DTP: Simplifying Patient Management and Allowing Providers to Focus on Care

The current prescription journey is broken. Legacy prescription flows create frustration for patients and extra administrative burdens for providers, resulting in treatment delays and lower adherence. The system does not just need to adjust. It needs to be transformed.

Direct-to-patient (DTP) offers the opportunity to create a seamless, patient-centered experience that connects prescribers, patients, and manufacturers in ways the traditional system never could. It simplifies patient management, allowing prescribers to focus on what matters most – patient care. 

Complexity, Burnout, and Treatment Delays

Legacy patient support was built to navigate access hurdles, not deliver a modern, consumer-grade experience for patients and providers. The use of traditional hubs and multiple vendors for intake, BV, prior authorization (PA), and fulfillment results in handoffs, manual processes, and fragmented systems. This slows approvals, increases drop-off, and leaves providers shouldering extra administrative work. Reminder programs designed to keep patients on therapy longer are disparate and uncoordinated leading to worsened patient outcomes and reduced prescriber confidence.

At the same time, complex processes like PA are taking physicians away from direct patient care. This impacts both provider and patient wellbeing. Nine in 10 physicians say PA increases burnout. More than one in four say PA has led to a serious adverse event, more than nine in 10 say it delays care, and more than eight in 10 say it has led to treatment abandonment. [1]

If we are to overcome these challenges, we need to streamline the process of prescribing and managing medications. This will not only reduce administrative burden but also help patients start treatment sooner and stay on treatment longer.

DTP Explained

DTP is a unified tech-plus-touch approach. By standardizing and simplifying the prescription journey, it creates better outcomes for both patients and providers, while ensuring prescribers keep full clinical independence. 

A single system for everything from intake to delivery means patients can see the best price for them, confirm delivery, and complete payment in minutes – just like they would in any other retail experience. Combining technology with human support also helps people achieve their desired health outcomes and stay on treatment for longer.

When patients receive personalized support throughout their journey, it reduces the administrative burden on providers as callbacks reduce. A single point of contact also simplifies even the most complex path to fulfilment, and common pain points like PA are removed via automation. In short, DTP is a long-overdue solution for both patients and overstretched providers.

A Unified Prescription Journey

By creating an auditable patient-first layer, DTP creates a data picture in real time, telling the true story of the entire prescription journey. This helps providers stay informed and supported throughout – allowing them to better support their patients. At the same time, tools that simplify patient management allow prescribers to spend more of their time focusing on care.

For example, physicians report spending 13 hours per week completing PAs and say peer-to-peer reviews disrupt patient appointments. [1] A third of providers say PAs are ‘often or always’ denied and one in five report that they always appeal an adverse PA decision.

By validating prescriptions upfront, DTP prevents incomplete or incorrect submissions from reaching payers, eliminating common points of friction that delay time to therapy. By bypassing third-party tools and initiating PAs directly with Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs) with pre-filled EHR-sourced clinical data, DTP results in higher approval rates and faster therapy starts. Automated eBV and eBI via direct payer connections means both insurance and eligibility and patient out-of-pocket costs are confirmed in real time without the need to submit a test claim. This means no claim reversals and no delays, empowering providers to move forward without waiting on incomplete data or payer denials and meaning patients get fast, clear answers on cost.

Patient support can also be improved by DTP. For example, a combination of automated SMS, live human follow-up, and AI voice calls can be used to engage patients monthly or whenever they are at risk of falling off therapy. This bridges the gap between refills and routines, helping patients stay on therapy longer and freeing up providers to concentrate on those who most need their support. Live visibility into each patient’s journey also means prescribers know exactly where patients are in the fulfillment process and can support them accordingly.

Conclusion

For providers, every minute spent on unnecessary prescription admin is time which could be better spent on direct patient care. DTP offers real-time updates, support, and simplified tools to streamline patient management. By strengthening the provider-pharmacy connection, it allows prescribers to focus on patient care, enhancing patient outcomes, and creating a seamless experience for everyone involved.

For providers who want to spend less time dealing with insurance companies and more time helping patients feel better, DTP is the obvious solution.

References

1. https://www.ama-assn.org/system/files/prior-authorization-survey.pdf