Becoming the partners that health systems and patients need us to be

Over the past few weeks, I have lifted the lid on how, at Roche,? we have turned our international commercial organisation inside out in pursuit of helping more patients to achieve better outcomes faster. I have shared insights on how we let go of beliefs and systems that we had relied on for decades and the new ways of thinking and working that are enabling us to be more ambitious about the impact we have for our customers and patients.?

In my first article I mentioned the feedback from customers that fuelled my own motivation for change. While our customers appreciated our strong science and our focus on patients, they found us complicated to deal with. They wanted patients to benefit from our innovative medicines, but they needed us to do a lot more than share data to make it possible for them to navigate the obstacles that stood in their way.?

Our transformation needed to enable us to engage with our customers in a way that worked better for them. We needed to be better at understanding their worlds and the problems they faced – and we needed to be better at unleashing our people’s talents and expertise to help solve those problems. So, how is what we do today different from what we were doing five years ago? Here I would like to share just two of the big differences that are increasing the impact we have for our customers and patients every day.??

Firstly, we have completely redesigned our customer engagement model. This is the most visible change and the one I get asked about the most. It was a bold move that sparked a lot of curiosity across the industry.?

In the traditional customer engagement model, strategy is set by leaders in head office, interpreted and translated into tactics by regional or country leads and then passed down the line to the people who will take it to customers. Yes, there is customer research and feedback that gets passed back up the line but, in essence, it is the people furthest from the customers who are making the decisions about what happens at the point of contact between company and customer. Sometimes we used to set targets for how many times a representative should meet a doctor. That wasn’t always helping us building meaningful partnerships with our customers or helping our customers to solve their problems. And with our portfolio diversifying and incorporating more targeted treatments it would become less and less effective for getting our medicines to the patients who needed them.?

In the past, our customer engagement model focused on exclusively telling our customers about the benefits of our medicines. A single customer could see several different Roche representatives, with each focusing on a different product or indication. Our Primary Point of Contact (PPOC) model turns this on its head. It is inspired by our work in rare diseases where the combination of highly complex diseases and therapies and closely integrated communities of patients and healthcare professionals had already led us to develop a way of engaging that put the patients’ needs and experiences first. Our new model gives each of our customers a single, senior point of contact to access expertise, support and problem-solving capabilities from across the organisation, and gives the person in the point of contact role – a Patient Journey Partner (PJP) or Health Service Journey Partner (HSP) – the authority to orchestrate expertise and resources from across our network to solve the problems our customers have. The remit of the PJPs and HSPs is clear: identify needs and ways we can add value for patients and health systems.?

The model is already helping us to have a greater impact. In one country, for example, one of our PPoCs was able to take action in response to the capacity challenges that infusion centres were facing. Calling on expertise from across our network, they launched a collective effort to make it possible for more patients being treated for certain types of cancer to be able to receive treatment ? subcutaneously? (by injection under the skin) rather than via an intravenous infusion that delivers the treatment into the bloodstream. This means fewer patients would need to visit infusion centres to get the care they needed.?

Overall, more patients are being treated with our innovative medicines, and customers benefit from having valuable infusion capacity freed up.? Best of all, patients have a more convenient way of receiving their treatment.?

We also are hearing that our customers appreciate the way we have made it simpler for them to work with us. Importantly, the PPOCs themselves report that they can see the impact the model is having. Several highly experienced colleagues who had become frustrated with the previous model and left the field to take up desk-based jobs have now chosen to return to customer-facing roles. They can see that working as PJP or HSJ gives them the opportunity to make a real difference, by developing? true partnerships with customers and ultimately having a greater impact for patients.?

Secondly, I want to highlight something that I believe has had the most profound impact of all. It’s the shift we have made in how we understand our role in the healthcare ecosystem: not as suppliers of innovative therapeutics and diagnostics, but as partners to our customers and health systems.? While doing what we can to ensure that patients get the benefit from our medicines, we take a role in ensuring that all the conditions that are needed for patients and healthcare systems to get sustainable benefit, are in place.?

This shift has enabled us to create a culture where people across our organisation are empowered to be of service not to metrics or to their managers, but to customers, patients and each other. It has made it possible for us to form many partnerships with health systems and governments around the world to accelerate the adoption of the latest advances – including personalised healthcare - and create a bigger patient impact. Becoming partners rather than suppliers started out as an aspiration but it has become fundamental to who we are.?

Why am I sharing this?? The fact is that science and technology are now making astonishing innovations possible – innovations with the potential to change lives and transform care. But patients and society will only be able to benefit from these breakthroughs if they are successfully integrated into health systems and that can only happen if we as an industry look beyond our traditional role and challenge ourselves to become the partners that health systems and patients need us to be.?

The progress we have made so far wouldn’t have been possible without the numerous committed colleagues across the organisation, with the clear ambition to create a bigger impact for our customers and patients. This wasn't dictated from the top. Instead, the design process was firmly rooted in a bottom-up methodology, actively engaging those facing the challenges head-on and enlisting leaders who embody our new ways of working.? Colleagues from across Roche played a role in shaping our new organisation.

I’m not saying we are fully there yet, but we have started the journey and I am confident that we are heading in the right direction. And as much as I value our reputation as pioneers and ground-breaking innovators, I hope that this will not be a journey we take alone. We have an opportunity to rethink our industry’s role in the future of health. Let’s not rely on old ways of doing things. Let’s not be afraid to try something new. Let’s go forward together.