Get to Know Advanced Therapy Management
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Define reactive, proactive, and coactive treatments.
- Explain what advanced therapy is.
- List the advantages of using advanced therapies.
- Describe what you can do with Health Cloud’s Advanced Therapy Management.
Prerequisites
Before you start, consider completing the following recommended content.
Coactive Support
If you completed the Health Cloud Care Programs module, you learned how healthcare has moved from being reactive in the 60s to proactive in the 00s, and finally, coactive in present times. Here’s a brief recap.
In reactive healthcare systems, patients are mostly recipients of care. In such a system, treatment is administered on a one-size-fits-all approach. Which means, when a primary care physician (PCP) prescribes a medicine for a patient, the decision is guided by external factors like the patient’s insurance plan, rather than the effectiveness of the drug for the patient. If the medication doesn’t work, the PCP switches to another medication. This trial-and-error method can drive up medical costs for chronic conditions and lead to poor health outcomes and dissatisfaction.
In coactive healthcare systems, patients are stakeholders in their own health. Instead of a generalized approach, pharma companies use biomarkers to create personalized medicines for the patients. The result of such personalized treatment is precision care with reduced adverse effects, reduced high-risk invasive testing processes, and lower overall costs.
One such coactive treatment is advanced therapy.
It’s in Your Genes
Despite the great strides that modern medical science has made to tackle life-threatening diseases and complicated disorders, treatment can still be long, difficult, and uncertain. Practitioners and clinicians struggle to provide the right treatment at the right time. As for patients, the uncertainty of the treatment process, its effectiveness, and recovery time can be daunting.
Advanced therapy is the next frontier in healthcare that uses genetics to find a solution for long and complex treatments. This emerging practice of medicine is also referred to as personalized medicine, cell and gene therapy, or CAR (chimeric antigen receptor) T-cell therapy. Advanced therapy uses biomarker information for the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of diseases. The therapy also helps in deciding which medicine or treatment is suitable for an individual. Furthermore, advanced therapy helps determine which individuals need outcome monitoring based on their susceptibility to the therapy’s side effects.
Advanced therapy is categorized as in-vivo (medicine administered to a patient) or ex-vivo (medicine manufactured from a living organism). This module focuses solely on ex-vivo personalized medicine, also called regenerative therapy.
The primary focus of ex-vivo personalized medicine is gene and cell-based therapy. In this treatment, medicine is manufactured from the living cells of the patient (autologous) or of a donor (allogenic). When the medicine is introduced into the cells of the patient, the new genetic material knocks out mutated genes that can cause illnesses.
A typical autologous workflow, like a CAR T-cell therapy, involves three steps.
- Apheresis: Collect a biosample from the living cells of the patient or donor. In a CAR T-cell therapy, treatment center coordinators perform apheresis to collect T-cells or lymphocytes from the patient’s blood.
- Manufacturing: Transport the biosample via specialty logistics to a cell lab for gene therapy. In the lab, the cells are isolated, engineered with CAR or TCR (T-cell receptor) gene, and grown.
- Infusion: Reintroduce the manufactured biosample into the patient’s body. In the CAR T-cell therapy, the treatment center coordinator introduces the engineered T-cells into the patient’s blood through infusion.
Why Advanced Therapy?
Advanced therapy is gaining momentum in healthcare, because it:
- Consists of a one-off treatment, as opposed to traditional treatments that entail a lifetime of managed care.
- Makes the physician-patient engagement more patient centric.
- Leads to better health outcomes and improved adherence due to its proactive, preventive approach, as opposed to the traditional reactive approach.
- Provides precision care that reduces adverse drug reactions (ADRs).
- Reduces the reliance on high-risk and invasive testing procedures.
- Lowers overall medical costs as compared to traditional treatments where ADR hospitalizations, trial-and-error dosages, and late-stage diagnosis can drive up costs. Also, gene sequencing costs are low and take less time than most of the existing treatments.
- Helps a more aging population that is prone to genetic diseases.
Meet Advanced Therapy Management
Advanced therapy is an emerging practice that requires new workflows and quick turnaround times—from patient to manufacturer and back to the patient. The development and delivery of personalized medicine is complex, involving a number of steps. Each step involves numerous stakeholders such as pharmaceutical companies, manufacturers, insurance payers, and providers.
Health Cloud’s Advanced Therapy Management simplifies the intricacies of the end-to-end journey of advanced therapies—from order intake to infusion and observation. It provides flexible and intuitive scheduling and optimized supply chain visibility. It empowers pharmaceutical companies to scale across geographies and implement an advanced scheduling logic.
Here’s what you can do with Advanced Therapy Management.
- Book apheresis, manufacturing, and infusion appointments, respecting lead times and available capacity.
- Configure multiple therapies on one platform.
- Streamline the delivery of advanced therapies to improve patients’ accessibility and health outcomes.
So far you’ve learned about advanced therapy and the processes involved. You also learned how advanced therapy benefits patients and pharmaceutical companies. In the next unit, you explore the Multi-Step Scheduling feature and Advanced Therapy Management objects.
