The evolution of HCP behaviour

Life sciences companies can drive growth by taking incremental steps towards improving their healthcare professional (HCP) engagements in this post-pandemic world, no matter their size or where they are on the digital maturity curve.

In our new reality, life sciences companies find themselves in a dilemma. They need to address the fundamental shift from a mostly face-to-face salesforce model to multi-models of engagement. The decisions — what they need to do, where to start, and how — becomes even more daunting when they consider the dynamic nature of HCP preferences, different types of engagement, level of company involvement, and other factors.

When we consider  Engaging the 5 HCP Archetypes, for instance, a digital native with an enthusiast persona may want a relationship with a company which excludes face-to-face interactions all together. On the other hand, a traditionalist persona may prefer to meet directly with a rep to obtain brand information but also like digital self serve options. Companies must take into consideration the fluidity of HCP behaviours and preferences as well as new channels like text messaging and chat bots.

So how does a life sciences company provide for a full range of engagement behaviours and channels while remaining coordinated, flexible, and nimble to changing HCP engagement needs? This is Pharma’s big dilemma — how to — drive growth in an era of multi-model transformation.

On March 23^rd, IQVIA Canada hosted a webinar to discuss digital transformation use cases and to provide best practices guidelines.

Challenges life sciences companies are facing

At the webinar, Manoj Hariharan (Digital Engagement Leader at IQVIA) and Mike Ness (Director Omnichannel Engagement at Data Ad) spoke about the challenges when companies are faced with trying to stand up and execute digital engagement models. Having partnered on multiple collaborative projects, they demonstrated the importance of properly obtaining and managing HCP consent. It is the logical first step and imperative to building tailored (omnichannel) HCP engagement experiences.

Over half of the session’s attendees¹ acknowledged that they had limitations with email outreach and almost half admitted they had little to no enterprise HCP consents. As HCPs evolve to desire more digital engagement, this is a real concern. Over a third of attendees reporting that they had no enterprise or brand solution to execute any form of digital journey. For many, building tailored experiences (i.e., including digital journeys) without enterprise consent is a challenge let alone making simple email campaigns work. In this respect, life sciences companies have some catching up to do compared to other industries.

Who is responsible for consent management anyways?

If omnichannel engagement starts with obtaining consent, who in the organization is responsible? Which part of the organization should be responsible for obtaining and managing consent - sales or marketing or both?

Consents collected through sales teams are generally cumbersome to manage. They are generally implicit consents which are dependent on salespeople’s personal relationships. Identification, organizing and collating implicit consents for deployment can be slow, especially when engagements need to be scaled up. They can only go so far whereas the best practice is to collect explicit enterprise consent.

Although marketing departments can make a big impact in driving growth, when asked if there were concerns about running a Head Office campaign with reps in the field, almost 40% of attendees answered yes. Can this hesitation to engage HCPs directly be attributed to siloed thinking or fear of disrupting the traditional rep to HCP relationship? As HCPs demand more self-service content and digital engagement, marketing and brand teams will have no choice but to provide these new channels. The key is to make sure that the enterprise manages consent, and all HCP touchpoints are coordinated. In this way, each part of the organization (marketing, brand teams, sales, etc.) can leverage the benefits from each other’s activities.

But is the dream of omnichannel limited to large organizations that have the resources and budget? Should different size organizations take different approaches to omnichannel strategies? Manoj and Mike addressed these questions using two use cases.

Challenges of launching a product during COVID-19

The first use case discussed involved a large multinational that was launching a new product just as COVID-19 was beginning to impact commercial activity in Canada. IQVIA and Data Ad helped deploy a multi-wave communication strategy that addressed several of the client needs. Included was a plan to incorporate an econsent mechanism within each touchpoint to gather consents for future use and the implementation of a platform as a service for HCP-level data to orchestrate digital and non-digital activities with their sales force.

The results of consent capture of ‘A’ Segment HCPs by the end of the 18-month program was an impressive 62%. This is double the capture rate expected by the majority of the webinar attendees when polled.

Start with a digital readiness assessment

The second uses case was focused on small and emerging life sciences companies that may have some of the same challenges as the mid to large sized companies but with a few differences. Emerging pharma companies may also lack field force coverage, scalable technology, marketing expertise or resources, and sufficient budget. For this industry sector, the key is taking incremental steps to keep moving forward.

Mike talked about the Crawl, Walk, Run approach starting with a digital readiness assessment. Briefly, this assessment includes 4 key areas:

1. Understanding your current state
2. Exploring technologies available
3. Evaluating enterprise email consent penetration
4. Mapping current and future HCP journeys

Essentially, a good solution starts with identifying the gaps that exist within these 4 areas. A digital readiness assessment is always a good starting point regardless of company size or position on the digital engagement maturity curve.

The path to digital readiness: from strategy to execution

Even companies that have an omnichannel strategy in place (with state-of-the-art technology and platforms) may still be unable to execute the strategy properly. They may not be creating meaningful experiences nor providing enough added value to incent HCPs to consent. When the audience was asked why this may be the case, 62% said that they don’t have the right resources and expertise to implement their omni-channel strategy properly. Outsourced expertise for the execution of omnichannel engagement services is a good option as it can provide valuable program feedback and engagement metrics.

On the other hand, for those lacking a clear strategy, the right technology, and/or resources, a white glove solution may be the best return on investment. In this scenario, IQVIA and Data Ad works with a client from strategy to execution. For example, this may start with journey mapping sessions to build out the current and ideal future state including a roadmap. The roadmap would show the sequence of events with engagement tactics and can leverage IQVIA/Data Ad technology and platforms until they choose to be self-sufficient.

We invite you to explore our solutions to support your omnichannel initiatives. IQVIA can help at every step with the knowledge of what works and what doesn’t.

¹ Representing 30 different life sciences companies