Matt dives into a specific healthcare topic to help those in the industry, and those outside of it, better understand the market drivers causing today’s healthcare challenges.

For years, healthcare leaders kept reaching for the same answer: another molecule, another trial, another breakthrough.

Researchers kept moving the science. Patients still ran into fragmented data, limited trial access, care inequities, and weak collaboration across the organizations responsible for turning discovery into care.

Theresa’s Research Foundation put that problem in writing. Its 2026 MBC DART strategic action plan brought together researchers, clinicians, patient advocates, industry leaders, and nonprofit organizations. The group organized its work around seven priorities, including patient-centered endpoints, modernized clinical trials, interoperable data, cross-sector collaboration, and equitable access across care and research.

The plan delivers a message healthcare leaders can no longer dodge. Structural barriers now rank among the greatest obstacles to progress in metastatic breast cancer.

Read that again.

Patients can live in an age of scientific progress and still lose time because the system refuses to connect.

A fragmented system does not appear by accident.

Leaders design reporting lines. Companies assign budgets. Sponsors choose who enters protocol development. Functions decide whether patient insight reaches medical affairs, market access, clinical operations, and commercial planning.

When advocacy sits inside one function and everybody else treats it like a community-relations desk, insight dies in the handoff.

The advocacy team hears that eligibility criteria exclude real patients. Clinical operations hears the message three months later, after legal, procurement, and governance have taken turns sanding off the urgency. Enrollment slows. The company schedules another listening session. Everyone congratulates themselves for engagement.

The patient gets the bill for that theater.

Archo’s 2024 BIOADVOCATE Benchmark shows how fragile the operating model can become. Among surveyed organizations, 75 percent reported annual revenue above $1 billion, yet 50 percent ran patient advocacy teams with only one to five people. Only 17 percent reported teams of 26 to 50 people.

The same benchmark found that companies placed advocacy across several reporting homes. Corporate Affairs and Communications represented the most common home at 33 percent. Market Access and Commercial each accounted for 17 percent. Government Affairs and Patient Experience or Patient Access each accounted for 8 percent.

Any one of those structures can work.

Each one fails when advocacy lacks decision rights, cross-functional access, and enough people to cover the disease states on its plate.

Across 131 respondents, organizations rated their interest in coalition support at 5.86 and current industry support at 4.36. That creates a 1.50-point gap.

They rated interest in patient-centric insights and collaboration at 5.56, compared with current support at 4.36. Research assistance produced a 1.42-point gap. Patient access support produced a 1.23-point gap. Advisory initiatives showed a 1.24-point gap.

Those numbers should ruin a few comfortable budget meetings.

Advocacy organizations want more than a sponsorship check and a logo on a conference slide. They want shared infrastructure. They want coordinated research. They want patient access support. They want a working relationship that survives the photo opportunity.

The top performers give us a useful contrast.

ELAVAY ranked Janssen first in partnerships and program support in 2025. Respondents gave the company a 5.74 rating for coalition support and a 5.60 rating for patient-centric insights and collaboration. Pfizer and Seagen ranked second in the weighted results. Sanofi and Genzyme ranked third.

Those scores stop short of proving causation. They do show that advocates can distinguish between visible activity and consistent partnership.

They know who answers the phone.

They know who brings the right internal people into the room.

They know who asks for insight before locking the decision.

They also know who appears once a year with a slide deck and a grant portal.

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The industry loves the word “value” right up until someone asks for a measurement plan.

Klein and colleagues offered one.

Their 2024 patient engagement impact framework tracks engagement inputs, outputs, resulting decisions, actions, and downstream value across the medicines lifecycle. The authors call on pharmaceutical organizations to measure, publish, and communicate that value so teams can improve patient engagement and make it standard practice.

That gives advocacy leaders a better budget argument.

Stop asking leadership to fund advocacy because engagement feels important.

Show where patient insight changed a protocol.

Show where a coalition removed an access barrier.

Show where an advocacy relationship improved recruitment, retention, health equity, or the burden placed on patients and families.

Track the input. Track the decision. Track the action. Track the patient impact.

MBC DART gives the industry a clean test.

Will companies fund interoperable data, modernized trial models, patient-centered evidence, equity-focused access initiatives, and cross-sector workstreams?

Or will they fund another roundtable where twelve leaders agree that collaboration matters and nobody leaves with an owner, a budget, or a deadline?

MBC DART calls for measurable outcomes, timelines, and accountability frameworks. That approach shifts coordination from a warm idea into an operating discipline.

The next move requires discipline.

Archo built ELAVAY for that last question.

Advocacy teams need more than internal applause. They need an external benchmark that measures trust, responsiveness, partnership quality, access support, and the gaps their own dashboards miss.

Archo’s Advocacy Influence Diagnostic adds an internal baseline. It measures integration, influence, and execution, then gives advocacy leaders an ELAVAY Index they can track over time. Together, the internal diagnostic and external ELAVAY research reveal whether advocacy holds real organizational influence or simply occupies a box on the org chart.

The barrier now sits inside the organization as often as it sits inside the science.

Organizational problems have owners.

Act like one.

To benchmark your advocacy function and turn the findings into a funded action plan, contact me at [email protected].