Laura Blair: Rethinking Hub Efficiency and the Role of AI in Patient Support

The specialty pharmaceutical industry has invested heavily in building patient support infrastructure — hubs, enrollment platforms, financial assistance programs — yet the gap between what these tools can do and what patients actually experience still remains. Awareness is sometimes low, enrollment forms are cumbersome, and the friction created by a busy HCP office or a requirement for a live signature can be enough to derail a patient's journey before it begins. The tools exist. Getting patients to use them is the harder problem.

In the second part of her video interview with Pharmaceutical Commerce, Laura Blair, chief commercial officer at ConnectiveRx, picks up where Part 1 left off — moving from distribution strategy into the operational realities that slow down speed to therapy for specialty patients. Blair notes that hub utilization rates of ten to fifteen percent are not a technology failure so much as a design and access failure, and that simplifying regulatory and legal requirements around enrollment could meaningfully improve both utilization and downstream patient outcomes.

Blair also takes a candid look at AI's role in the patient support journey — and where its limits lie. She draws a clear distinction between the transactional questions a bot can handle efficiently and the more complex, emotionally charged conversations that require a human in the loop. Using a relatable example from her own experience navigating a phone carrier's automated system, Blair makes the case that when a patient is newly diagnosed, frightened, and facing significant financial implications, the stakes of getting that balance wrong are far higher than a delayed phone transfer. For Blair, the most promising application of AI is not replacing human touchpoints, but equipping the humans on the other end of those calls with faster tools and better information — so they can focus on what a bot simply cannot replicate: listening, pausing, and making sure a patient truly understands what comes next.

Access the first part of her interview with PC:

1. Laura Blair: Balancing Virtual Fulfillment and Traditional Pharmacy Distribution