Every year, Courier Health surveys hundreds of biopharma commercial leaders for The State of Patient-Centricity in Biopharma report. This year, one trend stood out: data and legacy infrastructure are impeding innovation.
It is not a criticism from, or towards, any one team – rather it’s a structural reality facing biopharma today. As specialty medicines dominate FDA approvals and global pipelines, biopharma is moving patient support functions internal at an accelerated pace. The report found that 83% of biopharma companies now manage field access and reimbursement in-house and internal ownership of patient services jumped from 48% to 54% in a single year. While this enables greater visibility and control of the patient experience, it also transfers the onus of enabling the data, systems and workflows these teams need to help patients start and stay on therapy onto internal teams like commercial IT.
The challenge is that the specialty patient journey looks nothing like the HCP-centric sales workflows that commercial IT teams spent decades supporting. Today’s therapies carry complex prior authorizations, appeal processes and distribution models – not to mention potentially complex methods of administration and important education for onboarding and adherence. Each patient journey is unique, dynamic and non-linear, often involving dozens of data sources and vendors. It’s one of the most complex data environments in the commercial organization.
This is also why AI ambition is outpacing AI readiness. Nearly 60% of commercial leaders told us they can’t reliably access, analyze and act upon their data and fewer than 10% have reached data maturity to power meaningful AI use cases. While access to AI tools like Copilot continues to increase, it’s important that we don’t conflate access with adoption and adoption with value. The rate limiter to these advancements is almost always the same: a disconnected data foundation and tools that were never built for this work.
The translation problem
Connecting the data is one element, but connecting teams is just as hard a problem. 81% of IT respondents said they felt aligned with the business. Only 59% of the business agreed. Two teams that cannot agree on whether they're aligned aren't having the same conversation in the first place.
The reason is often the business (Patient Services, Market Access, Reimbursement, etc.), IT and compliance have traditionally worked more in sequence than in concert. The business shares requirements, IT handles evaluation and ownership and compliance reviews at the end. IT is rarely in the room when the underlying business goal gets defined.
IT builds exactly what was requested – a workflow, a report, an integration – but the request is just one piece of a bigger picture they’re not always able to see. As a result, the business feels frustrated when the larger goal isn't met and IT is left wondering how a job done right missed the mark.
Empowering those closest to the patient
The exciting news is that the expertise to solve these challenges already exists inside your organization and across the patient access ecosystem. Market Access, Patient Services and specialized partners bring deep patient journey expertise and real-world insight. The best biopharma companies are investing in them accordingly.
That starts with commercial IT recognizing it doesn't need to become the in-house authority on benefits verification, prior authorization nuances, copay activation, or the distinctions between pharmacy and medical benefit. IT's highest value isn't being the patient access expert, it's championing the right ones, working with them from the start and equipping business teams with solutions built for their work.
True patient innovators are investing in focused, specialized partners that also deeply understand the specialty patient journey and are properly equipped to support it. These partners absorb the burden of data quality and integration rather than handing it back and pressure-test AI against real workflows instead of generic use cases. Choose the wrong partner and a specialized function running on a general-purpose system will always underperform.
Get the partner and the foundation right and AI becomes an enabler that automates the manual, high-volume tasks so people can spend more time on the empathy, judgment and problem-solving that drive better patient outcomes.
This matters now more than ever. The complexity landing on IT will only grow as more functions move in-house and AI compresses timelines. The gap between companies actively investing and innovating and those that don’t widens every month and the decisions made in the next few quarters will determine who leads the next generation of patient access.
For a deeper understanding of the specialty patient journey and what future-proof infrastructure looks like, download The Commercial IT Leader's Guide to Patient Access.
