BCD Travel announced its Life Sciences Centre of Excellence last month and has now rolled out a new focus on patient travel. The move is intended to support the unique needs of the patient but also to leverage the benefits of a company's corporate travel programme.
"We started receiving customer requests about a year and a half ago, asking what we were doing in this space," said BCD Life Sciences Centre lead and VP global client team Jessica Azoulay. "BCD has rich experience across life sciences, but with patient centricity so important in life sciences today, our customers started looking for new and better ways to manage their patient travel."
The model for health study teams today is for healthcare and pharmaceutical companies to partner with contract research organisations like Paraxel or Icon. These organisations, over time, have expanded their remit to manage travel and logistics related to patient needs. But, according to Azoulay, there's a lack of transparency on what is happening on the patient level when it comes to travel.
"These organisations serve a really valuable [purpose] in the ecosystem. They do things we would never entertain," said Azoulay. But, she added, when it comes to travel, BCD wants to realign the roles and responsibilities to ease the burden on study teams and also to ensure the sponsor company optimizes the travel piece.
"We know [CROs] aren't leveraging corporate rates by and large [and they may] lack the information to bring that full negotiation power to the table when they are talking to suppliers," she said. "We also think there is a gap in duty-of-care management because the reporting isn't there to bring in the patient detail."
Part of the solution for patient centricity in travel was scaled by forming BCD's Life Sciences Centre of Excellence, said Azoulay. "We've had the teams and the expertise for a number of years," she said, adding that formalising the centre has allowed the company to put more process around how to share best practices across the life sciences practice and to offer unique solutions to clients.
Since the initial announcement of the center of excellence last month, BCD has experienced a "groundswell of interest," according to Azoulay. And the centre is flexible in terms of working directly with the sponsor company or with the designated CRO to provide the right set of services and solutions.
Other key pieces are still in play, however; specifically, the technology platforms that the centre will use to deliver those tailored travel solutions, specialised reporting and duty-of-care management to their clients.
"There are a lot of opportunities in both the meetings and travel space in terms of technology," said Azoulay. BCD is evaluating those options but remains open to the idea that the technology pieces that ultimately make up the platform may not be those traditionally used in the corporate travel space, given the sensitive patient information required as well as the regulatory and compliance requirements that are deeply embedded in the life sciences category.
"We need new solutions to solve recurring challenges across our client base," said Azoulay. "On the meetings side, it could be reconciliation and payment. On the travel side, it could be creating a single experience for the patient, knowing they need to manage a number of requests and appointments along their journey. We are trying to catalogue what is there now, and what solutions we could build or develop."
BCD has "a number of big customers we are talking to and that are very engaged with us" regarding the Life Sciences Centre of Excellence technology roadmap. The center has run several workshops with those customers to define their needs and "solve for their recurring challenges," said Azoulay.
The deep focus on patient travel is just one way that BCD's Life Sciences Centre of Excellence aims to prove that company is the right one to work with as healthcare, pharmaceutical, medical device and insurance companies—which have been among the few verticals that continued to travel during the pandemic—think about their specialised travel management needs.
"This is a differentiator for BCD," said Azoulay. "We are the only organisation that has the experience and the focus to solve these challenges."
As specific business verticals recover and essential travel becomes more robust in industries like marine, oil and energy, as well as entertainment and film production, the industry may see more specialisations like this emerge in travel management as TMCs invest to capture active clients with unique service needs.