Faye Zeidlhack Implements Patient Travel Model for Takeda

Imagine: You are a traveler with a chronic illness. It might be difficult for you breathe, walk, stand for long periods. You may be in a wheelchair. You may have a condition triggered by stress. Whatever the case, your illness is never a choice; it is never something you can leave behind just because you need to travel. Indeed, your illness may be the reason you are traveling.

In the pharmaceutical industry this is often the case. Patients travel on behalf of pharma companies to raise awareness around certain diseases and around available treatments. They are traveling to educate communities and healthcare providers, and to do the hard work they are passionate about.

“I admire them for their willingness to travel at this time and do the work they are doing,” said Takeda global travel manager Faye Zeidlhack. “It’s our job to ensure their wellness along the way is our first priority.”

Patient travel is pressing topic among pharmaceutical companies. Zeidlhack, who during the pandemic formed an industry group called the Pharma Travel Network and continues to lead it, says the issue comes up continuously within the group, with participants always looking for better methods and more supportive travel frameworks for patient travel.

For Zeidlhack, that conversation turned into action. After years of discussion in her former role at Shire, which was acquired by Takeda in 2019, BCD Travel came to her with a promising framework last year. Zeidlhack signed on as a beta customer to collaborate with the TMC’s new Life Sciences Center of Excellence to help define how the product would function in the real world.

Key to the solution has been the role of the patient engagement manager—a trained medical professional who works not only as an advisor and support individual for patient care when they travel but also as a super VIP travel agent who can step into the travel process when a traveler is struggling personally or when travel operations themselves break down. The latter has been a defining characteristic of the post-Covid travel industry.

But that role wasn’t well defined from the start.

“We needed to understand the whole process and understand at what points does the patient engagement manager step in—we had to identify those pain points, but then also help the PEM know how to step in. That individual is trained as a nurse, not as a travel agent. Yet, we are asking them to act as a VIP agent in a sense.”

Through working with Faye, BCD realized the success of the product would also depend on having a specialized agent desk for the Life Sciences client, which it established with round-the-clock full service that allows the patient engagement manager to have front-of-the-line access to agent services that may be required at any time.

While the product began as travel solution, in practice, the support has gone much deeper, with the PEM often serving as a confidante for travelers, said Zeidlhack, because they don’t want to reveal the full nature or extent of their travel difficulties to anyone else. Having that person to understand the issues and support their privacy has transformed the travel experience for these travelers.

That was the goal for Zeidlhack and Takeda.

“Everything we do at Takeda is really focused on the patient experience. It literally comes out every single day and in every single talk that we have,” she said. “As a travel manager, I don’t always have a chance to impact the patient directly, but in this case I felt like I had that opportunity to deliver very directly on the patient experience. That was important to me.”

But that hasn’t been the end of the road for the collaboration. Both BCD Travel and Zeidlhack see broader application for some version of these services to touch a larger group of travelers whose experience has been often overlooked.

“In going through this process, I got to thinking about travelers with accessibility and mobility challenges, and [realized] there's so much more that could be done,” said Zeidlhack. “This is a time like no other, when suppliers really care and want to do the right thing. So it's got us thinking about how to take elements of this project and apply it to travel diversity and inclusion strategies. Right now, our application is pretty narrow, but I think there's so much more that can be done with it. This is the tip of the iceberg. It's kind of exciting.”