How patient-centricity enhances resilience in pharma supply chains

According to TraceLink, only six percent of companies are actively pursuing patient-centric supply chain transformation. All too often, the pharmaceutical industry deployed local siloed improvements such as production and provision solutions to address disruption. However, with the shockwave of the Covid-19 pandemic abruptly changing buying patterns, delivery routes and creating supply shortages, the pharma industry needs to critically engineer a patient-centric supply chain to keep essential inventory flowing to where it is needed most – the patient – and to increase the resilience of its supply chain operations.

In this article, we dive into four key benefits of implementing a patient demand-driven supply chain. The four key benefits include:

• Patient safety become the top priority
• Pharma companies can carry less inventory
• The clinical trial landscape is transformed
• It demonstrates the value of a digital network platform

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Let us take a loot at each of these benefits in detail.

1. Patient safety becomes the top priority

   Patient safety is the first priority for any healthcare provider and the supply chain has a critical role to play in protecting a patient’s interest. Ensuring the clinical efficacy and safety of products throughout the supply chain’s lifecycle by way of timely product evaluation or product performance checks has been critical during a pandemic that has generated enormous demand shock. It will also prove vital in the industry’s goal of increasing its research and development efforts to improve therapeutic goals.

   Showing significant progress in this area already, an article analyzing the serialization of drug products across the pharma supply chain detailed: “By 2023, the US Food and Drug Administration will require implementation of a digital, interoperable system for pharmaceutical tracing and prescription drug transactions to be exchanged electronically to verify product identifiers [and the safety of a drug product]. When requirements are met, the healthcare supply chain will operate more efficiently, and – more importantly – medications will be more safely [and quickly] delivered to patients who need them.”

2. Pharma companies can carry less inventory

   Following a patient-centric supply chain model and thinking back to the product network will mean segmenting patient demands or patient communities into different supply chain groups, either geographically or by way of therapies. This will provide supply chain managers with a consistent and logical strategy plan.

   Roddy Martin, Chief Digital Transformation Officer at TraceLink, said: “By segmenting your supply chain groups means that as we distribute drugs and therapies into the supply chain and we do not need to have hundreds of days of inventory.

   “We can have a lot less inventory at the right place because we have a very good idea where those therapies are needed and who the specific patient communities are, ensuring patients get what they require on time and in full.”

3. The clinical trial landscape is transformed

   As direct-to-patient (DtP) services evolve in the supply chain to help meet patient requirements in restricted face-to-face environments, clinical sponsors are looking toward DtP clinical trial models to improve the patient experience, provide stakeholders with greater visibility of the supply chain, expedite trial timelines and reduce overall clinical supply chain costs.

   An article exploring the evolving dynamic of a patient-centric pharma supply chain explained: “If done right, patient-centric drug development will improve clinical trial design but also promote the best choices when it comes to formulation and delivery. The latter can lead to improved outcomes through better medication adherence – a key problem in the industry today – and ensure drugs are appropriately designed for specific patient populations. For example, taking into consideration ease of swallowing and dosage frequency for children and elderly patients.”

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4. It demonstrates the value of a digital network platform

   Due to local government bodies implementing lockdown and social distancing measures, patients can no longer freely see a healthcare provider face-to-face, but rather interact with clinicians over the phone or online. This has forced the industry to pursue a more radical change in behavior toward developing a digital economy, which was slowly happening before the Covid-19 pandemic, but has now been accelerated by the crisis.

   In an article entitled Are we ready for change, Alessandro de Luca, Chief Information Officer at Merck Healthcare, agreed the pharma industry had already begun its digital journey from siloed systems to integrated, predictive and prescriptive self-driving digital systems. However, he explained the industry still needed to look outward and move toward a patient-driven supply network to drive long-term resilience.

   “Understand patient needs and expectations, gather real-time service data, define new service measures and create an end-to-end information flow,” Luca advised. 

   “In the world of fast-moving consumer goods, we needed to understand real-time demand and focus on what was actually selling and where, not what we predicted would sell. The supply chain needs to move from thinking about loss elimination to how we create value by acting as one for the patient.”

In the eye of a storm

Pharma companies should be using the Covid-19 crisis as a risk assessment opportunity to discover where investments are needed, how to evolve supply chain planning for the future and reposition for growth once economies are on the rebound. If a patient-centric supply chain is achieved, pharma companies will be in a better position to monopolize on any disruptions that come their way, evolve pharma’s digital economy to unlock the value of patient data and rethink the operating model for supply chain resilience.

For more insights on how to transform your supply chain to be more patient demand-driven, attend Pharma Logistics IQ’s sister portal event Temperature Control and Logistics online in January 2021.

A panel discussion featuring UCB Pharma, Ultragenyx, MSD and Boehringer Ingelheim will deep dive into the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic including record-breaking product demand, unprecedented pressure on supply chains, emergency route development and patient isolation. Sign up to hear how supply chain and logistics leaders dealt with 2020 and all of its challenges.