Winning in Pharma: the power of early strategic planning with patients
February 17, 2026 | Early strategic planning, Launch strategy, Patient partnership, Pharma Strategy, patient engagement
By Zoë van Helmond
The pharmaceutical industry faces an increasingly complex and competitive landscape when bringing products to market, so what will give you the edge? The answer lies in efficient and impactful early strategic planning with patients. This is vital for mitigating costly industry challenges and setting your product up for success!
If you’re a Commercial or Medical Director or Patient Engagement Lead struggling with early strategic planning in this complex and uncertain world, this piece is for you.
The following is a reflection of a recent conference fireside chat that I had with an award-winning patient lead (Daniel Newman) and an industry representative (Emma Lane, UCB New Product Planning).
The industry environment is getting tougher: why and with what impact?
Asset development faces increasingly intensified pipeline competition, mounting launch pressures and steady erosion of product value.¹ Data show that bringing a product to market can take 10–15 years and cost upwards of $2 billion, with a staggering 90% attrition rate in clinical development.² Notably, 10% of failures are due directly to strategic missteps, with many more indirectly related.²
This underscores a critical truth: early-stage strategic planning is not just helpful, it’s a survival tool. It helps to mitigate risk, accelerate progress and carve out a competitive advantage.
However, planning is not easy. Managing portfolio complexity has been identified as the top factor driving cost of goods, after scale,³ and getting it wrong is costly! Delays to launch due to inefficient planning are estimated to cost $0.5–8 million per day in sales that never materialize.4 Running costs for clinical trials average at around $37,000 per day, and roughly 80% of trials miss enrolment timelines, often causing Phase II–IV studies to take up to twice as long as planned.4 There are also other, hidden costs such as the adverse impact on team morale and culture.
For patients, the environment is even harsher: what does this mean for them?
Patients are also invested in efficient and successful asset development, but they often face being shut out of that process.
‘Patient centricity’ is a popular buzzword in the pharmaceutical industry, yet we see time and again Pharma strategies that are built around patients, not with them. Historically, patient engagement has been tokenistic; this is a real strategic failure because true patient partnership is not just the right thing to do, it’s commercially smart. It can be the difference between products that falter and those that succeed.
We’ve seen too many times patient engagement being reactive and a box-ticking exercise. What’s more, if you’re a patient from a minority or underserved community, chances are you’ve been ignored, which is a real failure. We hear eye-opening insights from patients that you simply won’t find through desk research or clinical studies. You need to actually engage and listen to patients about their day-to-day experiences and integrate these insights into your strategic planning.
Poor strategic choices are made because lived experience is missing from your strategic decisions. The result? Patient-critical issues surface too late to fix, and your progress collapses.
For Pharma, getting your strategic planning wrong results in delays, increased costs and missed opportunities. For patients, it’s more serious. Patients miss out on treatments and lose trust in the system that is supposed to be there to support them.
Early-stage, patient-partnered strategy: the survival tool
What is early stage?
This can mean different things to different organizations. We consider anything up to Phase II as early, with much of our work geared towards addressing problems outlined above at the discovery-to-preclinical stages. Clients come to us when they find that they are struggling with the high degree of complexity and uncertainty in the work, juggling cross-functional decision making with pressure to hit planning milestones. We provide a tried and tested framework that enables our clients to focus on what’s material, acknowledge the risk but have clarity on strategic direction to progress, and, critically, gain organizational alignment. Our core approach focuses on embracing the early-stage ‘speed versus risk’ dichotomy and integrating our structured planning frameworks into our client teams’ planning processes to enable fast progress while embracing risk. Our frameworks span insight generation, strategic decision making, plan formation and organizational alignment. They are designed to allow aligned-forward movement, acknowledging risks and gaps while not being held back by them. Our approach enables faster, smoother progression to market and patients.
What does patient partnership look like?
First, engagement with patients has to be meaningful. It’s about building genuine relationships, giving patients a space to be themselves and be comfortable sharing their experiences, and for industry to listen and value patient insights as much as those from clinicians or key opinion leaders. Patients bring questions and perspectives that the industry and professionals may never have considered, and their involvement can reveal unmet needs that clinical data alone cannot.
“It’s not complicated – it’s simply people trying to develop a relationship.”
Second, be transparent. Patients deal with bad news on a regular basis, so don’t allow a fear of potentially having to deliver a negative message (eg when an asset has failed) put you off from partnering with patients.
“Things don’t go to plan, and patients can deal with that.”
Third, industry must move beyond the outdated assumption of a ‘default (white, male, 70 kg) patient’. True patient partnership means intentionally seeking diverse voices, including those from minorities and underserved communities. This requires creativity, trust building and collaboration with a wide range of patient organizations. Only then can we ensure that engagement is truly inclusive and that products serve the full spectrum of patient needs.
Fourth, it is important to understand the difference between patient engagement and other types of external engagement and how they are complementary (but also potentially quite different). It’s the complementary nature of these experiences that is so valuable and so critical. Insights from a 10-minute consultation with their HCP will not tell you how patients live their lives and how they live with disease.
“We can hear very different messaging from patients versus what we hear from HCPs and KOLs because we know patients will change their behaviour in front of their HCPs. HCPs tell you, ‘This is how patients feel, and this is how they behave’, and patients say, ‘Yeah, that’s what I tell my doctor because that’s what I want my doctor to see’.”
And once you have done all of that: Fifth, incorporate all this valuable patient insight into your strategic planning. (Not sure how? Our structured planning frameworks are specifically designed to do just that!)
We are encouraged to see more of the industry wanting to engage with patients at earlier stages of asset development, but there remains a mindset that all engagement is the same regardless of disease area or stage of development, and this needs to stop. How industry engages with patients has to vary: it’s not one size fits all for every opportunity, and it doesn’t mean the same thing at every development stage. When we work with patients, we think very carefully about who we work with, how we work with them and what level of transparency we can give. We can engage with patient organizations, individual patients, and different groups of patients, and we consider when we need to engage with them and what we want to achieve with that engagement.
Getting a product to market is not easy, so let’s not make it harder by failing to meaningfully engage throughout development with the very people who depend on these treatments to work for them. It makes sense for patients, it makes sense for your assets, and it makes sense for your business. To reiterate a critical truth highlighted earlier, early-stage strategic planning is not just helpful, it’s a survival tool. It helps to mitigate risk, accelerate progress and carve out a competitive advantage. Embracing this mindset will drive faster and smoother progression to market and patients.
Frequently asked questions about early-stage planning with patients
What does ‘early stage’ mean in early-stage planning?
This can mean different things to different organizations. We consider anything up to Phase II as early.
What value can be gained from early strategic planning?
At a time when asset development faces increasingly intensified pipeline competition and mounting launch pressures, and with the cost and time implications of bringing a product to market, early strategic planning helps to mitigate risk, accelerate progress and carve out a competitive advantage.
What does early strategic planning entail?
At Amiculum, our core approach focuses on embracing the early-stage ‘speed versus risk’ dichotomy and integrating our structured planning frameworks into our client teams’ planning processes to enable fast progress while embracing risk. Our frameworks span insight generation, strategic decision making, plan formation and organizational alignment.
Why should patient partnership be integral in early strategic planning?
Not engaging with patients early and missing their insights in your strategic planning can mean that key patient-critical issues surface too late, resulting in delays and, more importantly, patients missing out on treatments and losing trust in the system that is supposed to be there to support them.
What steps can I take to achieve successful patient partnership?
Engagement with patients must be meaningful, with the aim of building genuine relationships, being transparent about product progress, seeking diverse voices from minorities and underserved communities, and incorporating lived patient insights into your strategic plan.
For more insights, visit our website
References:
- www.mckinsey.com/industries/life-sciences/our-insights/charting-the-path-to-patients
- Sun D et al. Acta Pharmaceutica Sinica B 2022;12:3049–62
- www.bcg.com/publications/2023/biopharma-manufacturing-cost-reduction
- Johnson O. Clin Investig (Lond) 2015;5:491–9
This content was provided by Amiculum
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