Brok explains how missteps during patient support program transitions—ranging from service disruptions to data misalignment—can undermine access, adherence, and brand trust. He describes best practices organizations can use to ensure a smooth transition while protecting patients, providers, and program outcomes.
To learn more, download AssistRx’s Hub Transition Process Checklist. You can also schedule a meeting with the AssistRx team at the Asembia Summit in Las Vegas.
Read on for Brok’s insights.
The Hidden Pitfalls of Hub Transitions—and How to Navigate Them
By Brok Vandersteen, Vice President, Business Development, AssistRx
However, transitioning hub programs can be necessary. Factors to consider include:
- Internal pressures to deliver cost savings through vendor consolidation
- Current vendor’s lack of consistency across leadership and service offerings
- Current vendor misunderstanding of program optimization as a product transitions through its lifecycle
Selecting the right vendor to transition to—preferably one with an established transition methodology and proven experience—is critical. At AssistRx, 50% of our patient support programs were transitions from a previous vendor in 2025. Throughout these experiences, we’ve identified four key mistakes and built our methodology around the best practices that avoid them.
1 ) Disruption of Service to Patients, Caregivers and HCPs
A smooth transition experience for patients, caregivers and HCPs should be a top priority. A negative experience creates unnecessary risks to access and adherence for patients and to brand reputation, which impacts decisions to continue therapy or prescribe to new patients.
Ensuring continuity of service requires dedicated resources at the onset of transition planning. Best practices include:
- Assigning dedicated transition roles
- Effective management of workstreams, including technology configuration, operations center processes, program assets, data transition and patients in-flight
- Analysis of concurrent efforts across vendors
- Proactive management of the previous vendor’s work
The hub partner you are transitioning to should have an established framework for aligning resources across vendors so patients, caregivers and HCPs only experience the benefits of their engagements with the new vendor—such as improved and automated processes, strengthened services and newly aligned access operations.
When determining which vendor to transition your program to, ask potential partners: How do you coordinate resources across vendors to ensure continuity of service for patients and HCPs during a hub transition?
2) Misaligned Data Transfers, Resulting in Missed Migrations
When transitioning hub programs, migrating data to a new vendor can be easily misaligned if not properly planned for early in the transition process. Program owners and the transition team should possess an in-depth understanding of both the current and required future program data to ensure a coordinated, accurate and clean data transfer.
Best practices to ensure proper data transitions should account for historical data and active enrollment data. Careful coordination between the previous vendor and the new vendor to define data field requirements, definitions and standard processes should be prioritized.
Ask potential partners: How do you assess, map and validate both historical and active patient data during a hub transition, and what safeguards do you have in place to ensure data accuracy, usability and continuity of patient services post-transition?
3) Mismanagement of In-flight Patients
Another critical transition initiative is the proper management of patients and HCPs who have work in-process at the time of transition. These patients can be at risk if there are no proactive processes used to ensure they transition to the appropriate status in the new vendor’s system. Proper preparation and transition of in-flight patients is critical to ensuring every patient’s experience is prioritized and every HCP has a positive experience with the brand, maintaining essential trust.
Best practices to ensure in-flight patients are accounted for include:
- Establishing proactive processes for these patients at the transition onset
- Careful coordination with the previous vendor to ensure a seamless experience
- Continuous status reports both during the transition and at the close of the previous program so the new vendor can action around these patients
- Maintaining and prioritizing statuses once transitioned for follow-up communication alerts
Ask your potential new vendor: What specific processes do you use to identify, track and actively manage patients and HCPs who are in-flight during a transition, and how do you ensure no cases are delayed, dropped or deprioritized?
4) Failing to Consider Transition Timing
It can be tempting to move your hub transition forward as quickly as possible. However, to ensure positive experiences for program stakeholders, careful consideration of the internal and external factors impacting the program and its patients and HCPs will ensure better transition coordination and outcomes.
Best practices for getting the timeline right require you and your vendor to consider these items:
- Current sales objectives and roadmap
- Contract clauses with current vendors
- Physician/office availability considerations
- Patient considerations (e.g., reverification, OOP status)
- Data transition from current vendor
Make sure your new vendor partner accounts for timing by asking: How do you evaluate and recommend transition timing based on commercial objectives, patient impact, provider workflows and operational constraints—and how do you adjust timelines when those factors aren’t aligned?
While the undertaking of a hub transition is arduous, it is also an opportunity to improve broken processes, consolidate disparate systems and focus services required based on the product’s phase of lifecycle.
For one client, applying AssistRx’s proven methodology allowed five programs encompassing 17 products to be successfully transitioned in less than nine months. For another client, we transitioned 3.7 million patients’ historical data.
Want to learn more? Download our hub transition process checklist or schedule a meeting with our team at Asembia Summit.
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