Novartis Builds Patient Support System on AWS for Enhanced Medication Assistance

Headquartered in Switzerland, Novartis is one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. In addition to developing and manufacturing pharmaceuticals, Novartis helps patients access their prescribed medications through services such as financial support, initial free dispensing of a drug, and copayment assistance.

In its previous outsourced model for patient solutions, every initiative was a stand-alone program. Third parties ran the programs with little overlap or coordination, and without an overarching enterprise strategy. “We wanted to take more accountability of the patient experience instead of outsourcing it to someone who might treat it as a commodity,” says Scott Bradley, vice president of platform strategy at Novartis. “We also wanted a better view into metrics so that we could see at a patient level how our initiatives were performing.”

In 2021, Novartis put together a 3-year plan to bring patient services in-house to consolidate and take ownership of the patient experience. The new patient services platform puts Novartis at the center of a hub-and-spoke model where it has control over data and management capabilities. Novartis’s patient services also has a set of self-service features that simplify implementing third-party capabilities, offering the best of both worlds.

The company used a wide range of AWS solutions to power the data storage, analytics, design infrastructure, and patient-facing services. To structure the solution, Novartis worked alongside AWS Professional Services, a global team of experts that can assist businesses in reaching their desired outcomes when using AWS. “We decided to put the patient-facing web portal on AWS because we wanted it to be pixel perfect,” says Bradley. “Everything AWS does is about understanding and serving the needs of the customer, and that fit well with the vision we wanted to achieve with this solution.”

On the patient-facing frontend, the self-service solution provides a seamless, well-designed experience to check patient eligibility and status in near real time. Using Amazon EventBridge—a service to build event-driven applications at scale—Novartis connected its platform with backend customer relationship management applications such as Salesforce to develop custom solutions and deliver the ideal patient journey. For one brand, patients previously took 5.5 minutes to go through the workflow necessary to apply for a secondary benefits card. On AWS, it takes 3.5 minutes, more than 36 percent faster. The percentage of patients who complete the process is 15 percent higher, and Novartis has increased the patient conversion rate by 10–15 percent, meaning more patients are filling their initial prescriptions.

On the backend, Novartis optimized the architecture to give the solution scalability, using services such as AWS Lambda, a serverless, event-driven compute service, to build the business logic for its APIs. For one program, this architecture is serving over 124,000 enrolled patients without any friction. Because of the configurability and the microservices design of the solution, users can customize programs for each drug, and the solution can strategically integrate vendors when the need for a certain capability arises. To build its backend APIs, Novartis used AWS AppSync, which creates serverless GraphQL and Pub/Sub APIs that simplify application development through a single endpoint to securely query, update, or publish data.

The solution helps the company access more granular data than it could with other third-party solutions. By analyzing this data, Novartis not only helps  more patients fill their prescriptions, but also makes it easy to stay on them longer. “We built an entire stack of metrics from high-level business performance outcomes down to the daily number of patients supported, speed, and customer experience,” says Bradley. “Everything is available using a hierarchy of data and analytics services on AWS.” Novartis uses AWS Step Function, a visual workflow service for distributed applications, to orchestrate multiple AWS services into serverless workflows for adherence enrollment, copay enrollment, and free-trial-offer enrollment. It stores this enrollment data using Amazon DynamoDB, a serverless, NoSQL, fully managed database with single-digit millisecond performance at any scale.

By 2023, Novartis successfully launched three drug brands on this multibrand patient services platform, demonstrating notable improvements in efficiency. The first brand took 11 months to launch, the second took 9, and the third was completed in 3 months. In addition, this platform is helping Novartis respond faster to marketplace or regulatory shifts.

Novartis intends to launch five new programs in 2024, with the goal of enhancing the overall patient experience. The organization is using AWS as a foundation to expand its current programs in size and functionality – implementing a roadmap of patient-facing improvements. 

Novartis’s use of AWS fuels innovation at an organizational level, driving projects with the potential to shape the industry. “Using AWS has truly brought us closer to the core of what we do—to put patients first,” says Bradley. “By getting the friction out of the patient journey, AWS is helping the industry get closer to where it needs to go.”