Detailed patient-journey tracking and Forecasting for rare disease therapy

A specialty pharmaceutical company was planning to launch an oral prescription medication for treatment of seizures associated with a rare pediatric disease. The market landscape included several non-pharmacological therapies and non-targeted drugs.

Viscadia was asked to design and build a go-to-market forecasting model for tracking patient journeys and projecting demand on a weekly basis.

Helped the client predict patient journey and product demand for a therapy in a $1B rare diseases market

CHALLENGES

Complex fulfillment
process

  • Modeling several steps in the patient fulfillment funnel of a small patient population including REMS, echocardiogram assessments, and payer benefit verification

Lack of history

  • Formulating forecasting KPIs reflective of the entire population from a small sample size
  • Building confidence on key forecast drivers

Pandemic impact

  • Re-assessing pipeline forecast after product launch amid COVID-19 pandemic
  • Refining patient fulfilment assumptions to adjust for the impact of restrictions due to the pandemic

APPROACH

Patient fulfillment
pathway mapping

Conducted detailed stakeholder discussions to understand and define various potential patient journey pathways

Queue conversion
modeling

Tracked the patient acquisition forecast in the model by incorporating average patient-journey time across different pathways

Short and long-term
patient forecasting

Assessed therapy-area nuances, patient segments, clinical and commercial drivers of product usage, and estimated both near- and long-term KPIs

Variance analysis

Triangulated forecasts against actual weekly data, refined forecast assumptions and facilitated monthly and quarterly forecast updates

Cross-functional
insights and planning

Mapped the forecast model back to HCP segments for targeting, creating guidance for sales teams and optimizing patient access efforts

OUTCOMES

End deliverables

  • ViscadiaPatient Diagnostics Dashboard (Refreshed monthly)
  • Viscadia Regional Forecast Models (Refreshed weekly)

Key highlights

  • Enabled leadership to track and incorporate trends from the actual patient data into forecast planning and goal setting
  • Facilitated patient analytics to answer post-launch business questions faced by C-Suite leadership for board meetings and earnings calls
  • Helped commercial leaders quantitatively simulate what-if scenarios to assess market trends during COVID-19

Impact

  • The forecast model enabled comprehensive and intuitive evaluation of key performance indicators and helped drive stakeholder decisions
  • Established Viscadia’s forecast platform as a go-to tool for simulating forecast scenarios by senior leadership
  • Allowed the commercial team to detect bottlenecks in the patient fulfillment process in real time
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