The pharmaceutical industry invests billions of dollars¹ in digital tools and technologies. But for all the online surveys, feedback loops, and digital portals introduced to improve the patient experience, many organizations still struggle to see what happens after a patient receives their prescription.

Once a script is written, visibility fades—and with it, the opportunity to hear what patients are thinking and feeling during key moments of care. Without these insights, pharma companies can’t identify and address the root causes that diminish patient experience.

What’s missing from many care strategies today is the actual voice of the patient. Every call to a support hub, every messaging chat with a pharmacy, and every email triggered by a stalled benefits approval holds valuable information. These unstructured interactions offer a direct line into real-world patient experiences, signaling where systems break down and how to fix them.

Every day, patients are telling you what they need. Do you have the systems in place to listen, respond, and deliver at scale?

Why pharma struggles to understand real patient journeys

Many pharma companies are working hard to become more patient-centric, but legacy practices have created a wide gap to close.

A primary issue is that, for years, companies have outsourced the responsibility of patient engagement, whether through third-party call centers, digital portals, or other provider channels. These options have entrenched the divide between pharma decision-making and the types of patient experiences that should serve as critical inputs. Patient feedback is often delayed, filtered, or completely lost.

Even post-interaction surveys, one of the most common feedback mechanisms in place for pharma, rarely capture the full picture. According to McKinsey, while more than 90% of CX leaders use survey-based metrics,² 85% are unsatisfied with them, and only 6% consider surveys sufficient for confident decision-making.

To address these issues, more pharma organizations are launching their own support teams and integrated interaction platforms.

These efforts are starting to yield clearer views of the patient journey, as companies directly capture and analyze patient conversational data. When analyzed in aggregate, these conversations reveal where patients get stuck, confused, or even disengage. This intel can surface patterns like recurring prior-authorization confusion, misunderstandings about coverage, or bottlenecks caused by unclear instructions—all key opportunities to improve patient experience at scale.

Yet many organizations still struggle to aggregate and operationalize this information, even though it exists in abundance. Patient interactions produce enormous amounts of unstructured data, such as audio calls, free-text notes, chat logs, and emails. But most enterprise analytics systems are built around structured datasets: CRM fields, claims files, sales records.

As a result, pharma systems struggle when confronted with a 20-minute voicemail filled with emotion and context, a messy string of chat messages, or handwritten agent notes. That’s a major problem considering up to 80% of healthcare data is unstructured.³

Some of the highest-value insights often hide in the least polished moments—the off-script questions, the frustrated pauses, the “one last thing…” a patient mentions before hanging up. These types of signals rarely show up in structured fields or clean monthly reports, making them easy to go unnoticed by most leaders.

Patient conversation data is rich with value. But that value goes unrealized without action.

3 ways to get more value out of patient conversation data

New digital capabilities in areas like AI-driven transcription, natural-language understanding, and automated signal detection can process millions of real-world conversations securely, accurately, and at scale. But to use these tools effectively, organizations require a modern approach to how they design interactions, apply technology, and mobilize teams.

Here are three key strategies to turn patient conversations into patient improvements:

1. Design every interaction as part of a connected ecosystem

Avoid the common pitfall of solving for each digital channel in isolation. A chatbot is certainly useful, but if it can’t escalate issues seamlessly or track interactions across platforms, it risks frustrating patients.

Imagine a patient starting in a pharmacy chat, bouncing to a benefits portal, and ending up on a phone call with a support hub. Each transition adds friction, forces patients to repeat their story, and introduces the potential for error.

Disconnected tools can’t account for these handoffs. Plug-and-play solutions are not built to recognize or reconcile the full sequence of patient movements and experiences across channels. The bigger your technology stack, the harder the problem gets.

Instead, build a cohesive engagement strategy across all modalities: call centers, pharmacy counters, chat interfaces, email, and website content. Every touchpoint throughout the ecosystem should contribute to a unified view, supported by integrated data capture, smart escalation paths, and cross-channel measurement.

2. Leverage specialized tools that reflect pharma's realities

Generic analytics platforms fall short when applied to the specific needs of pharma. Domain-specific tools are better equipped to understand therapeutic nuances, regulatory constraints, and patient-provider communication patterns.

For instance, conversations in oncology often involve off-label questions that require strict routing and documentation, while rare-disease support lines may surface highly specific access challenges that generic systems fail to classify correctly.

Purpose-built systems can provide tailored dashboards, proven architectures, and ready-to-deploy use cases. These capabilities allow your team to extract insights from conversational data quickly and start acting on them within days, rather than spending months customizing off-the-shelf models or building tools from scratch.

Specialized tools also amplify the expertise that already exists within your teams. When agents and leaders have access to real-world interaction patterns, they can respond more effectively and proactively. That might mean refining call guides, tailoring training sessions, or generating automated summaries that allow staff to focus more on patient care.

The specificity of your tools should match the domain expertise of your teams so neither is held back.

3. Don’t let expectations cap innovation

One of the most important shifts you can make is cultural. Too often, organizations unconsciously allow their expectations to become their ceiling: “There’s only so much we can fix,” or “We can’t really affect the patient experience.” That mindset only ever guarantees limited impact.

To break that pattern, you need to practice curiosity—with the willingness to question assumptions about what’s possible. Patient data likely tells a different story. When you track and analyze real patient pain points, you uncover new opportunities to reduce drop-off, increase adherence, and build trust.

Small changes—like updating agent scripts, refining eligibility language, or reworking web content based on recurring questions—can produce outsized improvements, free from any perceived limitations.

These directives not only elevate the patient journey, but they also enhance operational efficiency overall. For example, you might discover that a benefits program needs updating because patients consistently misunderstand eligibility. Or you may realize your website requires a redesign after seeing the same question asked dozens of times. Once surfaced, these patterns empower you to continually improve the patient experience at scale through real voices and real data.

Bringing in technology to help with data management and analysis ensures these ideas see the light of day.

Hear patients clearly to act with purpose

Patients are already telling you what they need. They’re flagging confusion, asking repeat questions, and sharing frustrations with existing processes.

With the right blend of advanced analytics, domain-specific technology, and a commitment to connected care, you can transform those everyday interactions into meaningful insight. And then you can act on them.

For patients, that means clearer pathways, faster answers, and fewer moments of uncertainty. And for your organization, it means stronger adherence, higher satisfaction, and a more resilient competitive position in a rapidly evolving market.

Sources

1. The Pharmaceutical Industry's AI Journey And Digital Transformation. Forbes. June 26, 2025. https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbestechcouncil/2025/06/26/the-pharmaceutical-industrys-ai-journey-and-digital-transformation/?utm_source=chatgpt.com
2. Prediction: The future of CX. McKinsey. February 24, 2021. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/prediction-the-future-of-cx
3. Challenges and best practices for digital unstructured data enrichment in health research: A systematic narrative review. National Library of Medicine. October 11, 2023. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10566734/