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I was reminded recently -- during an interview with an experienced nurse coordinator in a neurology practice -- of the delicate balance at the heart of every Patient Support Program (PSP). She sat across from me, visibly tired but unfailingly committed, describing her struggle to choose the right “feel and tone” for a new PSP campaign we were assessing. The value of her 20 years of clinical experience came to bear.
“On one hand,” she said, “I need something that helps me get through my day -- the benefits verification, the triage, the follow-up questions about side effects. Ideally, it needs to give me time back. But my patients… they’re terrified. Some just got the diagnosis that changed their entire lives. They don’t need paperwork. They need reassurance.”
Her dilemma captures the fundamental tension in PSP design: the program must be operationally indispensable for office staff and emotionally resonant for patients and their care partners. When manufacturers get this balance right, PSPs become powerful engines of access, adherence, persistency, and patient confidence. When they miss, even the best-intended support can sit unused.
After decades working with manufacturers to design, refine, evaluate and re-engineer PSPs, my team and I have found that the difference between success and stagnation almost always comes down to one discipline: rigorous, ongoing marketing research. Not research as a checkbox or retrospective audit, but as a systematic curriculum of insight-building initiatives that shape the program from blueprint to launch to in-market optimization.
Below, I outline an approach to building and continually improving PSPs that meet the needs of both audiences who matter most: patients and the office teams who support them.
Manufacturers typically approach PSP development with clear strategic intent and a strong sense of the value they want to deliver. Yet the day-to-day experiences of patients and office staff rarely follow a neat or predictable path. Their needs evolve in ways that are emotional, nonlinear, and shaped by a myriad of micro-moments -- moments that can build confidence in a program or quietly erode it. Effective PSP design depends on understanding this lived complexity, not because the strategy is lacking, but because the realities on the ground are far more nuanced than any initial blueprint can anticipate.
The office staff -- nurses, office managers, reimbursement specialists, sometimes referred to as biologics coordinators, medical assistants -- are the real operational backbone of PSP utilization. On a day-to-day basis, they interact with hubs, operate portals, and troubleshoot benefits eligibility on behalf of patients. They are often the ones ultimately responsible for patient education, but more importantly, ensuring that patients and care partners feel confident in treatment decisions. If the portal is clunky, non-intuitive or the cadence of outreach feels intrusive, utilization plummets. If support personnel are inconsistent or communication channels break down, staff revert to old work-arounds. If patient education materials are poorly designed or don't include patients who look (or are) real, those pieces might find their way not to patients hands, but rather to a landfill.
Patients and care partners meanwhile face a completely different reality. Their questions are much more existential and immediate:
A successful PSP acknowledges both sets of needs -- one task-oriented, one deeply emotional -- and designs offerings, messaging, and experiences grounded in insight rather than assumption.
This is where thoughtful, well-structured marketing research becomes indispensable.
Based upon our experience at ThinkGen, designing an effective PSP is never a single study. It is an intentional, iterative sequence of learning moments, each informing a critical decision along the development path. Think of it as a curriculum with four major phases.
This is the moment to listen before building.
For office staff, qualitative research should map their actual workflow:
When you spend time inside the clinic -- observing workflows and speaking with staff on-site -- you witness challenges that rarely emerge from other modes of data collection. Watching people actually work... works. It’s in these moments that misalignments between hub processes and real office needs often become unmistakable.
For patients and care partners, the early exploratory research should illuminate the emotional arc from diagnosis to treatment initiation. Their fears, needs for reassurance, critical moments of need, and gaps in understanding help define the tone and structure of support.
What emerges from this phase is a clearer view of what the program fundamentally needs to deliver -- shaped by the people who will rely on it, not by internal expectations.
Once the initial blueprint is drafted, research becomes a filtering mechanism. Which offerings matter most? Which are nice-to-haves? How should the program be positioned?
For office staff, message testing reveals what drives trust:
Sometimes the difference between “This program helps streamline paperwork” and “This program helps you get patients on therapy faster” is the difference between an office treatment team's leaning in or leaning away.
For patients, tone is everything. The neurology nurse coordinator from my interview understood this well. Patients do not want to feel marketed to; they want to feel supported. While they may recognize that a manufacturer is trying to sell a product, they want to feel as though the manufacturer authentically cares about them as a human being. Testing various campaign styles, gradations of empathy, and the clarity of educational materials ensures that the communication meets patients where they are emotionally and with authenticity.
This phase often reveals tension between what patients need emotionally and what offices need operationally -- insight that prevents programs from leaning too heavily in one or the other direction.
You can have the best PSP in the world, but if your stakeholders don’t fully understand what it offers, or why it matters, utilization will falter.
At ThinkGen, we’ve seen dramatic improvements when manufacturers test not only messages, but channels, cadence, and the “packaging” of the program itself:
This is also where office staff often express frustration with mismatched expectations between what the hub promises and what it delivers. Identifying these disconnects early prevents in-market disappointment.
Once a PSP is in market, research initiatives should move toward refining and strengthening what’s already in place. The professionals using the program every day are the earliest signals of where adjustments can make a meaningful difference. Across programs, we regularly encounter the same critical decision points:
Satisfaction trackers, workflow audits, and targeted qualitative follow-ups can reveal these issues early -- and help PSP teams respond decisively.
The best PSPs are not those that simply offer the most services. They are those that create a coherent experience for two audiences with very different sets of pressures.
Patients and care partners need emotional grounding, clarity, and confidence that they are not alone. Office teams need tools that integrate seamlessly into their workload, reduce administrative friction, and deliver reliable, responsive support.
A research-driven approach to PSP design and communication optimization ensures that programs are not designed for one audience at the expense of the other. Primary MR ultimately helps manufacturers avoid the common pitfall of over-engineering PSPs internally, only to discover disconnects after launch.
Based on extensive collaboration with PSP teams, I see a few opportunities across the industry:
Manufacturers who adopt this mindset tend to create PSPs that stand up quickly, scale effectively, and sustain long-term engagement.
As I left the interview with the neurology nurse coordinator, I was struck by the simplicity of her question: “How do we make a program that supports us, but still feels like a lifeline for patients?”
The answer is not guesswork. It’s listening: structured, rigorous, and ongoing. Marketing research, when done well, is the bridge between intention and impact. It ensures that PSPs don’t just exist, but genuinely help the people who depend on them.
