Patient Activation in Pharma: A 5-Step Guide to Launch Success

In an era where pharma’s go-to-market models are transforming, patient activation remains a blind spot in many launch strategies. Despite its potential to influence therapy initiation, adherence, and real-world outcomes, patient-facing engagement is often underutilized, especially in markets with strict promotional regulations.

At smartpatient, we help pharma launch leaders turn this challenge into an opportunity. Through our MyTherapy app, you can design and execute data-driven, fully compliant activation campaigns that directly reach the right patient populations with measurable results.

This is your five-step guide to unlocking launch excellence through patient activation.

Step 1: Stop Ignoring Patients  

Even in strictly regulated markets, patients shape the success of new therapies. Yet, many launch strategies focus almost exclusively on prescribers, leaving a critical stakeholder out of the equation.

Today’s patients are informed, digitally engaged, and increasingly involved in treatment discussions, especially when new therapies are being introduced. Reaching patients via trusted, compliant platforms like MyTherapy helps increase awareness, improve understanding, and support conversations with HCPs. This is especially valuable for therapies with limited physician familiarity, where patient confidence can influence prescribing behavior.

Step 2: Define Your Desired Impact

Every new pharmaceutical product faces challenges at launch, some predictable, others less so. That’s why it’s essential to define early on what kind of impact your digital patient support program is designed to make. This clarity serves as a strategic anchor for campaign planning, content development, and KPI selection.

For innovative treatments, one common hurdle is physician hesitancy. Doctors may default to familiar options, even when newer therapies offer significant advantages. In such cases, the objective might be to empower patients to take a more active role in conversations with their healthcare providers, equipping them with the confidence and information needed to ask the right questions and explore suitable options.

In other cases, the desired impact may focus on bridging known treatment gaps, as seen in chronic conditions like asthma or psoriasis, where eligible patients often go untreated. Here, patient education and engagement can play a pivotal role in encouraging uptake.

Depending on the therapy, other priorities might include helping patients understand the benefits and risks of a new treatment or providing onboarding support for connected devices such as smart injectors.

Regardless of the goal, articulating the desired impact clearly from the outset ensures your digital program is focused, measurable, and aligned with both patient needs and brand strategy.

Step 3: Create Engaging, Compliant Content That Moves People

Let’s face it, generic patient websites filled with repurposed safety leaflet content no longer cut it. Today’s patients expect value, clarity, and personalization delivered in a tone that feels human.

These websites do little to engage patients in a meaningful way. At smartpatient, our marketing experts craft educational, non-promotional content that meets compliance standards while driving measurable engagement. We refine tone and visual elements to ensure relevance across therapeutic areas and patient needs. With experience supporting campaigns across diverse geographies, our teams are fluent in regional regulatory requirements and help streamline MLR workflows for faster, smoother go-to-market execution.

Step 4: Power Your Campaigns with Performance Marketing Precision

Outdated marketing metrics like raw clicks and impressions don’t reflect the standards of today’s digital landscape. Within the MyTherapy and Redcare ecosystem, pharma can:

• Target specific anonymized patient cohorts by therapy, condition, and geography
• Run cross-channel campaigns across app and web touch points

• Track meaningful metrics such as engagement levels and next-step behaviors

And with our performance-based model, you only pay for predefined user actions, ensuring every euro spent drives tangible results.  

Step 5: Partner with a Company That Delivers on Steps 1–4

Patient activation isn’t a core competency for most pharma teams, so campaigns are often outsourced. But without clear objectives, engaging content, or modern performance methods, many of these efforts fall flat.

By partnering with smartpatient you can run activation campaigns that are fully compliant, highly targeted, and built for measurable impact.

Especially for new product launches, where patient activation plays a critical role, our approach helps you embed it as a central pillar of launch excellence.