Transforming Means of Interaction

Client Situation

Pharmaceutical companies have traditionally compensated healthcare providers (HCPs) to speak to patients about products on their behalf – a practice causing patients and third parties to question the motives behind treatment recommendations. The client envisioned new means of provider interaction and information delivery that would solidify the company’s position as a trusted advisor on its medications and treatment options. To this end, the organization developed a global initiative to re-imagine its interaction strategy with HCPs.

With the organization’s vision in place, lack of an integrated plan across platforms and workstreams – including testing, training, and deployment – put the organization at risk for delayed implementation and compromised the value of the new capability for the company and its HCP stakeholders.

Our Approach

North Highland tackled the project with a team of 11 consultants focused on project management, process mapping, user acceptance testing development and coordination, and strategic guidance. The team assigned experienced operators to each of these focus areas, with representation across multiple sites and countries, to ensure integration across the enterprise.

Prior to North Highland’s involvement in the initiative, the fulltime employees and contractors staffed on the project viewed it primarily as an IT platforms upgrade, with siloed development plans. The North Highland team introduced integrated ways of working that re-oriented the organization’s perception of the initiative and helped to deliver the new capabilities, inclusive of the IT systems and infrastructure, efficiently.

North Highland's change agents were skilled in process mapping to document the current state and map the desired future state. The team oversaw day-to-day operations as the client developed its new platform capabilities, established new vendor service partnerships, and helped to build the underlying organization and staff needed to operate and sustain the new capabilities.

North Highland’s approach was anchored in project management best practices, including:

  • A master project plan across all platforms and workstreams to quickly identify the project critical path and key interworkstream dependencies
  • Consistent usage of a Risks, Assumptions, Issues, and Dependencies (RAID) log to track open risks and issues
  • Management of cross-workstream and individual workstream meetings

Value Delivered

North Highland successfully helped re-imagine the new capabilities to support HCP interaction, and embedded integrated ways of working by aligning IT development with business strategy. This work brought new ways and channels of interaction with HCPs, as well as new capabilities in content and asset management.

To support the ongoing operation of these capabilities, North Highland also delivered new tools—including a new enterprise taxonomy, metadata models, implementation plans, design plans, communications, and service model designs.

Beyond platform integration, North Highland helped to instill an ongoing appreciation for human-centric principles in systems, operations, and platforms. The team’s work helped to fundamentally reorient the organization’s thinking around the HCP journey, nurturing an increased focus on Customer Experience (CX) and, ultimately, the creation of an ongoing internal CX function.

Most importantly, North Highland’s work empowered the client to fundamentally reshape its approach to HCP interaction: a strategy that continues to enable high-value, transparent medical conversations that solidify the organization’s position as a trusted advisor to providers.

Beyond platform integration, North Highland helped to instill an ongoing appreciation for human-centric principles in systems, operations, and platforms.