Patient Finding: Mission (Im)Possible

Finding people whom your brand can help is the mission of every pharma brand. It’s never easy, but it can be especially challenging for small and midsize companies with tighter budgets and limited resources, as well as for brands that treat rare diseases with small patient populations.   

It’s important to first identify your patients. The next job is to engage them. (Neither of these is easy.)  

Identifying  

“Patient-centricity” might be the most overused buzzword in pharma, but there’s never enough true patient-centricity for any brand. Prioritizing understanding your patients every step of the way is vital: from designing your clinical trials to developing your packaging to writing educational materials.   

Part of identifying patients is understanding what’s at stake. For many conditions, earlier diagnosis is associated with better outcomes. Disease progression can be prevented, halted or even reversed if it’s caught early. Reduced time to diagnosis isn’t just a positive brand metric; it can be lifesaving.   

Perhaps your patients are currently misdiagnosed. Perhaps they’ve been diagnosed properly but are taking a medicine that isn’t helping them sufficiently. Perhaps they know something is wrong but have not yet been diagnosed. Perhaps they don’t even know that their symptoms are signs of a treatable condition.   

Mapping out an accurate patient journey to understand where your potential patients might be and what their needs might be at any given point is not a new concept. The data that’s now available to power that process is new, though: diverse, current, accurate information that can be connected and analyzed effectively. It makes it possible to know the clinical profile of potential patients, to accurately prioritize and model patient segments and to interpret additional data to uncover unique patient populations, enhancing your marketing effectiveness in new ways.   

Activating  

Inertia is one heck of a drug, as an expert told EVERSANA recently: The biggest competition that a brand has is usually not another brand, but the patient doing nothing. Taking action is hard. But once people feel motivated, empowered and safe, they can take action to get the help they need.   

How can your brand help patients achieve those states?   

What are the touch points with your patients? How, where, when and why do you optimize those interactions? Is that process led by real-time information or guesswork?     

Today, predictive analytics allows brands to make informed decisions, optimize marketing strategies and achieve better outcomes by targeting the right audience, improving engagement with patients and physicians, and understanding behaviors.  

Finding the right patients can be life-changing for the people you can help – and for your brand too. EVERSANA INTOUCH can help. Not only do we have sophisticated, AI-powered data analytics capabilities (through ACTICS by EVERSANA), but we also have a quarter-century of expertise marrying clinical and creative brainpower to lead pharma marketing to new frontiers.