Patient centricity is the buzzword of this decade, and necessarily so: it either underpins, or is an inevitable result of, all the forces shaping today’s rapidly evolving healthcare landscape. Payers’ efficiency-driven obsession with outcomes requires an enhanced focus on patient adherence and care management; new digital technologies are enlightening consumers and empowering them to proactively engage in their treatment choices just as growing financial pressures (and an increasingly public debate on drug pricing) compel them to. With longer life expectancy has come the need to properly manage chronic diseases, while at the same time, genomics-driven personalized medicine, disease segmentation, and continued interest in ultra-rare disorders are driving the focus of many R&D programs down to smaller patient groups and, at the extreme, individual patients.

Patient engagement already happens in some therapy areas, notably rare diseases. But it is inconsistent and patchy across the broader therapeutic spectrum. The shift to more widespread, systematic patient centricity will not be a straightforward one for a highly regulated industry that has grown used to dealing with providers and payers, rather than the end users of its products. Beyond the significant cultural and organizational changes required to reshape how many companies operate lies a perhaps more significant challenge: no-one knows what a truly patient-centric pharmaceutical organization looks like, nor indeed whether it is achievable.

The multiple experiments underway to test patient-centric approaches – spanning discovery through to commercialization, and involving both traditional and newer stakeholders – will slowly help answer those questions. It is already clear, though, that meaningful patient centricity requires new mindsets, new kinds of data, and new levels of cooperation and trust.