In 2021, members of my team of the Roche Pharma Medical CX department together with the Roche Pharma Global Medical Information team were driving an truly exciting initiative on innovating how Roche answers to medical information inquiries. The initiative called ‘Customer Driven Content Authoring‘ (CDCA) was based on a systematic co-design approach with Roche customers, physicians, pharmacists and patients.
Medical information requests (MIRs) or medical inquiries are an obligatory and vital service provided by pharma companies. It is a bit similar to service call centers in other industries, but much more sensitive and regulated. Every answer provided could have an impact to an individual patient’s life. A big pharma company like Roche, serving millions of patients around the globe, receives ~100k medical inquiries each year. Mostly questions by health care providers (~75%) and patients (~25%), e.g. on treatment safety and treatment efficacy under specific circumstances.
Now, what people typically experienced as an answer to a medical inquiry were long, text-heavy, scientific language based documents. Those were not easy to read and ‘digest’ for medical and pharmaceutical professionals (HCPs). And they were – in my opinion – nearly impossible to understand for lay people like patients and their families. As a result, HCPs and patients told us that the find it hard to access the information they need at the point of need. They clearly asked that answers provided by us need to be easier to use & understand.
Within less than 3 months, the team provided a new set-up and design for global medical information responses. They used agile methodology, customer-centric needs research, personas, journeys, sentiment analysis, A/B testing and actively co-designed with physician, pharmacist and patient representatives.
Now you will be curious about the outcomes …
Amazing, right?! Remember, this was achieved in less than 3 months, simply by collaborating cross-functionally plus actively involving customers.
Obviously, the biggest improvement was with patients, not really surprisingly. But even with physicians (MD) and pharmacists an increase of ease-of-use of 20-30% had been achieved associated with an increase of confidence in answers provided by the company.
I had the pleasure presenting the approach and top level outcomes at a session of the cross-industries’ CX Council (I am a member of) and at the 2021 CX Management for Life Sciences conference, where it received a remarkable amount of acknowledgement by colleagues and experts.
