Patients at the Heart of the Scientific Dialogue: An Industry Perspective

Pharmaceutical companies need to regularly communicate to patients all essential information about their medicines, especially data from the research studies that were conducted to evaluate the medicine’s benefits and risks. To do that, companies will need to make sure patients have access to and awareness of relevant information. This can be achieved by ensuring medical information is freely available to the reader, and working with publishers to facilitate open access (free) publications. Companies should also help improve patients’ understanding of medical terminology, offer simplified versions of scientific content, and deliver information through various formats (print versus digital, text versus audio versus video) to address different learning styles and literacy levels. This will empower patients with knowledge and improve shared decision-making. It will also be essential for pharmaceutical companies to involve patients in various stages of medicine development, such as getting their input on how the research studies for investigating these medicines are designed and reported to ensure relevant information to patients are well-captured and clear. This should also go in parallel with providing opportunities to elevate the patient voice through patient-partnered research and authorship on topics particularly relevant to them.