Partha Anbil

: Traditional sales tactics are outdated—collaboration with IDNs is now essential.

: Pharma needs to show measurable clinical and economic impact aligned with health system priorities.

: Success depends on tailored, cross-functional teams and co-created solutions.

The US healthcare landscape has dramatically transformed, accelerating trends that began a decade ago. The convergence of value-based care, digital health, and regulatory changes has fundamentally altered how life sciences companies must engage with integrated delivery networks (IDNs) and health systems. The traditional pharmaceutical commercial model, reliant on volume-driven sales, broad promotional campaigns, and key account management, has lost effectiveness in a market now dominated by consolidated provider organizations, standardized formularies, and outcomes-based reimbursement.

To remain relevant and competitive, pharmaceutical companies must move beyond incremental adjustments and embrace a systematic, partnership-driven approach to health system engagement.

This shift requires answering four foundational questions:

What is our differentiated value proposition for integrated health systems?

How do we identify and prioritize the right system partners?

What does successful, measurable collaboration look like?

How should we redesign our engagement model for long-term, mutual benefit?

Companies that act now to build robust, partnership-based engagement models will be best positioned to thrive as the US health economy continues its shift toward integrated, outcomes-driven care.

Opportunity and challenge in today’s market

The rapid consolidation among providers, spanning physicians, hospitals, and health plans has created formidable barriers for traditional pharmaceutical field teams. Access to decision-makers is tightly controlled, and the influence of individual prescribers has waned as care pathways and digital formularies dictate therapeutic choices. The widespread adoption of electronic health records (EHRs), AI-driven clinical decision support, and population health management tools further diminishes the impact of conventional sales and marketing tactics.

Simultaneously, the vertical integration of retail pharmacy, specialty distribution, and pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) has eroded the leverage pharmaceutical companies once held through contracting. Health systems now demand clear, evidence-based demonstrations of clinical and economic value, ideally supported by real-world evidence (RWE) and digital health solutions that drive measurable improvements in patient outcomes.

While many pharmaceutical leaders recognize these shifts, few have developed actionable, system-oriented engagement strategies. Treating IDN engagement as an extension of key account management or focusing solely on cost-offset models fails to address the fundamental changes in health system economics and priorities. A new approach, rooted in partnership, data, and shared outcomes, is now essential.

Redefining the value proposition for integrated health systems

The provider business model has shifted decisively from volume-based to value-based care. Health systems are now evaluated on their ability to deliver better outcomes at lower costs, as measured by quality scores, population health metrics, and risk-based reimbursement contracts.

Pharmaceutical companies must align their value propositions with these priorities, moving beyond efficacy and safety to demonstrate how therapies improve disease-specific and population health outcomes; the impact of interventions on total cost of care (e.g., reducing hospitalizations, emergency visits, or surgical interventions); integration with digital health tools and care pathways to support adherence, remote monitoring, and patient engagement; and the ability to generate and share RWE that supports continuous improvement and regulatory compliance.

Discounting alone is unsustainable. Instead, pharma must be willing to tie reimbursement or contracting terms to real-world performance, sharing risk and reward with health system partners. This means developing value propositions that:

Connect drug utilization to expected clinical effects across all relevant service lines

Offer clear, measurable improvements in outcomes based on tangible interventions

Aligning with metrics that matter to providers (e.g., disease-specific outcomes, Triple Aim, quality scores)

Translate clinical gains into cost offsets or revenue upside for the health system

For example, a cardiovascular drug’s value should be assessed within the entire cardiovascular service line, considering its impact on hospitalizations and long-term health costs. Similarly, high-cost therapies for chronic diseases must demonstrate their ability to reduce downstream expenses, such as emergency care or surgical interventions.

Identifying and prioritizing the right partners

Integrated health systems are highly variable in structure, mission, and digital maturity. Effective partner identification requires a nuanced, data-driven approach that considers degree of integration (such as ownership of health plans, breadth of service lines, HER, and analytics capabilities); strategic priorities (e.g., population health, specialty care, digital transformation); decision-making structures (centralized vs. decentralized, clinical vs. administrative leadership); and willingness and capacity for innovation and collaboration.

For instance, large academic medical centers may offer tightly integrated, service-line-driven decision-making, while distributed community hospital networks may rely more on corporate leadership and local market dynamics. The system’s mission, local provider landscape, and financial alignment with physicians all influence the feasibility and structure of potential collaborations.

Mapping these factors enables pharmaceutical companies to prioritize partnerships with systems most likely to benefit from and co-invest in collaborative programs, rather than simply targeting those with the highest sales volume.

Defining and measuring successful collaboration

Success in health system collaboration is defined by the alignment of long-term objectives and the ability to measure and communicate mutual value. Effective collaborations typically fall into one or more of the following categories:

Direct operational cost improvement (e.g., reducing readmissions, optimizing drug utilization)

Joint research and RWE generation (e.g., pragmatic trials, outcomes studies)

Digital health and care coordination support (e.g., remote monitoring, patient engagement platforms)

Clinical pathway co-development (e.g., AI-driven protocol optimization)

Each partnership should be designed to produce tangible, publishable results that can inform broader system strategy and regulatory compliance. For pharmaceutical companies, benefits include improved access, brand differentiation, and risk mitigation as health systems gain greater influence over drug selection and utilization.

The business case for investment in these partnerships extends beyond immediate sales. Durable collaborations can secure formulary access, foster clinical momentum, and create operational integration that is difficult for competitors to displace. Moreover, investing in these relationships allows companies to navigate ongoing system reforms and evolving market dynamics.

Legacy engagement models—fragmented by channel and focused on sales volume—are increasingly obsolete. The new model requires cross-functional teams with expertise in clinical science, data analytics, digital health, and value-based contracting. It also calls for incentive structures aligned with partnership objectives (e.g., outcomes achieved, program adoption, RWE generated), and adaptive engagement strategies tailored to the structure and maturity of each health system partner.

One also cannot forget about the regular, structured input from health system stakeholders to co-design and refine initiatives.

For example, academic medical centers may require highly scientific, research-oriented teams, while community-based systems may benefit from teams skilled in operational improvement and local relationship-building. Internal management structures should mirror the organization and objectives of the health system partner, whether service-line, research, or population health-focused.

Crucially, pharmaceutical companies must proactively seek input from system partners in shaping engagement models, objectives, and tactics. This collaborative approach transforms the relationship from adversarial to mutually beneficial, positioning industry representatives as resources to achieve shared goals.

Organizational implications and the path forward

The transition to partnership-based engagement is a significant undertaking, requiring new capabilities, organizational structures, and cultural change within pharmaceutical companies. Early adopters will be able to shape the future of healthcare delivery, while those who delay risk being sidelined as health systems consolidate purchasing power and clinical decision-making.

The shift from promotion to partnership is now a defining trend in US healthcare. Pharmaceutical companies that embrace this reality by building system-oriented value propositions, prioritizing the right partners, designing measurable collaborations, and reinventing their engagement models will secure a durable competitive advantage in the evolving health economy. The time for action is now; those who move decisively will shape the next healthcare innovation and delivery era.

The views expressed in the article are those of the authors and not of the organizations they represent.

Partha Anbil is at the intersection of the life sciences industry and data & analytics, including GenAI/ML/NLP. He is a Senior Advisor to NextGen Invent Corporation, an AI, data analytics, and digital transformation company. He has over 25 years of experience in the industry.

Kamini Anbil is an experienced consultant in the life sciences industry. She spent six years with ZS Associates, a top boutique global management consulting and technology firm specializing in the Life Sciences sector.

Articles

In order to succeed in today’s outcomes-driven healthcare landscape, pharmaceutical companies must move from traditional sales models to strategic, measurable partnerships with integrated delivery networks (IDNs).

Bridging the Gap Between Strategy and Practice in IDN Partnerships

Fig. 1. Hub service elements. Credit: Occam

		A hub represents a key set of services to support patient access to specialty drug therapies across the entire patient journey—from initial coverage determination and drug start, through continuation of therapy (Fig. 1). With the growing emphasis on specialty pharmaceuticals, personalized medicine and “high touch” products (requiring, for example, infusion services or complex patient followup), the biopharma industry is putting more effort into setting up optimal hub services. This critical hub role is being organized in a variety of service models such as internal, external, hybrid, or hosted onsite and along a continuum of service options that integrate with distribution and data strategy.

		More and more we see the use of cloud technology becoming the preferred platform for everything from file storage, video content delivery, telephony, and banking to a range of business and enterprise based service solutions. But what about in healthcare, and biopharma in particular? Biopharma companies have been leveraging cloud based business process solutions for quite some time, but one often overlooked opportunity for cloud-based improvements is better connectivity with patients and physicians—especially for platforms used to perform and enhance hub services, as well as the use of predictive analytics for actionable insights.

		No matter which hub model is used, the opportunity to improve patient and physician connectivity, as well as lower costs, has never been greater with secure cloud technology. Early adopters in biopharma, and those service providers helping them, are leading the way to predictive, data-driven patient and physician interactions that are dynamic, Web-based, and mobile-enabled. These efforts have helped to increase market share for specialty products in billion-dollar therapy areas.

		While it is true that many of the physician office interactions that happen today with hub providers still rely heavily on modes of communication like faxes that must continue to be supported more efficiently, it is also true that there are powerful technologies and platforms now available in the hub service market to better integrate into office workflows, advance the tools used to perform the common hub tasks, and remove speed-to-therapy obstacles. These new cloud-based IT tools also augment the gathering, use, and coordination of predictive analytic data along the patient journey (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2. Advantages of cloud-based hub services.

		Hallmarks of secure, cloud-based services include lower costs, faster time to deployment, dynamic web forms, real-time actionable information, simpler administration and better controls, automatic updates, system compatibility, enhanced collaboration, and mobile access under a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. There is no better technology to build and maintain an adaptable ecosystem to connect with patients and physicians, as well as the varied vendors deploying your support and messaging programs.

		For example, these platforms improve front-end activity on any Web-enabled device with real time coverage information for the patient’s pharmacy and medical benefit, electronic consent capture and follow up, and auto-fill smart forms. They also improve back-end hub processes with benefits such as real-time intake integration, auto case distribution, dynamic custom prior-authorization generation, and interconnectivity with ancillary programs such as copay, patient assistance programs (PAPs), and nursing support. Utilize and combine just a few of these examples and the improvements in efficiency and speed-to-fill are significant.

		These advances also power the ability for biopharma to now deploy enterprise-level solutions in areas such as provider segmentation, payer analytics, therapy monitoring and management, care coordination services, and integrated data-sharing that more easily connect custom therapy workflows with multiple layers of third party program support vendors, including at the core hub services level.

		At a strategic level, these enterprise solutions put greater control and visibility back in the hands of biopharma, while still allowing for the agility needed for the varied product specific support needs of their pipeline of specialty therapies—all the while reducing the overall cost burden carried with using the fractured set of stale technology options for connecting with patients and physicians offered by most current hub vendors.

Fig. 3. Growth in e-prescribing. Credit: SureScripts

		The best of these modern platforms don’t just stop at making the most of secure cloud based technology; they also integrate the rapidly growing demands and efficiencies offered through e-prescribing (Fig. 3).

		The challenge has been to go from mere e-referral captures that are commonplace today, to the next frontier of generating clean, accurate, and immediately fillable e-prescriptions that have the Surescripts certification seal of authenticity for a specialty product. A cloud-based, Surescripts-certified platform allows for efficient exchanges of information within the larger healthcare data stream through the use of Web-based application program interfaces (APIs) and the clinical interoperability standards being driven by the federal government. This is an invaluable advantage when dealing with chronically ill patients and those with severe diseases that are serviced by the specialty market.

		When certified e-scripts and traditional fax scripts are all collected, processed, managed, and reported with real-time integration on a secure cloud platform, the benefits are real and substantial. Specialty drugs are delivered more quickly, providing less anxiety and more comfort to patients. Physicians and their staff will know that no script was left behind and that a thoughtful and reportable process has been integrated with their unique workflow and varied set of devices they use today. Moreover, all of this happens with fewer burdens on their limited time and resources.

		Coordination across the continuum of care is critical to drive better patient-centric outcomes. This coordination effort includes attracting patients to a therapy, as well as initiating and retaining them on that therapy. In order to accomplish these coordination goals, several data repositories are used across a number of vendors, campaigns, and touch points along the patient journey.

		We are all too aware of the many issues and challenges relating to the current state of care coordination, including disparate data access, inconsistent data types, and lack of specific customer insights, archaic customer and vendor data interfaces, as well as inadequate and inefficient business processes. Therefore it has become imperative for biopharma to find innovative solutions to these data coordination problems while also driving the adoption of process enabled and cloud-based technology solutions.

		This imperative has led to successful pilot programs by biopharma for deployment of new cloud-based technology for enhanced data mining, newer analytical algorithms to drive better access and usage insights, metrics-driven improvements in the patient and physician experience with hub services, as well as use of advanced analytics for physician targeting and segmentation.

		For example, the use of intelligent, event-based alerts that incorporate provider segmentation and payer analytics can help drive provider behavior when patients try switching to a competitor product, or when there is a change in the reimbursement landscape.

		Improved technology in dashboard and reporting tools are helping both biopharma and their hub providers have a shared and real-time view of patient on-boarding, adherence metrics, customer services, and program performance. This comprehensive view enables enhanced customer service at the time of request, improving both the response time and the quality of the response to patients and physicians. Along with that comes linked data reporting to access, for example, adherence data for review and proactive intervention.

Cloud-based IT technologies are a natural fit for patient-support hubs