PHARMA AND HEALTH SYSTEM COLLABORATION – RESHAPING THE PATIENT JOURNEY AND DRIVING GREATER IMPACT AT SCALE
At Fierce Pharma Week, leaders from pharma, healthcare, and health tech shared the results of a large-scale respiratory care program that reached 16,000 high-risk respiratory patients across 11 health systems. The approach, centered on trusted outreach from providers and real-time clinical data, drove near-immediate results and offered a new model for how pharma can align with health systems to close care gaps without brand-first messaging.
At this year’s Fierce Pharma Week, a panel featuring leaders from pharma, healthcare, and health tech explored a model of pharma-health system collaboration designed for scale, built on shared goals, and grounded in operational simplicity.
The conversation centered on a program that identified and activated 16,000 high-risk respiratory disease patients across 11 health systems. Through targeted outreach in the voice of each patient’s trusted provider, nearly 90% scheduled and completed a visit. Of those, 37% had their treatment optimized. One in five escalated to triple therapy, a 6.5x increase compared to the control group.
Dr. Joshua Briscoe, Chief Medical Officer at Andor Health and a practicing emergency physician, grounded the conversation in clinical realities. “We all want to improve patient outcomes,” he said. “But historically, collaboration has stalled because of a lack of trust. Health systems often feel that pharma puts brands before patients. That has to change if we want these programs to work.”
Dave Guiga, Head of U.S. Commercial Innovation at AstraZeneca, echoed the sentiment and explained the business rationale for engaging in this kind of program. “There’s too much variability in how pharma and health systems operate. And when pharma brings one-size-fits-all solutions, they fall flat. What Essence offered was different. It was designed to scale from the start.”
Essence CEO Nidal Alley explained how the model works. “We identify patients based on real clinical criteria, engage them through trusted health system channels, and activate their providers at the same time. The outreach isn’t branded, it’s driven by clinical need and delivered through the health system’s voice.”
This dual-activation approach, targeting both patient and provider, was critical to the program’s success. “These are symptomatic patients who think what they’re feeling is normal,” Alley noted. “They aren’t looking for care. The fact that the message came from someone they trust made the difference.”
The program also supported clinicians with timely, relevant data at the point of care. “You can’t assume every provider has internalized new treatment guidelines the moment they’re released,” said Briscoe. “This gave them the insight they needed when it mattered: during the visit.”
Guiga highlighted another key difference: the ability to scale. “From day one, we weren’t piloting, we were operationalizing. The infrastructure was already in place, so we could go live across 11 systems quickly. That changes how we think about innovation.”
Essence’s infrastructure, combined with partnerships like Andor Health, enables pharma to launch compliant, scalable programs across multiple health systems with a single agreement. The company uses de-identified, aggregate-level data to power outreach and measure results without touching PHI.
“We’re solving a clinical problem, not selling a program,” said Alley. “That’s why it works and why it’s repeatable.”
The panel closed with a clear message: this model is already being applied in other disease areas, from cardiovascular disease and oncology to diabetes and vaccines.
And as Guiga put it, “When collaboration is designed to scale and built on shared goals it stops being an experiment. It becomes the new standard.”
