prolong lives.

At our most recent Summit, held in late 2024, we focused on reviewing our patient community engagement activities across the medicine development pathway, identifying current gaps and challenges, and exploring opportunities for more effective collaboration. Most importantly, it gave us concrete feedback we can act upon to improve our processes and patient-engagement efforts.

Check out this Instagram post to get a sense of the event.

A key takeaway from the event was the need to develop consistent processes across our healthcare business to support earlier engagement from patients and their caregivers and identify ways to make us all accountable for impactful patient engagement. 

Let me share some more details on what we learned—and how we plan to take action.

Establish Consistent and Structured Communication: A consistent point of contact for Patient Organizations (POs) was highlighted as essential, and lack thereof as a barrier to effective collaboration with industry. We will take action and strengthen our communication processes through one single point of contact to help ensure that POs feel heard and valued.

Reinforce the Feedback Loop: POs emphasized the importance of receiving feedback after collaborations with industry to understand the impact of their insights. We were encouraged by the feedback from the patient advisors showing a high level of trust in our company when it comes to acting on patient insights, especially those collected through our Patient 360 program, but we will work to improve our processes for closing the feedback loop following general advisory boards and other key engagements.

Address Capacity Constraints: Many POs operate with limited resources. As patient engagement increasingly becomes a part of the drug development process, we as pharma companies must be mindful of these constraints and work to simplify our processes. For us this includes looking into our contracting processes, to make contracts as simple and understandable as possible, and the process of setting up a collaboration less time consuming.

Embed Patient Engagement in Company Culture: Although results from a survey done in conjunction with the Summit show our company incorporates patient insights throughout the drug development process, there is a need to formalize our processes. Some of the patient advisors expressed feeling undervalued by industry, often being consulted too late to make meaningful contributions. Emphasizing a culture of co-creation by patients, rather than merely creating for patients, is essential. As a result of this feedback, we will co-develop with the community a corporate-level framework to secure early patient engagement in all our development programs, as well as KPIs to measure success and incentivize teams to prioritize patient engagement. 

The insights gained from the Patient 360 Summit 2024 are invaluable, and we’re grateful to all who attended for sharing their perspectives. By prioritizing early and consistent collaboration with patient organizations, fostering open communication, and embedding patient perspectives even deeper into our company culture, we can drive innovation and enhance outcomes for everyone we serve—and hope that others in the pharma industry will do the same. 

To learn more about our patient-directed approach, visit Patients & Caregivers.