Potential Pitfalls of the Direct-to-Patient Model

In this Pharmaceutical Executive video interview, Angela Tenuta, President, Full Service Agencies, at EVERSANA INTOUCH, explores the findings of their study What Matters Most: The Trends That Will Shape Pharma Marketing In 2025. Tenuta emphasizes the importance of embracing AI as an innovation and highlights specific examples of how AI is being used to improve efficiency and effectiveness in marketing campaigns. The discussion also discusses the ethical considerations associated with AI, particularly regarding patient privacy and data security. The conversation also touches on the growing importance of direct-to-patient (DTP) models and the challenges and opportunities associated with globalization in healthcare, emphasizing the need for cultural sensitivity and adaptability in global marketing campaigns to effectively reach diverse audiences.

The study highlights the benefits of the Direct-to-Patient model for patients. Are there any potential downsides to this approach for patients that we should consider?

A one-word answer is no. I'll dig in a little bit more. I think really any and all advances that help patients get to treatment faster, find cost options, navigate all of the insurance claim PBM nonsense that's come into the spectrum a little bit. Anything that cuts that out is a benefit. But how you create all these connectors and all this streamlined way of getting patients to product faster there.

There are some things that that get in our way. The technology is faster in a lot of these places than some of our own where the data lives, or different legal policies, with what we can know about a patient before they're on a medication versus after a medication, or who can talk to a patient at different steps of the journey, just think about one like maybe a concierge app, where a patient could figure out what doctor to see what products cost so they can be informed which one they want, all the way down to, Where do I go to pick it up? How does it get to my house? What if I have a side effect? You know, when you start to add up all those things, there's many different silos, kind of delivering things now, and when you put them together, you're disrupting not only like norms, but some of the legal rules that every pharma company has taken upon itself to figure out, and a lot of this data is in different places too.

What we're finding is that there's a lot at the front end to figure out new rules, but once the new rules are set, you can really do a lot with the technology now to get people identified through to treatment and to stick on treatment with making that one single pipe and things as simple as text messages, we all survive through text message, but the power of that is tremendous.