D2 Consulting : Ensuring Frictionless Patient Journey

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Dean Erhardt, President & CEO, D2 Consulting

The adoption of specialty medications has grown exponentially over the past decade for treating patients with rare and complex health conditions, including cancer, hepatitis, and auto-immune disorders such as multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis. These specialty medications usually have complex profiles regarding dosing, administration, adverse events, and special handling requirements. This necessitates the specialty pharmacies to offer high-touch personalized patient care management support, access to disease-specific trained pharmacists and nurses, and assistance with health insurance-related coverage issues.

Unfortunately, even today, most specialty pharmacies have not adopted technology to enable these services. They rely on telephony and internal call center teams as the primary means of patient engagement. Needless to say, patients often feel discouraged to engage with such a telephone-based outreach. This leads to several challenges, such as the inability to address patient questions and difficulty in resolving insurance concerns. While there will always be a core subset of patients who prefer telephone-based engagement, most patients today—especially in a post-COVID environment— seek a personalized mode of service. Also, for a frictionless patient experience, it is always essential to start the medication journey from the moment a patient receives the prescription. Currently, patients have to deal with multiple parties, including physicians, health insurance providers, HUBs, to name a few. This ultimately delays the entire process while hampering medication adherence. As such, specialty pharmacies are assessing technology-driven innovations to supplement telephony for starting therapy faster, optimizing medication adherence, and providing timely medication counseling for optimal clinical outcomes.

Enter D2 Consulting

D2 Consulting’s digital patient engagement technology platform is purpose-built to support customized medication via scheduled and triggered digital outreaches. It automatically directs patient-initiated tasks to the appropriate pharmacy team member, bypassing the arduous “telephone tag” aspect and delivering near-real-time resolutions. “Our years of consulting expertise coupled with SaaS-based technology solutions improve the experience for people who receive specialty medications,” says Dean Erhardt, President and CEO, D2.

D2 focuses on five key aspects: patient enrollment, reimbursement, product access, disease management, and affordability. Healthcare stakeholders such as HUBs, specialty pharmacies, clinics, hospital systems, and life science companies can benefit from D2’s modular approach while maintaining their existing workflows.

“Unlike our competitors who often offer single-point solutions, we combine various modules that can fit within any technology eco-system. This reduces complexity and makes the entire patient engagement process seamless,” says Kirby Eng, Vice President, Technology Sales and Business Development at D2. “More importantly, our digital patient engagement solution has been designed using -consumer driven principles such as convenience, personalization and choice that make it easy for patients and clients to use while keeping patients engaged throughout their medication journey.” Depending on clients’ specific requirements, D2 can also provide the digital patient engagement solution as a private label offering.

With ongoing innovation, D2 has helped its healthcare clients modernize their patient care model. Erhardt recalls an instance where a specialty pharmacy was struggling with patient navigation for new and refill prescription processes. Their patient care coordinator team was relying on the telephone and auto-dialing outreaches which led to a significant number of non-responses and delays in therapy. Having to perform hundreds of tedious and routine telephone outreaches with a high rate of non-response, the patient coordinator team was frustrated.

Unlike our competitors who often offer single-point solutions, we combine various modules that can fit within any technology eco-system

Stepping into the scene, D2 helped the client to provide a better patient experience through personalized and convenient digital outreaches. This included real-time bi-directional communications, efficient capture of the required information to enable new and refill prescription processing, auto-scheduling for medication consultations and deliveries, and addressing any outstanding issues or concerns. The client was also able to automate the workflows between the patient and respective pharmacy team members.

With D2’s digital engagement platform, the client witnessed 63 percent of patients responding within 24 hours and an additional 23 percent responding within 48 hours. This was a significant improvement over existing text/auto-dialing processes, and it helped facilitate faster initiation of new medication and better patient experience. Additionally, the patient care coordinator team saw a 61 percent reduction in manual outbound calls. The specialty pharmacy is now looking to broaden the scope of D2’s platform to other specialty medications by identifying additional clinical and non-clinical opportunities to bring extra value to patients as well as internal pharmacy staff.

Many such use cases are testament to the success of D2 in helping clients enhance patient engagement and responsiveness. The company looks forward to introducing a new division, D2 Digital Solutions, which will play a vital role in modernizing and accelerating patient access to medications. “This will further help us connect various healthcare stakeholders, including pharmacy, hospital systems, pharma manufacturer, physician clinics, HUBs, and payers with patients to drive better care outcomes and lower overall healthcare costs,” concludes Erhardt.

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Company
D2 Consulting

Headquarters
Chesterfield, MO

Management
Dean Erhardt, President & CEO, D2 Consulting

Description
D2 Pharma Consulting empowers healthcare leaders with a unique combination of SaaS solutions and deep consulting expertise. The company brings pharmaceutical manufacturers, payers, pharmacies & support providers, and patients together to facilitate enhanced care delivery.