PatientsForce wins HBR DingGe Award top prize for business model innovation and ESG special award for digital access-to-medicine solutions

Harvard Business Review (HBR) Global Traditional Chinese Edition has announced the fourth annual winners of its HBR Digital Transformation ("DingGe") Award. This year's top prize for business model innovation among small and medium enterprises went to Media-WIND Health Strategies, which also earned the ESG Special Award. The winning project tackles the financial burden of self-paid new drugs with an innovative solution: a platform that helps patients obtain financial assistance for new medicines while lowering transaction costs across the healthcare supply chain. It has accumulated more than 60 specialty drug services covering cancer therapies, biologics, and other specialty prescription drugs and medical devices, and through partnerships with multiple international pharmaceutical companies has become the innovator in new-drug benefit programs in Taiwan's healthcare market.

"Solving the problem of access to new medicines takes more than public-private collaboration and advancing NHI and commercial insurance in tandem — it also calls for innovative market solutions that balance patient affordability with the market value of new drugs," said Sean Chang, Chairman of PatientsForce, Media-WIND Health Group (MWHG). In 2015, Media-WIND Health Strategies launched the "PatientsForce Patient Support Program platform (Patients Assistance Programs)," helping pharmaceutical companies deliver medication programs directly to patients, supporting and reducing patients' financial and treatment burdens during the period before a new drug enters NHI reimbursement, and providing patient-centered care and health services. It currently runs more than 80 patient support programs, and since 2017 has provided physicians and patients with medication support services covering more than 1 million units of drug support applications, with a market value exceeding NT$6 billion.

"Last year more than ten thousand patients applied for medication support programs, and this year the number of patients PatientsForce serves has already passed ten thousand — multiplying year over year. Part of it is that more and more new-drug programs are joining; part of it is that our innovative, diversified new-drug solutions let us serve patients across different medication channels and disease types." To improve the healthcare experience of patients in Taiwan, Chairman Sean Chang said, the group is committed to building a complete suite of digital management products. The "MediPASS integrated SaaS platform" is an agile-developed integrated system that lets pharmaceutical companies, healthcare institutions, and pharmacies collaborate on a single platform to apply for and manage Patient Support Programs. Its launch enables all parties to share resources more efficiently and raises the quality of healthcare services overall.

Group COO Evie Wang noted, "MediPASS is the digital platform PatientsForce keeps refining. For the patient medication application process, it delivers standardized, compliant quality management. Through optimized intelligent modules, it can rapidly OCR patients' large volumes of application documents, auto-fill workflows and detect errors, track, assign, and quality-manage case work, and simultaneously handle patient-hospital coordination and drug dispatch. Our management capability is equivalent to an insurance company's claims department — except what we pay out is mostly actual medicine."

To further streamline drug donation distribution, the group also integrated downstream into the supply chain, launching "MediRX" to help pharmacies manage donated-drug inventory — a system that has substantially improved the accuracy and efficiency of program drug distribution. The project also offers multiple solutions for patients' drug-cost financing, pioneering the "Drug Installment" service that lets patients buy medicine first and repay in installments. Combined with waiver clauses provided by pharmaceutical companies, it relieves patients of the financial burden of self-paying while awaiting NHI reimbursement, and includes case-specific financial plans to address the short-term financial pressures of patients with different abilities to pay.

Bringing AI-powered services on board will drive the next stage of PatientsForce's scalable patient support programs, Chairman Sean Chang added. To realize 24/7 patient medical services (open, serving, all day, all year), the company has recently begun deploying intelligent voice AI services — internally, visual management that raises customer service quality; externally, large-scale conversational services with healthcare institutions and patients, including pickup notifications, follow-up visit reminders, health surveys, and clinical patient-reported outcome management — to support the precision health management services of tomorrow's new healthcare models.

PatientsForce is also extending the Patient Support Program platform to the corporate side, as an ESG and employee support solution that builds future healthcare capital for employees and their families. Sean Chang said: "PatientsForce is more than a digital system — it embodies corporate responsibility in action. We hope more healthcare institutions and pharmaceutical companies will join us, using innovative business models and digital tools to make new drug treatments affordable for more patients and give them complete care, while helping solve clinical patient-support gaps during NHI transition periods and where private insurance falls short — advancing a virtuous cycle that benefits medicine, patients, and pharma alike."