Unlocking Treatment Pathways: Our Approach to Brand Planning

TCC Health’s new, pathway-centric approach to brand planning helps pharmaceutical companies overcome barriers to treatment utilisation so therapies achieve maximum impact.

Enabling access to treatments is about more than regulatory approval and reimbursement – it’s about ensuring patients can actually receive and fully benefit from the treatment. While engagement strategies are necessary, they are not sufficient to unlock treatment pathways. True progress requires addressing underlying barriers within pathways. This is where a pathway-centric approach becomes essential, offering a structured method to ensure that new therapies integrate effectively into healthcare systems.

What is a Pathway-Centric Approach?

Pathway barriers range from individual to systemic: a pathway-centric approach appraises and addresses these at the moments that matter most for patient access. It enables pragmatic programmes of work that address  pathway challenges in three key areas:

• Perceptions & Behaviours – Clinician and patient decision-making is shaped by     habits, biases and norms that can delay timely access to appropriate     therapies
• Tools & Interactions – The way healthcare professionals access     information, make multi-disciplinary decisions and monitor patients     influences whether a treatment is seamlessly integrated or left     underutilised.
• System Readiness – Infrastructure, institutional processes and the     perspective of professional/patient organisations can either enable or     restrict access to innovative treatments.

‍

To build an effective strategy, pharmaceutical teams must consider not only what the barriers are, but also where they occur along the treatment journey. At TCC Health, we structure this analysis across three critical stages:

• Symptom to Referral – the initial steps in a patient’s journey (which may not     be fully defined within a pathway) and result in contact with primary care     and early diagnostic efforts
• Confirmation to Care Planning – the pathway steps associated with linking patients     to appropriate secondary/tertiary services, running confirmatory     diagnostic tests, treatment decisions and care planning
• Monitoring & Support – the routine and recurring aspects of patient care     where treatment response may be assessed and care plans altered

‍

By aligning pathway barriers with these stages, TCC Health’s pathway-centric approach pinpoints the issues that are most likely to present a barrier to patients having timely access to the most appropriate therapy. This structured approach not only identifies challenges but also ensures that solutions are aligned with real-world healthcare dynamics. On situation may require an education-oriented campaign whereas the next may require the creation of tools and services that clinicians can use to optimise day-to-day practice.

Powered by Design+Thinking

TCC Health is uniquely placed to deliver pathway-centric planning because of our proprietary approach: Design+Thinking, which leverages a range of social science and strategic disciplines to unlock pathways. Find out more about it here. Design+Thining embraces the principles of human-centred design while acknowledging the complexities of healthcare. Applying Design+Thinking to pathway-centric brand planning typically results in the following workflow with our client teams:

• Pathway Analysis – Mapping key barriers at critical pathway stages.‍
• Barrier Prioritisation – Identifying and focusing on the most significant challenges.
• ‍Solution Ideation & Feasibility Testing – Assessing practical interventions for real-world application.‍
• Solution Prioritisation, Planning & Pricing – Aligning strategies with market conditions.‍
• Affiliate Engagement & Tactical Execution – Enabling local teams to drive adoption.
• ‍Implementation & Continuous Refinement – Adjusting strategies based on real-world insights.

From Insight to Action: A Pathway-Centric Approach

In our next post, we’ll explore practical case studies demonstrating how pathway-centric planning has unlocked pathways in different disease areas.

The healthcare landscape is complex, but by adopting a pathway-centric approach, pharmaceutical companies can create meaningful change – ensuring that innovative therapies reach the patients who need them most. If you're ready to explore how this approach can strengthen your brand strategy, let’s start the conversation today.

‍