On a Quest to Find HCPs? Three Things You Need to Improve Your HCP Targeting

A snowflake in a blizzard. A needle in a haystack. A drop in the ocean. When you’re trying to find something elusive among countless similar things (such as the right healthcare professional [HCP]), it can seem like an impossible odyssey.

In storybooks and movies, people on missions like those get wise guides. Or maybe an enchanted compass or a magical map. If nothing else, they get a loyal animal companion to keep them company.

Real life, though, can be a lot more prosaic: fewer sidekicks in jaunty costumes and more late nights at the laptop.

Identifying the right HCPs who work with the appropriate patient populations for your brand can feel like an uphill challenge, with no supernatural help to lend a hand. But while we haven’t seen a lot of talking animals, a lot of powerful help is available today.

• Data-driven analytics can use AI and machine learning to combine disparate, real-time, real-world data sets.
• Clinical and data science experts can interpret those findings to provide pragmatic insights.
• Not only can HCPs be identified, but their prescribing and referral behavior can be predicted with a high degree of accuracy, as can their propensity to encounter un- or misdiagnosed patients.
• From there, these individuals can be engaged proactively, strategically and personally. All this enhances prescribing decisions and improves patient outcomes.

That may sound a bit like magic. So, how could it work? Here are three things to look for as you build and bolster your HCP targeting efforts:

• Purpose-built tools: Look for AI-powered solutions that were designed from the ground up with pharma in mind, not retrofitted from more general purposes or cobbled together to suit a new use case.
• Hyper-specific activation: The best targeting imaginable won’t help if you don’t then have the ability to manage specific sub-segments, accurately scale content personalization and dynamically update your media plan.
• A deep bench of subject matter experts: No tool can give you wisdom (outside of the storybooks). Experts with clinical and data science understanding across multiple therapeutic areas and technology platforms are vital to get from data to insight.

Explore these case studies to discover how we’ve achieved HCP identification and activation for clients:

• Creating a predictive model of real-world evidence that uncovered 4,800 undiagnosed patients and 3,000 treating HCPs with 94% accuracy
• Using switch prediction to identify three patient personas and 1,350 patients with a 75% probability of switching, as well as the 1,200 unique HCPs treating these patients, which led to 80% of new patient starts coming from those identified HCPs
• Using more than a dozen data sources and machine learning to identify 1,270 HCPs to target, a campaign that resulted in $29 million in incremental, long-term revenue after one year

Even if you’re not living a storybook tale, there’s help to be found on your quest.