Practical Steps for Better Cross-Functional Collaboration

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.

Pharmaceutical Executive: The report emphasizes the need for cross-functional collaboration. What practical steps can pharmaceutical executives take to foster better collaboration between different departments within their organizations, as well as with external partners like providers and pharmacies?
Kimberley Chiang: Within pharma, we don’t have standardized data protocols. That makes it difficult to talk the same language amongst our groups. Programs, physicians & healthcare records, and pharmacies all have different data standards. The ability for us to communicate effectively is inhibited by the nature of interoperability. Providers and pharmacists have a knowledge gap about what’s available and whether they should invest in interoperability solutions.

There are solutions out there, with more coming to market with more sophistication that would more broadly solve the problems we’re facing today. Because there’s not a broad awareness of this, however, there’s still prevailing confusion and unwillingness to spend money towards interoperability.

Everybody understands the potential benefit down the road, especially for the patient. If we could link these solutions together, we would logically see the benefit. But, how do pharma companies make decisions about investing?

When we asked pharmacists and providers if they would be willing to invest in interoperability, 46% of pharmacists and 52% of providers said that they were not aware of what’s out to make that decision for investment. The knowledge gap seems to be creating a delay in adoption for some of these systems even though we all agree that if we could get together and bring interoperability across the ecosystem, everyone benefits. The provider spends less time working through or searching for things. The pharmacy also benefits at the point of sale because they can treat the patient and dispense with all of the information right at their fingertips. Frankly, the patient benefits because they get on their medications faster and have better health outcomes.

The benefit for the industry is being able to link the data and be able to make better and faster decisions proactively. We can use predictive analytics, bringing all of the data across the ecosystem, to make better plans, programs, and funding-and-asset resource decisions. This is at the heart of answering where someone in pharma who has $5 billion is going to spend it.

Where are the gaps most likely to occur in a particular therapeutic area or group of patients? If we look more broadly into the patients, what dimensions of social determinants of health could we also consider along the patient journey? If we could integrate all of that, imagine what we could do faster and more efficiently, which would take costs out of the system and bring patients the medications they much faster.