“Patient centricity” is everywhere in pharma these days. Let’s resist the temptation to name the consultancy behind this ubiquitous and unquantifiable credo. Given the slide decks, strategy documents, and press releases, the patient appears to be the most important thing. But beneath the polished corporate exterior, patient-centric programs often fail.
Why? Because organisations confuse talking about patients with building around them. Invite a patient speaker to a launch event, set up an advisory board once a year, or sprinkle a heartwarming story into your annual report, tick, tick, tick, and carry on with business as usual.
Real patient focus isn’t about appearances. It’s operational, structural, and often less glamorous than a shiny PR campaign. True patient centricity demands hard choices: trials that minimise unnecessary procedures, packaging that people with arthritis can actually open, pricing that doesn’t force impossible trade-offs. And it means measuring outcomes that matter to patients, not just those convenient for regulators or marketers.
Consider a recent example. A European biotech launched a treatment for a rare neurological disorder. Clinically brilliant. But the packaging was fiddly. Vials required complicated mixing, and the instructions assumed a specialist nurse at hand. Patients struggled, adherence dropped, and uptake lagged, despite regulatory approval. A minor tweak using a thoughtful design from the patient’s perspective could have prevented months of lost momentum.
Patients instinctively know when they’re being listened to versus being managed. True patient focus asks a simple, uncomfortable question at every stage: Would a patient genuinely thank us for how we built this? If the answer is “probably not,” your slogan is just wallpaper.
Here’s a mini checklist for teams aiming for authentic patient centricity:
- Trial design: minimise invasive or unnecessary procedures.
- Packaging: easy, safe, and accessible.
- Pricing: avoids forcing trade-offs between affordability and adherence.
- Outcomes measurement: tracks what truly matters to patients, not only clinical endpoints.
- Communication: plain, clear, respectful, and timely.
- Patient involvement: ongoing, not tokenistic; integrate feedback iteratively.
The irony is that patient-centric solutions are often less glamorous but far more powerful. The therapies that truly succeed are those designed around real human experience, not internal KPIs or press opportunities.
In plain British terms, if the patient wouldn’t thank you for your design choices, your patient centricity is about as useful as a chocolate teapot.
When teams move from token gestures to operational patient focus, outcomes improve across the board; adherence rises, payers are reassured, clinicians trust the therapy, and patients actually benefit.
Because at the end of the day, patient centricity isn’t about slogans, awards, or slides. It’s about making the patient experience the core driver of every decision. And patients, as it turns out, are surprisingly excellent judges.
