How to Build Trust and Retention in Patient Support Programs

As patient support programs (PSP) continue to expand alongside the growing use of specialty medications, manufacturers are grappling with a persistent challenge: how to identify early signs that a program isn’t meeting patient needs. In the final installment of Pharmaceutical Commerce’s interview with Tina Valbh, managing partner at PharmaKonnect and co-founder of Tina’s Warriors, live from Access USA 2026, Valbh offers a candid look at why post-launch programs sometimes fall short—and how data and patient insights can make the difference.

Valbh emphasizes that the first warning signs often appear in the form of patient abandonment. “You start seeing that patients aren’t picking up the phone, or you can’t get ahold of them,” she explains. This disengagement frequently emerges not because the program itself is flawed, but because it fails to account for the cumulative burden patients have already faced in their healthcare journeys. For example, cancer patients navigating oral oncolytics may have endured chemotherapy, surgeries, and radiation long before enrolling in a specialty pharmacy or patient services program. Without understanding that context, programs risk missing critical psychological and practical barriers that contribute to dropout.

Another key factor, Valbh notes, is the metrics used to measure success. “We build these data ecosystems around what we think looks good, but we’re not asking the right questions,” she says. By integrating patient-reported outcomes and focusing on real-world experiences from day one, manufacturers can better predict where disengagement may occur—and design interventions that sustain trust and adherence. In this conversation, Valbh shares insights on how PSPs can evolve from checklists and dashboards into truly patient-centered ecosystems, ultimately improving both outcomes and patient confidence.

Access the first and second parts of Valbh’s interview with PC below:

1. Looking Beyond Launch: Rethinking Long-Term Patient Support
2. How to Fix the Handoffs Where Prior Authorization Workflows Break Down

A transcript of her conversation 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: What early signs indicate a post-launch patient support program is underperforming? How should manufacturers track them?

Valbh: Early warning signs is, you're starting to see a lot of abandonment. You start seeing that patients aren't picking up the phone and, and you can't get ahold of patients. You're starting to see that, maybe you were able to get the first fill to the patient, and now you're trying to do a secondary touch point. What you're starting to see is, number one, exhaustion from the entire healthcare ecosystem that that patient has already been through, and we haven't met the patient where they're at in the journey. You know, if we put it in perspective, patients have been on a journey long before they get on their specialty med. From the point of diagnosis, I mean, in, in a cancer patient's case, for example, they could have been through chemotherapy, surgeries, radiation, all of this stuff before they got to the specialty pharmacy, an oral oncolytic, and the patient services provider, right? We never took any of the other stuff into consideration. And so the patient has some psychological barriers that we're not addressing, and so you start seeing abandonment. We're not measuring the right, metrics around what does that look like. We're not bringing in, patient-reported outcomes in order to address where an abandonment can happen or discontinuation can happen. And so we build these data ecosystems around what we think looks good, but we're not asking the right questions and building it into the programs on day one, and so you start seeing fall off and disengagement, and really disengagement from a trust perspective. You lose trust from the patient.