Winner
Project BlueSky
Summary of work
It’s April 2021; the UK is emerging from pandemic restrictions; the NHS is facing unprecedented wait lists and resource pressures. 156,000+ patients are waiting to access Neurology services. For those with Parkinson’s, their disease continues to progress, for some, past the window of opportunity for initiating advanced treatments.
Add to this: one of the available advanced treatments has been on the market for 17 years. It’s a complex device that requires gastric surgery, followed by multiple in-patient bed days for drug titration. It can only be initiated in a handful of specialist centres.
The result? Patient access to this treatment fell to zero. This continued as the NHS resumed services – initiation of advanced Parkinson’s treatments like this, were pushed to the bottom of priority lists.
With an internal cross-functional team limited by budget and headcount, our key target had to be the HCPs and how we could engage to accelerate patient access to care. We’ve been doing this for 17 years; what could we do differently?
We needed to develop a new customer engagement strategy that would overcome these barriers. We needed to go on a journey of innovation to accelerate patient access to care.
Welcome to Project BlueSky.
Judges’ comments
The judges were very impressed with the overall execution of this entry from AbbVie and Pivot as it featured a workable pilot. They also recognised the entry’s effort to use a relevant approach to the subject matter with a strong sense of purpose throughout. The panel were in agreement that this entry was an outstanding contribution and an example of well-constructed and executed planning.
