Engaging Primary Care Networks

Primary Care Networks (PCNs) are a key new customer for the life science industries – wherever your medicine is prescribed.

They are key stakeholders for solutions focused on a particular locale – patient access schemes, service redesign, system costing, local patient identification and local pathway change. With the right data, it’s possible to stratify, segment and target PCNs– giving us the ability to assess which are the most ‘capable’ to implement new patient programmes and achieve better outcomes.

As Julian Snape, Head of Commercial Optimisation at Wilmington Healthcare, puts it:

“We can assess aggregated PCN performance, but also variance across practices. In situations where a PCN’s performance against data is good, and variance across practices is minimal – it has potential as a collaborator, with co-ordinated parties, good governance, better, quicker outcomes available and a more enthusiastic partner for Industry”.

Care closer to home

Care closer to home is still a huge part of the agenda for the NHS and it’s important that it produces better outcomes to justify the policy.

Earlier this year the Hewitt review called for co-ordinated community multidisciplinary teams to take as much action as possible to remove the burden from hospitals, both in terms of managing overall demand, and performing treatments in non-hospital settings to increase hospital capacity.

Care closer to home necessarily involves a lot of work at so-called ‘neighbourhood’ level, which is supposed to comprise population groupings of about 50,000. Many PCNs are getting involved in work on this kind of scale, as they are the relevant ‘neighbourhood’ stakeholder as set out in the Health and Care Act 2022.

There are around 1,200 PCNs – which means many options and ‘purchasing points’ for your ideas. Our clients are asking us more and more to help them focus messaging and appropriate content for such primary care providers.

Which clinical areas are relevant?

Several clinical areas are undergoing the transition to being predominantly primary-care managed, such as Alzheimer’s care, chronic pain, dermatology, respiratory, gastroenterology, some aspects of oncology and some aspects of cardiovascular care such as stroke.

Pharma can assess what current provision is like for their disease and see what could be done – together – to improve patient identification, diagnosis and the shape of services.

This also requires a new round of stakeholder mapping – including clinical specialist nurses, clinical pharmacists and dieticians. In diabetes service improvement at PCN level, for example, in many cases the driving individuals are clinical pharmacists, not GPs, and certainly not consultants.

In conclusion

PCNs are becoming ‘local providers’ and over time they will have more and more independence, capability, versatility, responsibility and activity. The time is right to explore this new tier of the NHS customer landscape and see what you could do for them.