Gene Therapy Company Soothes its Technology Pain

A gene therapy company, that has been in business for a decade and has more than 500 employees, needed a better way to track patients throughout their patient journey from enrollment to infusion. The existing applications in the market does not easily cater for personalized therapy, but adopting Salesforce Health Cloud provided the company with much needed flexibility.

Gene therapy is an emerging area, one that offers patients unique treatments, meaning they work with different providers and insurance carriers.

The Company that invents the therapy often relies on Health Care Providers to recommend the therapy. Once finer details such as financing are vetted, the process of enrolling patient into therapy and all the way to infusion often involves several steps, such as scheduling the patient for apheresis process for cell component needed for extraction, sending the extracted collection to Manufacturer, following up with manufacturer on the drug product preparation steps and keeping a track of collection through Chain of Identity and tracking custody of collection all the way to manufacturer and when final drug product is ready, tracking the drug product shipment from manufacturer to hospital and infusion to patient. The data will be housed in multiple applications owned by different stake holders in the eco systems, including a few third-party applications that those owners may or may not agree to integrate.

The health care company required a new platform that is capable of delivering user friendly and easy to access to patient related data all the time during the treatment no matter where they are during the treatment journey from enrollment to Infusion. The desired platform required to provide solutions for the following requirements:

• Ability to serve same therapy under different brand names in different countries
• Enable therapy workflow specific to country if regulation of that country mandates
• Provide ability for hospitals to enroll patient and track the patient journey
• Generate Unique Id and dedupe the patient information
• Generate a Chain of Identity for the collection
• Develop a Chain of Custody module capture data when critical events happen
• Support multi-bag/multi day collection along with multiple collections
• Schedule and change appointments based on manufacturer availability
• Generate collection and drug product labels OR provide ability to scan information from community into hospital / manufacturer application to leverage their existing label generation applications
• Integrate with courier company to track the collection shipment
• Integrate with manufacturer systems to monitor the drug manufacturing steps / process

Client after a thorough research in the market and the process of short listing selected TekSmart, a Salesforce partner that works with companies on digital transformation projects, as their implementation partner. Teksmart along with Salesforce Architect evaluated requirements, identified gaps and proposed a suite comprised of a troika of Salesforce solutions:

• Health Cloud features a seamless, digital record management service spanning enrollment, scheduling appointments, and completing treatments.
• Field Service Cloud creates customized scheduling based on business rules that streamline booking appointments
• Experience Cloud provides hospital staff and manufacturer personnel with the ability to access patient data to check their status at each step in their treatment journey.

The system provides a single point of access to health care professionals working at multiple affiliated hospitals or in one health care system. Internal users as well as hospital staff gain a 360 view of all patient treatment information with a few clicks because it is stored in one place. The new solution provides many benefits:

• 1) Onboards hospitals, hospital staff, and manufacturers.
• 2) Sets up therapy specific information, including all the tasks involved for a therapy.
• 3) Empowers hospital staff to enroll patients.
• 4) Provides hospital coordinator to Schedule / Re-schedule appointments based on manufacturer’s availability.
• 5) Captures all the steps and information needed for collection bags from extraction and shipping to infusion.
• 6) Generates labels, including barcodes for each individual bag.
• 7) Creates reports that capture Chain of Identity and Chain of Custody events.

The implementation of the complicated system is a huge success for the customer. The new system streamlined business processes. Consequently, employees now spend more time in one application vs multiple applications.

Another plus is TekSmart delivered the project on time and on-budget. The health care company is now engaged with TekSmart additional enhancements to its systems. The gene therapy company and TekSmart are focused on implementing new products that are expected to be approved in 2022.