Pharmaceutical company streamlines and scales patient support program with Conga Composer

Challenge

Prior to implementing Conga, the organization had no document generation tools. The company used old school Word documents or macros to create the documents that explained each patient’s therapy coverage. The process was completely manual.

The patient support team needs to generate multiple documents for each program participant. Because these documents can be long and complex, the team found the manual process to be time consuming and error prone. Mailing the documents added even more work, as there was no way to send out patient communications automatically.

The company updates its patient support database at the end of each year. Verifying the accuracy of patient information helps ensure program participants will continue to receive benefits the following year with no interruptions in treatment. But with a large customer base, this process was very labor intensive, prompting the company to hire about 300 temporary workers annually to handle patient follow-up, update the database, and send out new documents.

Solution

The company had historically stored patient support data in its Salesforce™ customer relationship management (CRM) system. Conga Composer’s seamless integration with Salesforce and robust document automation capabilities helped the company dramatically streamline its patient document operations.

In terms of implementation, the company decided to take a mixed approach by engaging with both their platform partner and Conga’s services team. The company’s partner manages their patient support platform, so the same team performed the initial Conga installation. However, they also engaged Conga’s professional services team for several weeks to help leverage their expertise in implementing the more complex product functions and helping to build out the dynamic documents required to meet their needs.

Today, the patient support team uses Conga Composer daily to generate detailed documents based on pre-defined templates. These documents are dynamic and custom-tailored to each patient, based on the individual’s therapy, benefit terms, and other information.

While the detailed document is typically 25 to 30 pages long, it is just one of several documents that the company needs to create for each patient. With Conga, the team can generate the complete set with a single click.

Meanwhile, with Conga Trigger, the team can now effortlessly generate a corresponding summary report for each detailed document. The summary serves as an explanation of benefits for the patient, whereas the detailed document generated by Conga Composer contains additional information for internal use. Conga Trigger automatically generates the summary on the back end, so there’s no need to press any buttons.

The company also uses Conga Batch to perform bulk updates and send correspondence to customers. Bulk updates have streamlined the team’s year-end activities, drastically reducing the time and labor required to verify patient information. And now that they have automated their correspondence, documents get out the door faster. With Conga Batch, the team can send 500+ documents at once. This feature has virtually eliminated the manual task of sending documents individually, resulting in less work for the team and significant time savings.

Conga has exceeded the company’s expectations. The company designed a solution they would have never thought possible. During the pandemic, their business partners wanted to send customers a document that had text superimposed over an image. So, in addition to generating the complicated image, they are still able to merge four or five documents and send them out to customers all in one package.

It took the patient support team about two years to become adept at using Conga. By the third year, the organization began to reap huge productivity benefits and cost savings. Now that Conga has helped simplify the team’s end-of-year activities, the organization hires 70% fewer temporary workers to assist with the process of verifying patient information.

But users reap the benefits every day. As a result of implementing Conga, the user experience has improved significantly for the company’s agents. Employees really love being able to generate documents automatically, pulling accurate information directly from Salesforce. They don’t have to do anything except ensure the data they input into Salesforce is accurate.

Business Outcomes

Reduced seasonal hiring of temporary staff by 70%
Streamlined and scaled the document generation process
Enabled one-click generation for detailed patient coverage documents
Gained the ability to generate related summary documents automatically
on the back end with Conga Trigger, with no user intervention