Pharmacy Customer Experience

When most people start to this about segmentation in the pharmacy space, it becomes quickly overwhelming:

• Age
• Gender
• Plan design
• Geography
• Income
• Condition
• Drug
• New to therapy or ongoing therapy
• Co-morbidities
• Depression
• Physician relationship
• Support system
• Education
• Literacy
• Etc.

I want to spend some time over a few posts beginning to break this down.  Today, let’s look at the five logical customer types:

1. New Nancy:
   • Newly diagnosed
   • Not very familiar with her condition, the medication, the pharmacy process, or the PBM
   • Needs lots of hand-holding and education
   • Need to address gaps in the physician-patient encounter
   • Need to help her build a routine
2. Caring Carin:
   • Caregiver for either dependents or parents
   • Picking up prescriptions for them and responsible for translating (sharing) information with them
   • Important to educate, but not the patient
   • Likely to be the “e-patient” but also stressed out (see sandwich generation)
3. Sporatic Sam:
   • Someone who gets some acute medications occassionally (e.g., antibiotic)
   • Understands the healthcare system somewhat but not overly interested or engaged in the semantics
4. Forgetful Frank:
   • Chronic medication user
   • Likely to have or develop multiple conditions
   • Not great with adherence to therapy
   • Understands their condition, but not worried about it (even if they should be)
5. Steady Suzy:
   • Chronic medication user
   • One or more conditions
   • Understands the value of medication
   • Feels better when taking her medications
   • Actively managing her health
   • Generally adherent
   • Engaged with MD and pharmacist

I guess I could add Corrupt Cindy to talk about patients that abuse the system (a pharmacist friend of mine was telling me about a patient they caught this weekend with 6 different names across different pharmacies and a fake prescription pad). 

From a basic segmentation framework, are there others without getting into demographic attributes?