The Expanding Frontier – Commercial Interactions with Patients and Patient Organizations

Over the past two decades, the role that patients play in their health care has dramatically shifted. As a result, there is an increasing need and drive by life science companies to engage with patients (e.g., patient centricity). However, this approach is not without risk as this article will explore.

Over the previous two decades, we have seen a dramatic and transformative change in the role that patients play their health care. Your grandparents, and even your parents, generally were passive players in their care, content to let their “better informed” physicians (“Doctor knows best”) make most of the treatment decisions for them. They confined their roles to making appointments submitting to diagnostic tests, getting prescriptions filled (at a retail pharmacy or via mail order), and contacting their physicians to get renewals and refills thereby ensuring they stayed on treatment. Some, but not all, of this passivity can be attributed to a health insurance scheme that had less “friction” caused by financial-burden decisions. That’s all changed.