Not long after Relay and Claritas Rx announced our partnership, we saw it in action in front of a live audience. In a recent Informa webinar, Oliver Dunford, SVP of Product and Life Sciences at Relay, and Loan Villaverde, Senior Director of Data Strategy at Claritas Rx, put their two data sets side by side to show what happens at each stage of the patient journey and why it matters. They opened by admitting they love data, which can make for a dry hour. This one wasn’t, because the numbers answered questions patient support teams are asking right now: where do patients drop off, and what keeps them engaged?

Oliver and Loan led an insightful discussion backed by strong data analyses from both Relay and Clartias Rx around the phases of the patient journey, patient behavior at each stage, and where digital engagement shines. The split was simple. At each stage of the patient journey, Oliver showed what patients do when they are reached digitally. Loan showed why that behavior matters for fills, refills and persistence. Here is what each found.

Across roughly 230,000 digital consent requests, about 48% of patients clicked through the text message, and 95% of those who clicked completed the action. The top-performing program reached a 75% click-through and a 96% action rate. One program reduced the time to obtain HIPAA consent by 3.4 days compared with traditional channels.

The strongest programs did not wait for the patient to find them. They moved the ask to the point of care, added outreach at the point of dispense, and put QR codes in provider offices.

In an A/B test across similar cohorts, Claritas Rx found that patients with consent filled 12 to 40 percent more often and refilled 11 percent more often than patients without it. Consent also breaks in predictable places: when a patient moves between the hub and a specialty pharmacy, when consent expires, and when a patient revokes it with one partner but not another. In one case, a faxed consent form arrived with portions cut off, and that alone delayed a therapy start by more than two weeks.

The Takeaway: Treat consent as something you capture early, monitor continuously and keep aligned across partners, not a form you collect once at intake.

Coverage and access was the highest-engagement stage in Relay’s data: about a 60% click-through and 83% action rate, compared with 34 to 37 percent in other stages. That is close to double. This is the journey phase where patients can really take control of their care. Patients can check free-drug and copay eligibility, uploading insurance cards and reading prior authorization updates, including denials and appeals.

The results show up in fills. Alkermes, maker of Vivitrol, saw a 21% lift in fill rate among patients who engaged in its text and coordinator-call program. A second tactic is reaching patients flagged as unresponsive after several phone attempts. Across about 6,400 experiences sent to those patients in rare disease, about 5% re-engaged, and the best-performing program brought back about 20%.

Claritas Rx data explains the urgency. If a specialty prescription is not filled by the end of the first week, one in five patients abandon. Past the 30-day mark, first-fill rates fall about 30% for each additional five days of delay. How fast is fast enough depends on the therapeutic area: oncology reaches an 85% fill rate in about seven days, rare disease 83% in about 11, and neurology about 65 to 66 percent in a median of 33 days.

The Takeaway: Engagement at this stage is where a digital channel earns its keep, and benchmarks for your therapeutic area tell you what “fast” should look like.

Teams worry that patients on long therapies will tire of messages. Relay’s data points the other way. Introducing the digital tool earlier in the journey was associated with about a 20% lift in continued engagement. Opt-outs average under 1% across the platform, and when patients do opt out, they do it within the first one or two messages.

One medical-benefit program grew from 7 experiences to 40 to 80 over several years. Click-through dipped when it expanded, then climbed to about 56% after the content was refined, for patients who had been on therapy for years. A multi-brand pharmacy-benefit portfolio that sent the same generic refill message to every patient saw engagement fall. The difference was not patient fatigue. It was whether the content stayed relevant.

Digital works best alongside people. An infusion-therapy client saw about 6% higher treatment completion when patients had both a nurse and a digital channel. For patients who stopped speaking with the nurse, staying on Relay was associated with about 19% higher completion than no support.

Claritas Rx data shows how much is at stake. One in three active patients carries a predicted risk of discontinuing therapy within 90 days. Four signals mark them: a prior authorization aging past about 21 days, affordability pressure such as an expiring copay card, more than 14 days with no engagement, and a dose change that may signal a tolerability issue. Claritas Rx’s machine-learning model also explains what is driving each patient’s risk, so teams know what to do next.

The Takeaway: The signals tell you who needs help and when. The content and the human follow-up decide whether they stay.

Older patients will not use a mobile channel. Relay’s most engaged group was patients aged 54 to 64. Among Medicare patients 65 and older, click-through was about 38% with a 56% action rate.

More messages mean more opt-outs. Opt-out was about 1% at onboarding and lower in later stages. Even the program with 80 touchpoints did not see opt-outs rise. The first one or two messages carry the most risk, so make them personalized and relevant.

Want to see how your program compares? Watch the on-demand webinar, or talk with our team about a content-strategy review for your brand.

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