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Optimising pharmacy's digital transformation with human connection

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Mark Gregory, chief pharmacy officer for Pleio, focuses on pharmacy services as a component of healthcare delivery, and the power of the human connection in optimising pharmacy’s digital transformation.

Key insights:

Consumer reliance on digital technology has increased dramatically over the past two years. Despite significant negative health effects of pandemic-induced isolation, consumers generally found digital experiences convenient and effective. Today, consumers expect the same convenient, effective digital experiences in all aspects of their lives, including healthcare.

During the pandemic, pharmacies in communities across the country rallied to provide frontline patient support. They quickly ramped up expanded services to include administration of COVID vaccinations and testing and experienced greater use of digital health diagnostic tools, more virtual care, and acceleration of AI-powered operations. While stretched beyond capacity, they continued to provide uninterrupted medication adherence support for patients with existing and new chronic conditions. Today, with focused efforts underway to accelerate digital transformation within all sectors of healthcare, pharmacies are using their pandemic experience to inform further innovation.

The power of empathy

In pharmacy, and more broadly, healthcare, the importance of empathy in defining the path to optimised digital transformation cannot be overstated. Empathy, defined as “the ability to see a situation through the eyes of another person,” is “the most important human attribute that matters in every aspect of life and is essential in healthcare.”

Regardless of advances in AI, digital technology alone is not a panacea. Empathy is multidimensional, including behavioural, cognitive, emotional, and moral aspects. It prompts us to show acts of compassion and engenders trust. In patient care, emotional empathy allows providers to gain better insight and understanding of a patient. It cannot be replicated by digital technology. Patient benefits of empathy and empathic care are numerous, broad in scope, and well established by research.

In a recent Accenture study, over 50% of patients reported empathy as the most important aspect of care, equally as important as actual treatment. Other documented benefits of empathy are: 

Human-digital connection

The human connection allows pharmacies to make the most of digital technology available to them. By optimising the human-digital connection, pharmacies can take patient engagement to the next level. Patients feel well supported by people they trust and benefit from a longitudinal approach to care, focused on the whole patient throughout their health journey. Building trust creates space to identify emotional barriers to therapy so they may be mitigated or resolved altogether. Optimisation of digital technology within this approach means creating a frictionless patient experience that is both scalable and affordable. Digital technology that supports empathic care gives pharmacies a decisive advantage to elevate patient care and pharmacy performance.

It is important for pharmacies to select partners who share their commitment to the human connection and empathic care as essential complements of digital transformation. Pharmacy partners should provide solutions that enable pharmacies to extend the reach of their teams by building capacity without causing stress or workflow interference. They should improve medication adherence, persistence, and pharmacy loyalty. The programs should be cost-effective and should expand the pharmacy’s ability to generate revenue for pharmacy services. For pharmacies, establishment of a new, higher-level role in patient care is a real opportunity amidst the healthcare disruption taking place today. To get there, they need partners who understand their reality intimately and share their long-range vision.

Empathy is a key element of peer-patient support, beneficial to both patients and pharmacies. For pharmacies, peer support increases patient loyalty and retention, which leads to improved medication adherence, long term script growth, and increased revenue. Notably, the peer-patient approach produces adherence gains irrespective of type and number of other adherence strategies employed. Because peers provide support that might otherwise be provided by pharmacy staff, they reduce burden and create economic advantage for the pharmacies. Additionally, peer support allows for identification of issues related to social determinants of health that might not surface otherwise.

Peer-patient relationships are rooted in empathy and provide emotional support at the time patients need it most—when new conditions are diagnosed and new medications are prescribed. Patients experience a heightened level of awareness at the time of diagnosis followed by a period coined by Gartner as the trough of disillusionment soon afterward. Without intervention at precisely the right time, the risk of primary non-adherence is great. With peer rapport and trust, patients receive the information and emotional support they need to become empowered, with confidence to successfully manage their own medication adherence. Of 4,100 patients surveyed on seven aspects of the peer-patient program—quality, convenience, reassurance, understanding, motivation, helpfulness, and likelihood to recommend—patients provided a composite satisfaction score of 96%.

Conclusion

The peer-patient effect cannot be achieved by technology alone. To optimise digital transformation, the empathy-imbued human connection must be an inextricably linked complement to digital technology. Supported by a cost-effective business model, human-digital hybridisation re-establishes the human relationship as the heart of healthcare and yields tangible benefits to patients, pharmacies, and other healthcare stakeholders along the patient’s journey.

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