Moving Patient Centricity Beyond Tokenism: Just Checking the Box Misses the Point

Author(s): Beth Fand Incollingo

What patients want from healthcare interventions—and, importantly, what they don’t want—have become indispensable factors in assessing the value of those measures. HEOR experts are supporting the thoughtful incorporation of patients’ voices across the healthcare landscape as part of a movement toward inclusion of patients as research partners.

Several decades ago, insights from patients about the level of symptom relief that would have a meaningful impact on their quality of life, or whether the clinical benefits of specific medical interventions outweighed the side effects, were considered “nice to have” by healthcare stakeholders. Now, that type of patient feedback—and tools for quantifying it—has become expected, if not essential, across drug development and the healthcare system.

“If a patient can’t tolerate the drug, are they going to stay on it, or are they going to skip doses? When you’re not considering a drug’s impact on patients in their day-to-day lives, you greatly limit the ability to produce therapies that are effective from the patient’s perspective,” said Stacie Hudgens, Chief Scientific and Strategy Officer at Clinical Outcomes Solutions, which conducts research and incorporates patient insights across drug development.