The Critical Role of Telehealth in Patient-Centric, Compliant Direct-to-Patient Programs
Telehealth Awareness Week is an opportunity to marvel at how virtual care has reshaped the healthcare landscape. What began as an emergency response to the COVID-19 pandemic is now a cornerstone of how patients access care. For biopharma organizations, telehealth is no longer peripheral, it is central to the design of direct-to-patient (DTP) programs that want to go beyond awareness to diagnosis and treatment.
The challenge, however, is not simply deploying telehealth at scale. It is doing so in a way that expands patient access while maintaining compliance, safeguarding trust, and preserving clinical independence. Recent federal scrutiny has made this point crystal clear.
DTP Programs as a Bridge in the Digital Patient Journey
For the majority of patients, the healthcare journey has been fragmented and challenging for their entire lifetime. Educational campaigns run in one silo, diagnostic testing in another, and treatment pathways in yet another. Direct-to-patient programs, particularly those offering telehealth, provide the connective tissue that closes these gaps.
When thoughtfully integrated into DTP programs, telehealth enables:
- Faster diagnosis — moving patients from awareness or risk identification to evaluation without long delays.
- Choice of access — offering synchronous or asynchronous visits, virtual or in-office scheduling and follow up care,
- Support at every step — ensuring that patients know their options, and can act without unnecessary friction.
Telehealth does more than reduce logistical barriers, it gives patients the confidence that they are not navigating the system alone. For biopharma, this means DTP programs that are not only more effective but also more equitable.
The Compliance Imperative: Lessons from the Senate Report
In July 2025, the U.S. Senate released a report on direct-to-consumer and direct-to-patient programs. The findings were a forewarning. When telehealth is tied too closely to pharmaceutical promotion, risks emerge.
The report highlighted concerns about:
- Perceived inducement — the impression that patients are being funneled to a specific therapy.
- Steering — the use of single-provider networks that undermine choice and raise red flags.
- Erosion of clinical independence — quick, superficial consults that focus on prescribing rather than evaluation.
- Inadequate oversight — reliance on self-reported questionnaires without objective data or meaningful follow-up.
These criticisms should not be dismissed. They reflect the reality that poorly designed programs compromise both patient care and public trust. But they also provide a roadmap for what compliance-focused, patient-first programs must look like going forward.
Building Telehealth into DTP Programs Responsibly
For biopharma companies, the answer is to structure programs with clear compliance guardrails that protect patients, providers, and brands alike.
Best practices include:
- Maintaining a layer of separation—Telehealth providers should remain independent of pharma influence. This means no direct contracts, no incentives tied to prescribing, and no pharma input into clinical protocols or patient-facing materials.
- Offering multiple network options—Exclusivity can create the appearance of steering. Programs should route patients across multiple credentialed networks, giving them a real choice of providers and modalities.
- Preserving clinical independence—Providers must evaluate patients according to standard of care (which may include labs, imaging, or record reviews) without pressure to prescribe. They should remain unaware of whether a patient originates from a brand-specific program.
- Ensuring pharma does not pay for clinical services—Patients or their insurers should pay fair-market-value fees for telehealth visits. Pharma-sponsored rebates, copay support, or payments to providers introduce risk under the federal Anti-Kickback Statute.
- Monitoring quality and appropriateness—Oversight must be active and ongoing: monitoring prescription rates and auditing visit quality.
- Safeguarding privacy and limiting data sharing—Programs should minimize the data that flows back to pharma, restricting it to aggregated and de-identified insights rather than patient- or provider-level information.
When these principles are built into the design of DTP programs, telehealth becomes not a compliance liability but a compliance asset.
The Path Forward
Telehealth Awareness Week is a reminder of how far virtual care has come and how central it is to the future of patient engagement. For biopharma marketers, the challenge is to see telehealth not only as a tool to improve patient experience, but also as a lens for responsibility.
The Senate’s July 2025 report raised valid concerns, but it also underscored an opportunity: programs that maintain separation, preserve provider independence, and prioritize patient choice can stand as models for best practice.
DTP programs designed in this way do more than connect patients to medicines. They build trust in the system at a time when trust is fragile. They enable action, not just awareness. And they show that compliance is not a barrier to innovation, but a foundation for lasting impact.
About ixlayer
ixlayer has the only end-to-end, direct-to-patient platform built for biopharma and optimized for patient choice. We help biopharma companies connect with patients from testing to treatment with speed, transparency, control and impact.
