The 2025 Medication Access Report: Biggest Bottlenecks for Patients

In this Pharmaceutical Executive video interview, Kimberley Chiang, vice president of biopharma commercial solutions at CoverMyMeds, discusses "The 2025 Medication Access Report." She highlights gaps in data-sharing and cross-functional collaboration as major bottlenecks that cause delays, rework, and increased patient burden. Chiang shares that only 3% of patients utilize support programs due to a lack of awareness. A large majority of the report's respondents plan to expand funding for patient support programs within the next 5 years due to large number of new therapies expected to come to market. The report emphasizes the need for interoperability to streamline data and improve patient outcomes.

Pharmaceutical Executive: "The 2025 Medication Access Report" highlights significant fragmentation due to gaps in data-sharing and cross-functional collaboration. Can you elaborate on the most critical areas where these gaps are causing the biggest bottlenecks for patients? Specifically, what are the tangible effects you've observed on patient timelines and outcomes?
Kimberley Chiang: The lack of cross-functional collaboration in our industry adds fragmentation, and the seamlessness of the flow of data and the patient experience is impacted. Whenever we impact seamlessness, we impact the data that is arriving to help us make decisions or anticipate gaps in patient care. It causes delays, rework, and for the burden to fall on the patient to piece together all the elements to find the best way to cover some of the barriers that they’re experiencing in their own healthcare ecosystem.

The industry needs a cohesive and efficient approach that takes cost out of the system and adds data at the right time to help HCPs make the right decisions. We need to get out of our silos because we’re still in our own way. The lack of a clear view drives delays, creates barriers, and doesn’t look at the holistic needs of the patient.

For example, pharmacies and providers see certain needs, and pharma is paying for patient support programs to provide other needs for patients. However, we’re not talking to each other, and that’s where the challenge lies. If we’re looking for the best outcomes for patients and the urgency to get them the medications they need quickly and efficiently with all the education and support for the patient journey, we need to improve integration.

The second element is the knowledge gap. Forty-six percent and 52% of providers don’t know what’s out there for patients. They may be able to identify a gap, but they don’t know where to go to fill that gap. Therefore, the pieces still don’t get put together in that puzzle for the patient and causes delays in looking up what’s available for that patient in their community.

The knowledge gap worsens the delay and puts the burden back on the patient to put together the pieces of their healthcare ecosystem themselves.

The pharma industry is committed to increasing the funding for patient-support programs. But if patients don’t know about them, the utilization stays at about 3%. The majority of the biopharma customers we talked to said that in 5 years, they plan to expand support and funding for these programs. That’s based on the fact that important new therapies are coming to market in the next 5 years and 75% of them have increased complexity because they’re in the specialty realm.

Complexity drives gaps and needs. If we don’t bring this ecosystem together and have data sharing across the portfolio to reduce fragmentation, we are going to continue to see delays which effectively reduce outcomes for patients.