Reaching the Always-On Healthcare Professional: Marketing within the Clinical Workflow

Let’s face it, today’s healthcare professionals are busier than ever. Physicians, for example, continue to have their workload divided between seeing patients, inputting data, and staying on top of new medical advances or treatments. It used to be that marketers engaged with HCPs through a pre-programmed cadence with the same broad message and most often delivered in person by a sales rep. But today, with real time data, marketers have the opportunity to serve HCPs the messages which fulfill the need they have in the moment, sequence them through a journey – whether online or offline – and match those messages to their mindset. The question then is, “where do HCPs spend most of their time?”

The Heart of the Clinical Workflow

HCPs are busy. Not just with providing care to patients, but with the electronic health records (EHR) system that governs how they gather and organize patient information. And working in the EHR isn’t an activity that’s done after the patients are seen or the day is over. HCPs often carry an e-detailing device or laptop from visit to visit, entering diagnoses and other information about each patient they see. This is the heart of the clinical workflow, the one system where the HCP spends an inordinate amount of time and the one place where targeted messaging can have the most impact.

Ensuring your messaging strategy hits the mark with HCPs

But targeting messaging within the EHR doesn’t have to be just another shotgun approach. With the right strategy, the right data, and the right platform, you can target messaging to a variety of different touchpoints within the EHR, each offering their own level of engagement and presenting different opportunities for the brand. Some of those include:

• Login screen. Based on interactions throughout the EHR, a pharma or medical device brand might show messaging related to those behaviors, such as the most recent diagnosis entered for a patient.
• Keying in the diagnosis. While the HCP is entering a diagnosis, messaging can be delivered to influence specific treatment selection.
• Writing the prescription. At the moment they’re writing the prescription, the HCP can be shown messaging regarding educational resources on new dosage (which can be provided to the patient), distribute co-pay support, and even offer a 90-day prescription refill on the brand-name drug if there is also a generic option.
• Patient interaction. When the HCP is interacting with the patient, perhaps showing them diagnostic information within the EHR, messaging about treatment, such as discount or other financing options, can be displayed to facilitate a conversation between HCP and patient.

The EHR does not require you to flood all the available messaging spots with the same message. With the right data, you can identify the mindset by moment and tailor messaging against behavior to ensure improved reception and engagement.

Taking advantage of an expanding clinical workflow to ensure the best audience quality

Although the HCP spends a lot of time in the EHR, they also spend time on websites looking at information about treatments and drugs. That behavior can be a powerful catalyst for targeting messages not only on those websites but also following up later on in the EHR. Doing that, though, requires a tool for including sequential messaging into a unified omnichannel engagement strategy combined with a database of first-party data.

PulsePoint provides the strongest point of view of every HCP with technology to streamline engagement for clinical impact. PulsePoint’s digital to HCP identity linking methodology is the only way in the market to find, activate, and measure authenticated HCPs everywhere, with the largest fully consented provider identification numbers (NPI) coverage in the market. Imagine being able to target over 3.2M verified HCPs with active and named opt-in consent. PulsePoint also unifies the HCPs’ real-life identity and profile with their online behaviors to give deep understanding and insight about what messaging might resonate best with the HCP within the different EHR environments.

With all that combined insight into HCPs, you can target NPIs on various EHR platforms and trigger communications based on a variety of identifier and treatment codes including ICD-10 and NDC codes. 

Making it easy to add EHR targeting to your marketing toolbox

Capitalizing on the opportunity to deliver targeted messaging within the EHR system which is connected to a larger HCP engagement strategy, is not something that you can do by yourself; you’ll need a media activation platform which is integrated into the largest EHR environments as well as all other formats and channels. Through simple and easy-to-use interface elements, you should be able to quickly identify existing campaigns and brand assets for EHR targeting, ensuring brand continuity across marketing channels. 

PulsePoint offers you that single ad technology platform to manage your omni-channel digital marketing strategy. From CTV to web to the EHR, you can take advantage of a myriad of digital channels without having to utilize different tools or services. This enables you to include brand assets already being delivered in other programmatic campaigns within EHR, increasing efficiency and productivity and helping with measurement and reporting. A single platform for all of your digital marketing means you can do side-by-side comparisons of campaigns across channels to understand where messaging is working and where it isn’t.

Your digital marketing platforms shouldn’t just provide you the opportunity to deliver messaging in more locations. They should also make you a smarter, more effective marketer. That requires not just integrations between your DSP and HCP systems like the EHR, but the data to better segment, analyze, and ultimately target those messages. And as the digital marketing landscape changes, being able to validate the audience quality of HCP data sets will be critical to ensuring the continuity of messaging reaches the intended target.

Do you know what you need to know about HCPs to target them effectively? We do.

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