Pharma Is Split on Patient Support Tech

When Redi surveyed more than 100 patient support leaders, two findings landed almost side by side. 52% said legacy solutions are too slow to innovate to meet what patients now need and expect. And nearly as many, 50%, said emerging vendors are the ones pushing the industry forward.

That is not a small disagreement at the margins. It is a split down the middle of patient support technology, and it is showing up just as brand and patient services teams lock in their 2027 plans.

Whichever side of that split your organization is on, the more useful question is what the programs that are keeping pace have in common. Here is what we are seeing.

What the split is really telling us

Read the two numbers together and a clear picture emerges: pharma is actively looking beyond legacy partners for better technology to improve the patient experience. Leaders are saying, in effect, that the industry is not moving as fast as it should.

But the answer is not as simple as “swap the old vendor for a new one.” As Redi Co-Founder and CEO Luke put it in our Split Industry video series, doing something new does not automatically mean it is the right thing. Speed only matters if it produces a better experience for patients and better results for the brand.

That is why the teams pulling ahead are not defined by whether their partner is legacy or emerging. They are defined by where they focus.

Three things the leaders getting it right focus on

Every product is different, and so is every program built around it. That makes scaling innovation in patient support genuinely hard. The programs that manage it tend to invest in the same three areas.

1. A patient experience built on engagement and personalization. Patients have come to expect the convenience they get from consumer apps and services. Support programs that feel generic or cumbersome lose people, and programs that adapt to the individual keep them on therapy.
2. Access and operational efficiency. Getting patients onto therapy quickly, without avoidable friction, is where many programs still lose ground. If current and emerging solutions stop innovating here, the gap between patient support and the consumer experience people expect will only widen.
3. Data visibility, measurement, and provable outcomes. Reporting has to be concrete. Brand teams need real results they can act on, not activity metrics that look good in a deck but cannot inform a decision.

Innovation means flexibility, not just another app

No two patients are the same, and no two manufacturers have the same regulatory and compliance needs. Some patients want a mobile app. Others prefer desktop, web, SMS, or email. Programs that offer that range, what we call greater optionality, see greater adoption.

That is a deliberate choice at Redi: we are not just an app. In patient support, flexibility may be the most important part of innovating at all, because technology only works if patients actually use it.

Moving faster inside one of the most regulated industries

Here is the bottom line: legacy or emerging, every patient support partner needs to move faster with technology. In pharma, that is easier said than done.

Every product has its own needs tied to the condition it treats. Every manufacturer has its own regulatory and compliance perspective. And no single patient population behaves the same way. Innovation that ignores those realities stalls in review or fails in the field.

The partners worth betting on are the ones who build that complexity into how they work, so speed and compliance stop feeling like a tradeoff. As you plan for 2027, that is the standard to hold every patient support partner to, whichever side of the split they fall on.

See the full findings

The split is one of four findings from Redi’s research with more than 100 patient support leaders. Watch Luke walk through each one in our short video series, and download the full report to see where your program stands.