Patient Journey Mapping is a tool that can help pharmaceutical companies increase patient access and engagement. It involves tracing a patient's journey from early disease stages through treatment to understand challenges faced. This helps identify influencers, gaps, and ways to increase contact points to improve the sales process. While complex to implement, Patient Journey Mapping can guide resource allocation and help transform product-centric companies into valued partners for healthcare providers by developing new solutions.

1. Patient Journey Mapping: A powerful Tool to increase Patient Access
In pharma market, growing top and bottomline is becoming a challenge for companies engaged in Healthcare
especially due to government regulations and pricing pressures.Pharma companies are facing challenges of
-Drying R & D pipelines: 2014 R & D pipeline analysis shows only five companies worldwide are developing
more than half of pipeline products for developing countries with Novartis being the leader. More than 50% of the
industry’s pipeline targets only five diseases:lower respiratory infections, diabetes,cirrhosis of the liver (mostly for
hepatitis) HIV/AIDS and malaria.
-Recruitment & retention of skilledfield force
-Problem of plenty: In a generic market like India, sales & marketing function face challenge of brand
differentiation leading to rat race of CRM for physicians and promotional schemes for dispensers and
chemists..Currently there are more than 111 brands of Metformin plain; 663 brands of Aceclofenac and its
combinations; 250 brands of Paracetamol plain; more than 47 brands of plain Clobetasol Propionate topical
preparations available currently
-Accessing new geographies/therapeutic segments due to well entrenched players, long gestation period, high costs
& long term resource commitments. A classic example is fate of rural marketing divisions.In past 5 years, more
than 10 big pharma companies have launched dedicated rural marketing divisions in India. When you will observe
the health of such initiatives now, lower ROI compared to main divisions, logistics issues and lack of management’s
long term commitment resulted in stagnancy ordisbanding of operations in 8 such initiatives.
One of the ways to survive and thrive in highly fragmented, rewarding yet alluring healthcare market is to
increase patient access of brands.Increased patient access will help companies in fast recovery of the investments
and increasing product life cycle. Till now Patient access was limited to decision making process ofpricing and
availability. Moreover patient access was considered to be the domain of sales and marketing teams.
Various stakeholders have been working to increase patient access in their own ways. To provide universal
healthcare, successive governments have taken initiatives like setting up of healthcare networks, Jan Aushadhi
Bhandar/ Generic price shops.Govt. policy decisions like regulatory control over costly niche products / DPCO /
NLEM have increased patient access to medicines.
On their part, pharma companies rely upon tailored pricing strategies, expansion of distribution channels.MNCs
adopt Tier pricing in different countries keeping in view the socio economic factors of target markets. Increased
media/ government scrutiny will continue to push more companies to launch the economical versions.
Reach and coverage: Companies like Mankind, FDC etc increases patient access by reaching out to physicians in
under covered and unexplored Indian rural markets.
The time has come for Sales and marketing teams to relook at the reach and coverage of patients rather than looking
at physician as the only stakeholderin a changing world -where rules of the business are getting redefined by the
day. In this article, would like to share views about the concept of Patient Journey mapping(henceforth referred as
PJM). To increase patient access,an ideal PJM traces patient’s journey from the early stages ofthe disease through
all stages oftreatment until final outcome or cure.PJM concept will help companies to
- Increase patient access,product and knowledge availability and adherence to treatment.
- Identify skills,capabilities. Services and programs needed for increasing the contact points in current & future
patient journey to complete the sales triangle (right patient- right HCP- right message) successfully
- Identify key stakeholders, challenges and bottlenecks that patients faced across specific disease areas so as to
identify influencers and address patient’s needs.
- Understand the disease map (Why / how an individual becomes a patient), identify the interaction points with each
stakeholder and key influencers & ways and means to build long lasting relationship with same.
The tools used in PJM are
Current patient journey -Interactions with patients,retailers, physicians,pathology labs and paramedic staff in all
class towns starting from additional PHC/rural HCPs and going up to superspecialists coupled with available
market insights from market research, consumer facing teams enable marketers to identify probable contact points,
understand patient needs and physician’s treatment goals.
Ideal patient journey maps- Based upon current patient journey, identification of evolving influencers (Digital,
social media) will result in plotting of future patient journey. The exercise will help marketers to identify the gaps
and tools to fill in the same by internal resources or external partners

2. Established processes forcommercializing new pharmaceutical products are now increasingly becoming obsolete
which will sooneror later compel companies to look at the entire process of marketing drugs right from the drug
discovery, patents &licensing, manufacturing & distribution and sales and marketing etc.
However, several practical issues in building and using patient Journey understanding has challenged pharma
companies to implement and use the potential of PJM concept.Some of the limitations behind low use of the PJM
concept are the long term resource commitment, skilled manpower, proven mapping tools,complexity and diversity
of different geographies and ROI calculations. Development of a well defined, easily understood road map of patient
journey need top management’s buy in of the concept,skilled manpower and cross functional collaborations to
commercialize the findings in all stages ofdrug delivery process.Marketers attempting PJM must remember that
-Customer journey mapping should be a pan organization cross functional exercise rather than limited to marketing
& sales only
- PJM exercise is a powerful tool to make all arms of organizations patient and marketing focus instead of
functioning in silos who are concerned about their own job responsibilities. Involvement of particularly the middle
and lower ranks will increase their buy in and tap cross functional resources in mobilizing the organization at all
levels
- Teams should try to incorporate customer journey mapping in their annual brand plans as it allows them to identify
and allocate resources & stakeholder mapping right in beginning of planning exercise
- The PJM exercise forces traditionally product centric companies to become trusted value partners by HCPs by
enabling them to think of new solutions and business models
Patient Journey Mapping exercise will enable healthcare providers like pharmaceutical companies, pharmacy
chains and corporate hospitalnetworks to use the resources judiciously identify the right set of influencers and
partners to increase patient access.