Field access has quietly become one of the most important levers in a successful launch. Yet in many organizations, it still doesn’t receive the same structured capability investment as sales or medical. That gap shows up in familiar ways: teams can recite the reimbursement landscape but struggle to execute consistently in the field. They “know” access, but they can’t always do access.
When Incyte set out to build brand-new Field Access capability, the task wasn’t simply to onboarding new hires. It was to establish shared expectations, aligned ways of working, and repeatable practices that could scale as the organization grew and a major product launch approached.
In other words, this wasn’t a “teach the content” problem. It was a behavior problem.
The difference between onboarding people and building a function
That distinction matters, especially for access teams, where performance isn’t determined only by what someone knows about payer models or prior authorization requirements. It’s shaped by the everyday behaviors that make the role effective: how access partners with sales, educate healthcare office staff on coverage pathways, support patients, and navigate cross-functional collaboration in a compliant, consistent way.
Two people can complete the same training and still operate very differently in the field. One may build strong relationships with other teams and stakeholders, while another focuses primarily on resolving immediate issues as they arise. Both activities are significant, but high-performing teams share a clear understanding of how and when to apply each approach.
The differentiator is often the ‘how’: how teams collaborate, how they structure conversations and how they prioritize actions across competing demands.
Incorporating behavior design in L&D
A conventional training approach starts with stakeholder alignment on content, which is then deployed as eLearning or workshops. But this leads to what’s known as the “transfer problem:” lots of information but limited behavior change.
A more effective starting point is to define the behaviors tied to business outcomes and then design learning around what enables or prevents those behaviors.
So instead of starting with “what topics should we teach?”, we emphasized a shift toward a behavioral design mindset:
- Define the key behaviors tied to business outcomes
- Understand what motivates the audience, and what makes those behaviors hard
- Clarify “what good looks like” with specificity
- Design tools and experiences that solve for the barriers and build on motivators
Start with evidence: audience research that reflects reality
Designing for behavior change requires understanding audience’s day-to-day reality. In our project with Incyte, we started by conducting both quantitative and qualitative audience research.
This research helped us understand how the role was being performed in practice, where teams felt confident, and where challenges were emerging. Our audience research included:
- Surveying all Associate Directors, Field Access to assess onboarding effectiveness, readiness, and early learning needs
- Conducting stakeholder interviews across key roles including Market Access leadership, Field Access, Compliance, Specialty Accounts, and Sales/Marketing
That mix of perspective matters. Because “what good looks like” in access is not determined by a single function. Instead, it is shaped by a range of perspectives, including commercial strategy, access, compliance, field collaboration, and the operational realities of the accounts being served.
A simple filter: what deserves training attention?
Audience interviews and survey generate a lot of data, priorities, friction points, motivations, and competing expectations. Without a method to prioritize, it’s easy to build a curriculum that tries to cover everything and lands nowhere.
We use the following criteria to help determine training priorities:
- Business objectives
- Audience motivations
- Daily priorities
- Clear challenges (what gets in the way)
- Specificity (can we define observable actions?)
If something hits all those criteria, it’s a strong signal that we should prioritize it in training. For example, collaboration between field access and sales teams often emerges as a priority because it directly influences patient identification, therapy access, and the consistency of support across regions. Clear expectations and structured interactions can significantly improve how those partnerships work in practice.
Designing learning solutions that drive real behavior change
When learning programs focus on behaviors rather than content alone, the solutions often look different. Instead of adding more training modules, the goal becomes designing resources and experiences that help people perform key interactions more effectively.
That meant creating resources and learning experiences that help individuals:
- Build strong working relationships early in a territory
- Clarify roles and responsibilities across functions
- Align on communication preferences and expectations
- Navigate escalation processes and collaboration workflows
Approaches like these address specific behavioral barriers and make effective collaboration easier to execute. When learning solutions are designed around how people work, capability becomes embedded in the workflow itself. And the ultimately the goal is to enable access professionals to collaborate effectively, navigate complex situations with confidence, and help ensure patients can access the therapies they need.
