What changes when every function has lived the condition
Picture the same drug development programme, but with one variable changed. Every person involved has lived a day inside the condition the drug is for. The chemist running early-stage screens. The clinical operations lead writing the protocol. The medical affairs team prepping for KOL meetings. The brand director shaping launch. The rep walking into a doctor’s office. Even the policymaker reviewing it for reimbursement.
They have felt the symptoms. They have used the kit. They have made the phone calls. And they have sat with the uncertainty.
What changes about that programme? Honestly, almost everything.
We have watched it happen across hundreds of teams in dozens of therapy areas since 2009, and the pattern is consistent enough now that we feel comfortable saying it plainly. What follows is a short tour of where deeper insight into the patient experience is doing its work inside pharma right now, and it is broader than the function most people associate with this kind of programme.
A Common Misconception About Who This is For
When people first hear about immersive patient experiences, two assumptions tend to surface.
The first is that it’s a programme for patient engagement teams. The second, often from people who already work closely with patients, is that they have heard the stories so many times that they already understand the condition.
Both assumptions cost organisations more than they realise. Patient engagement teams benefit deeply from the experience, and we will get to what they take away from it. The teams making the largest changes to their day-to-day decisions, though, can be the ones furthest from the bedside. Discovery scientists, clinical operations leads, brand directors, and sales reps are the functions whose work eventually arrives at a patient’s table, several years and several handoffs after a decision was made.
What Deeper Insights Look Like Across the Drug Development Process
Each of the figures below comes from our own measurement of A Life in a Day participants in their respective functions. The pattern that connects them is consistent, and everyone leaves making different, more grounded decisions in the work they were already doing.
Discovery and clinical
Trial design happens early, often years before the protocol ever reaches a participant. The choices made there, around endpoints, visit frequency, biomarker collection, and inclusion criteria, are the ones that decide whether the trial will be feasible for the people it depends on. In our experiences, 87% of R&D participants have made patient-focused changes to their work afterward. Those changes have reshaped protocols, improved retention, lifted recruitment, and pulled cost out of trials that were already approved.
“I will commit to finding ways to convince our teams why it is vitally important to engage directly with patient advisors versus assuming they understand. I will continue to reduce the burden of a clinical trial, knowing the burden of doctors is already heavy.”
- Head of Patient Informed Development
Medical affairs
Medical affairs sit in a position that most other functions do not. Their job is to translate science for stakeholders who are not in the trial, but whose decisions shape whether the drug ever reaches the patients it was built for. 99% of medical affairs participants told us they came away from the experience with increased confidence in talking to stakeholders. That confidence shows up in MSL conversations, advisory boards, payer discussions, and the small daily exchanges that move a programme forward or stall it.
“During discussions about reluctancy of regulatory authorities to reimburse newer treatments, I am discussing the impact on patient emotional wellbeing and family, which I would not have done before.”
- Medical Science Liaison
Brand, marketing and sales
Commercial functions face a particular version of this challenge. They are responsible for the quality of the conversations about the drug with the people who will prescribe it, recommend it, and reimburse it. Those conversations carry information about the patient but can miss the patient’s perspective. Our measured outcome here is that 92% of brand and sales participants report an increased understanding of the condition’s impact. With one of our clients, six weeks after the experience, the quality and duration of their HCP conversations had increased by 85%. The reps are engaging differently, and the doctor’s notice.
“In my view, I have experienced no better way to understand the highs and lows for patients. Completely invaluable experience to enrich understanding and empathy.”
- Global Brand Director
Patient engagement
The team most likely to assume they already know the patient experience is also the one that can get the most out of going through it themselves. 97% of patient engagement participants agree that A Life in a Day develops a more patient-focused culture inside their organisation. The interesting part is what they tell us afterwards about why.
The advocates and engagement leads who have gone through our experiences talk about coming out of it with a sharper sense of where the gaps in their own programmes were, how their advisory boards were and were not representing the lived day, and what they wanted to redesign in their own patient-facing materials. They were already paying attention. The experience just changed what they were paying attention to.
“You deliver meaningful impact for patients by making us think about what we can do, better.”
- Chief Patient Officer
Cross-functional and support services
The functions that get cited least in conversations about patient centricity tend to be the ones where lived insight produces the most visible shift in day-to-day behaviour. The operations, recruitment, L&D, HR, and finance departments are the people whose work shapes the conditions under which everyone else operates.
To date, 93% of participants in these functions have told us they felt more motivated in their role afterward. That is not a soft-skill metric, either. Motivation in cross-functional teams shows up as faster turnaround on cross-team requests, more thoughtful design of internal tools, and a noticeably different tone in meetings where the patient is not in the room but is still the reason everyone is there.
“I have started meetings by sharing a patient story. It helped focus and remind us what we are all doing here.”
- HR Business Partner
HCPs, journalists, policymakers, stakeholders and patient advocacy groups
Outside the walls of pharma, we have been running experiences with the people whose decisions shape how patients are treated, written about, regulated, and represented. Among external stakeholders, 99% report feeling more empathy towards patients afterwards.
With HCPs, the change shows up as clinical practice adjustments around non-clinical impact, sharper attention to quality of life alongside clinical endpoints, and a different quality of conversation in the consulting room. For journalists, it shapes the way patient stories are framed in coverage, with more accurate representation of the daily reality behind a diagnosis. With policymakers, it shifts the conversation in committee rooms about what is being prioritised and why, particularly around access, reimbursement, and the non-clinical burden carried by patients and their families. Finally, for patient advocacy groups, it deepens an already informed view, giving advocates a fuller picture of the lived day to bring into their work with members, regulators, and industry partners.
“This is the first time in my whole career I have been through a programme that helps me to truly understand the burden of the disease.”
- Associate Professor and Honorary Consultant Endocrinologist
The Wider Cost of Not Closing The Gap
There is a quieter case for all of this that is worth making explicitly. Closing the empathy gap is not just about better experiences for patients, though that matters enormously. It is also one of the few intervention points where the moral and financial cases point in the same direction.
Bringing a single drug to market costs, on average, $879.3 million when failures and capital costs are accounted for. Of the out-of-pocket spend involved, around 68% goes to clinical trials. Within those trials, the median dropout rate across more than 10,000 Phase III trials is 11%, with some specialties pushing it above 30%. Every dropout is a real person making a decision they did not have to make if the trial had been better designed for them, and every dropout is also a measurable hit to the budget, the timeline, and the data quality.
Experience it for yourself
Deeper insights lead to better outcomes, and our Interactive Showcase is the fastest way to feel that. Join our next free thirty-minute session to get a direct sense of how the immersion works and what it tends to do to the way teams think afterward. It is the lightest way to see the method in action before committing to anything larger.
Join our Interactive Showcase today or contact us to talk about scheduling a tailored experience built around your specific function, therapy area, and the decisions your team is making right now.
The reputational layer underneath all of this matters as well. In the most recent PatientView survey of 314 US patient groups, the proportion rating the pharma industry’s reputation as “Excellent” or “Good” fell from 65% in 2022 to 57% in 2023. Patient groups talk to patients, and what patient groups think of the industry eventually becomes what patients think of it. In turn, this affects recruitment and retention numbers further down the line.
Lived patient understanding sits underneath every one of those numbers. It is the variable that, when changed, moves trial design, HCP conversations, internal alignment, and external reputation in the same direction at once. We have not seen another intervention with that range.
How we Help Teams Make This Real
Our work is built around the idea that experiencing what patients feel firsthand changes how a protocol gets written, how an MSL handles a conversation, and how a brand strategy gets shaped. We help teams close that distance through immersive twenty-four-hour simulations grounded in real patient stories and experiences.
Deeper insights lead to better outcomes, and our Interactive Showcase is the fastest way to feel that. It is a free thirty-minute session that gives you a true sense of how the immersion works and what it tends to do to the way teams think afterward.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who are A Life in a Day’s immersive experiences for?
Anyone whose work touches a patient’s eventual experience. That includes R&D, clinical operations, medical affairs, brand and marketing, sales, patient engagement, L&D, HR, and operations within pharma. It also includes HCPs, patient advocacy groups, journalists, and policymakers working alongside the industry. The brief is consistent across functions, but the outcomes vary depending on the work each function performs.
What do non-patient-facing teams get out of this?
More measurable outcomes than most people expect. R&D participants report patient-focused changes to trial design that improve recruitment and retention. Medical affairs participants report increased confidence in stakeholder conversations. Brand and sales teams report an 85% increase in HCP conversation quality six weeks afterwards. Cross-functional and support services teams report higher motivation that translates into faster cross-team turnaround and more thoughtful internal design.
What is the A Life in a Day Interactive Showcase?
It is a free thirty-minute session that gives pharma and healthcare professionals a direct sense of how our immersive patient experience works. It is the easiest way to see the approach for yourself before committing to a full programme. Our complete experience lasts up to 24 hours and combines a smartphone app, a physical kit of simulation items, and live role-play calls with trained actors.
Is this only for people who work directly with patients?
No, and that is part of the point. People who work closely with patients do benefit, but some of the largest changes we see come from teams several steps removed from the bedside. Discovery scientists, clinical operations leads, brand directors, and sales reps are often the ones who report the most concrete shifts in their day-to-day decisions afterwards.
What measurable outcomes have clients seen across different functions?
Outcomes by function include 87% of R&D participants making patient-focused changes to their work, 99% of medical affairs participants reporting increased confidence in stakeholder conversations, 93% of cross-functional participants reporting higher motivation, 97% of patient engagement participants reporting a more patient-focused culture, 92% of brand and sales participants reporting increased understanding of the condition, and 99% of HCPs and policymakers reporting greater empathy towards patients.
