Pharma companies have made significant strides in omnichannel marketing, building programs that engage healthcare professionals (HCPs) across email, digital, social, and peer-to-peer platforms. However, many of these campaigns are often based on static HCP lists and pre-scheduled sequencing, leaving brand teams unable to adapt to clinical events as they occur.
Real-world data (RWD) changes that dynamic. By integrating insights from lab results, claims, EMR systems, and patient journeys, pharma companies can not only broaden their pool of target HCPs, but also engage them at the moments that matter most—whether it’s right after a lab order, at the time of diagnosis, or when care teams are changing their treatment plan. Here’s how RWD can help your team.
Refine the Ideal Audiences for Your Brand
Many omnichannel programs operate on static HCP target lists, which are usually based on physician prescribing behavior. These lists are not always frequently updated, and may fail to reflect more recent shifts in provider behavior.
At many pharma companies, brand teams are not necessarily involved in creating the HCP target list, and may not be provided with all the details of how providers were selected, segmented, or ranked. In some instances, the HCP target list is aligned with sales force coverage across geographic territories, as it was initially created to support in-person promotion.
While these lists identify known high-value specialists, they miss a wealth of other influential HCPs who shape treatment decisions—such as nurse practitioners, physician associates, pharmacists, and even primary care physicians (PCPs) on the patient’s care team.
Broaden Your HCP Pool with Care Team Mapping
By using RWD, a pharma company can map the entire care continuum for a patient, identifying all HCPs involved in diagnosis, treatment, and ongoing management. These providers may not be the primary focus of field outreach, but they are still important targets for non-personal promotion.
Tokenized patient-level data can connect the specialists on your target list with the PCPs, nurse practitioners, and pharmacists who support the same patients. Instead of targeting only the patient’s cardiologist, for example, an expanded list might include the patient’s PCP, as well as the PAs who help with patient management and can potentially also make prescribing decisions.
By adding new HCPs to the initial target list, a brand team can expand its sphere of influence. These providers can be targeted across multiple channels without diluting engagement with the primary target list. Brand teams can also rank care team members by treatment volume over time, which allows them to prioritize engagement with high-value providers, such as the top 20% of prescribers.
Focus On the HCPs Who Matter Most
In other instances, a pharma company’s initial HCP target list is not focused enough. Without RWD, pharma companies have no visibility into provider behaviors like diagnostic frequency, or into hidden patient identifiers, such as metastatic status.
By leveraging structured and unstructured data from EMR systems, open and closed claims, and lab orders and results, pharma companies can identify and prioritize HCPs for even the most elusive patient populations. Common targeting parameters include:
- Specialty: HCPs within a specific specialty or sub-specialty taxonomy
- Treaters: HCPs who treat p3atients with a specific condition, based on patient volume (ex. ICD-10 E11 codes for Type II diabetes)
- Prescribers: HCPs who prescribe a specific brand or its competitors (optional additional qualifiers for a specific condition/ICD-10, etc.)
- Lab Orders: HCPs identified via lab authorization behavior (e.g., ordering an A1C test, with optional additional qualifiers for the test results, patient age, evidence of a specific prior therapy, etc.)
- Coverage/Reimbursement: HCPs with a high percentage of patients on a particular payer plan
- Patient Demographics: HCPs who treat patients of a certain race, age, household income, or other socioeconomic factors
Use Real-World Events to Trigger Perfectly Timed Messaging
Once a brand team has fine-tuned its HCP target list, it’s time to leverage RWD to increase engagement across each marketing touchpoint, whether that be a moment of personal interaction with a field rep or the non-personal delivery of brand messaging.
As part of their omnichannel strategy, most pharma companies leverage programmatic brand materials—like web banners and display ads—to deploy on various platforms. Many also choose to advertise their brands on physician-focused online platforms like Skipta, the leading online social network for verified HCPs.
RWD amplifies the impact of these messages by providing dynamic signals that can trigger certain messaging cadences when an HCP is primed to be most receptive. For example, messaging triggers based on lab authorizations and/or test results can alert your brand team that an HCP has just tested a patient for a relevant condition. This is the perfect moment to share brand efficacy data or treatment guidelines.
Insights from EMR systems—including unstructured clinical notes—can also reveal persistent treatment challenges, pending biomarker testing, or new diagnoses. RWD triggers can feed into an omnichannel engine to sequence messages based on both clinical events and recent provider engagement. Consider these scenarios:
- An HCP orders a lab test relevant to your therapy → Trigger a follow-up email with key clinical data
- A physician engages with peer-to-peer content in an online specialty community → Serve a related brand message in their newsfeed within 48 hours
- A segment of HCPs misses a scheduled field rep visit → Send targeted digital content to ensure they still receive timely brand education
- An HCP visits your brand website to look up coverage data → Deliver dynamic formulary messaging to the HCP’s inbox via a branded email
By integrating RWD with clinical events and behavior-based triggers from online platforms, your team can deliver the right content—whether branded or unbranded—when HCPs are actively seeking information. Instead of a steady drip of the same brand messages, RWD transforms omnichannel campaigns into a precision-timed series of engagements designed to influence decisions and drive real-world results.
Learn how Skipta can help your team deliver the right content to the right HCPs in the ideal timeframe.
