Cytokinetics Demonstrates that true patient centricity isn’t just for patient facing roles.
- Embedded patient experience across functions, geographies and seniority levels.
- Extended the program to reach employees throughout the organization.
- Helped colleagues connect patient insight with practical outcomes in their own roles.
Deepening Disease-State Knowledge to Strengthen Patient Focus
As a specialty cardiovascular biopharmaceutical company, Cytokinetics wanted patient perspective to become part of how colleagues think, make decisions, and work across the business. Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) is a chronic, hereditary condition and the most common genetic heart disease, yet its impact is often invisible to others.
Because it is not always apparent when someone is living with this serious condition, Cytokinetics recognized the importance of helping colleagues better understand the complexity of living with HCM. Rather than limiting patient engagement to specific teams or projects, the organization sought a scalable way to bring the patient experience closer to employees across the company and embed that perspective more deeply into its work.
To achieve this, Cytokinetics partnered with A Life In a Day to create an immersive patient experience designed to help colleagues better understand the challenges, choices and realities faced by people living with HCM.
Bringing the Patient Experience to Life
The program was designed in collaboration with people living with HCM and healthcare professionals to create an experience that reflected the world patients live in every day.
The experience combined an interactive app throughout the day, live role-play conversations with professional actors and a physical experience kit to make elements of the patient journey tangible. Together, these elements helped participants move beyond an intellectual knowledge of the condition and connect more deeply with the realities patients face every day.
Participants did not step away from their normal lives to take part. Instead, they walked in the shoes of a patient while continuing their everyday routines, creating a more realistic and meaningful understanding of what living with HCM can involve.
The Real Story: Organizational Adoption
What makes Cytokinetics’ story particularly compelling is not simply that it delivered a patient experience program.
The experience was originally created while the company’s therapy for HCM was in Phase 3 clinical development, before the medicine was approved. It reflected an early commitment to understanding the lived experience of patients and ensuring that perspective informed the organization well before commercialization. Rather than treating it as a one-off initiative, Cytokinetics chose to embed the patient experience more broadly across the organization. After an initial rollout to employees in the USA, the program expanded into Europe, including colleagues in the UK, France, Germany and Switzerland. It has since been delivered to employees across functions, geographies, and new-starter cohorts, including senior leaders and executives.
This reflects a broader commitment to ensuring patient-centered thinking is not confined to a small group of specialists but becomes relevant to every role within the organization. Cytokinetics is continuing to expand the initiative globally, including through translations that will help more colleagues engage with the experience in a meaningful way.
Employees across Cytokinetics have used the experience to deepen their understanding of the day-to-day realities of living with HCM and bring those insights into their own roles. For the commercial team in particular, the program has helped connect patient insights with practical decisions involved in preparing for commercialization.
Cytokinetics provides an example of how patient understanding can be embedded throughout a business without requiring the scale or resources typically associated with the industry’s largest organizations.
“I talk to people living with HCM every day as part of my role and I was on the team that designed the experience. Nevertheless, when I went through it myself, I discovered a newfound understanding of the impact of the disease – I experienced the vulnerability, complexities and challenges of HCM in a way that I hadn’t before. This experience shapes how I interact with patients and empathize with their lives.”
Mary Pomerantz, Senior Director, Patient Centricity and Corporate Responsibility
