How Pharma Tracks the Impact of Patient Support Programs

Patient support programs continue to play a role in how pharmaceutical manufacturers address access and adherence challenges, particularly as patients face administrative and financial barriers between prescription and therapy initiation. As these programs expand, companies are placing greater emphasis on how their impact is measured and communicated internally.

Common areas of focus include time to therapy, prescription abandonment, and patient persistence, along with measures tied to patient experience. These metrics are often used to assess how effectively support services help patients navigate processes such as prior authorization, affordability programs, and onboarding.

In this first installment of a two-part interview series recorded live at Access USA 2026, Nareda Mills, global president of Patient Solutions at Inizio Engage, discusses how patient services are being measured today and which data points are most commonly used to demonstrate value to leadership. She also outlines considerations for aligning patient support initiatives with broader organizational goals.

The period between prescription and product receipt remains a point of friction across many therapeutic areas. Delays or drop-off during this stage can affect both patient outcomes and commercial performance, prompting continued attention to how support services are structured and evaluated.

A transcript of her conversation with PC can be found below.

Editor's note: This transcript is a lightly edited rendering of the original audio/video content. It may contain errors, informal language, or omissions as spoken in the original recording.

PC: You've spent nearly three decades watching patient services evolve from a clinical nicety to a strategic imperative. When it comes to proving the value of a patient services program to leadership, what are the metrics that move the needle?

Mills: Well, I think it starts with making sure that folks understand that just getting a prescription written isn't enough anymore, and it's incredibly challenging for a patient to gain access to their therapy. So it's really important to make sure that you put resources in place that can support these patients in understanding everything that they're going to have to go through, all those hurdles and barriers that they're going to have in order for them actually receiving their medication. the metrics that really move the needle are that experience that those patients go through. If you think about some of the industry brands like Patagonia or Chewy that really do well with customer experience, that patient experience is critical in making sure that people feel supported on that journey.

Securing executive support for patient services can feel like an uphill battle, especially if leadership is focused on commercial outcomes. What's your playbook for making the case to the C-suite?

I'll come back again to getting that script written is only a very small portion of the journey, and making sure that the commercial organization understands the importance of making sure that that script ends up to product in hand for a patient. So making sure that you're championing for that journey, for that patient to actually get all of the access to support that they are going to require to eventually be able to take their medication.