Point of care marketing is transforming pharma communication by reaching providers and patients at critical decision-making moments. In this blog, we'll explore the strategies, benefits, and real-world impact of point of care marketing, helping you understand how it can connect your message with the right audience when it matters most.
Is Face-to-Face Access to HCP Still a Thing?
Traditionally, drug manufacturers have counted on their sales reps to meet with prescribers in person to share product information. But this tactic has been on the decline for several years because:
- More than half of US physicians are employed by health and hospital systems which notoriously block sales reps from entering their buildings.
- Younger physicians enter the space each year, and these are people who grew up using technology way more than their older colleagues and may prefer to communicate digitally.
- COVID-19 forced many physicians into either hybrid rep meetings or to go all digital, and now they are used to their new system.
Embracing Point of Care Marketing
Because direct access is now so limited, manufacturers need to look for new ways to engage with prescribers, in the right place, at the right time, and with the most relevant message. In other words, brands need to embrace the digital transformation happening in the pharma industry. And the best way to transition is by adopting a Point of Care (POC) marketing strategy for their brands that focuses on communication via the prescriber's electronic health record (EHR) system.
By implementing an in-workflow messaging strategy you can reach prescribers in real time. After all, physicians report spending at least 50% of their time in the EHR, and this is where the biggest ROI opportunities lie for brands. Even more impactful is the ability to target a very specific audience that is likely to be interested in the message (more on this in a bit).
More than 90% of HCPs spend about 4.5 hours a day in the EHR. The ability to connect them to patient savings offers and other clinical and educational information in workflow through their EHR systems helps drive awareness and adherence, with brands seeing incremental script lift and usage as a result.
4 Core Tenets of HCP-focused Point of Care Marketing
Fortunately, point of care marketing provide effective and efficient options for pharma brands. Let’s briefly unpack 4 core tenets of an HCP-focused POC marketing plan.
1. The EHR is the Holy Grail of Point of Care Marketing
Reaching HCPs while they’re prescribing is the epitome of POC marketing. And to do that in today’s digital age, you’ve got to think “EHR.” Why? Because nearly all prescriptions are now written electronically. If you want to capture the eyeballs of HCPs in real time at the moment they select and prescribe a medication, the EHR is likely the best game in town.
As the ability to reach HCPs through EHRs has expanded, a new group of messaging providers has sprung to life. These companies establish message-delivery contracts with multiple EHR and health systems, bundle those contracts to create a multi-EHR network of reachable HCPs, and then offer that message delivery capability to brand teams as part of the marketing strategy. Top-performing vendors can deliver relevant messages at multiple locations and instances within the EHR:
- As prescribers log into the EHR
- While in the patient chart during the patient visit
- While e-prescribing competitive medications
- After generating an e-prescription (including auto-sending a copay offer to the pharmacy)
Importantly, new technology can trigger messages based on elements in the patient chart/summary. When a patient meets predetermined triggering criteria, a brand message appears in the EHR. Messaging triggers include:
- ICD-10 diagnostic codes
- Lab orders/results
- Medication history
- Immunizations
- CPT procedure codes
- Vital signs
- Geography
- Doctor’s specialty code
Your path forward as a marketer is to get connected with the messaging provider that best meets two key considerations: 1) they contract with EHRs that provide the broadest coverage of your target HCPs, and 2) they offer the most appropriate mix of messaging solutions for your brand and target HCPs.
2. Expanding Technology Will Continue to Offer New Options
Continuous growth in technology gives marketers an unending stream of more and better ways to get clinical information in front of prescribers. For example, starting in 2015, companies that had been using print materials in doctors’ offices began switching to large electronic tablets in waiting and exam rooms that displayed information for multiple brands. These digital wallboards had a smaller footprint within the doctors’ offices but delivered the messages with a much more dynamic effect. Today, new breakthroughs enable us to message HCPs in the EHR at the point of prescribing, deliver renewal reminders to HCPs within workflow, and much more.
In the years to come, expanding technology will offer more novel POC options. Top-tier marketers will keep their ears to the ground in order to stay fully informed on these new options and deploy those that make sense for their brands.
3. Medical Literature Reports on POC Too
It’s not just pharma that’s interested in changing prescriber behavior. An entire academic ecosystem is focused on point of care marketing. They refer to this practice as “nudging”. To dip your toe into the nudging pool, start with the University of Pennsylvania Nudge Unit (yes, there is such a thing). As advertised on their home page, “The Nudge Unit designs and implements scalable nudges to improve medical decision-making and patient outcomes.”
If you’d rather dive right into the literature, we recommend two excellent articles. First, “Effect of Nudges to Clinicians, Patients, or Both to Increase Statin Prescribing: A Cluster Randomized Clinical Trial,” by Srinath Adusumalli and colleagues in JAMA Cardiology. This piece serves two purposes: 1) it provides a review of the literature to date and 2) it reports on an effective nudge intervention. The second is “Systematic Review of Clinician-directed Nudges in Healthcare Contexts,” by Briana Last and colleagues in BMJ Open. This is a synthesis of the growing research applying nudges in healthcare.
4. This is Not Your Father’s Reach and Frequency Game (Think Omnichannel)
Many pharma marketers partner with their advertising agencies to lead their POC strategy so they can stay on top of emerging trends. Since agencies typically live in the world of reach and frequency advertising, they tend to lean in that direction in HCP-focused point of care marketing. But POC messaging cannot be pigeonholed into traditional banner-ad metrics.
On the contrary, as pharma companies began to professionalize their POC strategies, they first started with marketing plans and CRM journeys, then moved to multichannel marketing programs. Now the focus is on an omnichannel approach, which includes posters and digital wallboards, back-office TV, geo-targeted digital ads, and more.
The truth is point of care marketing fit into an omnichannel strategy like a hand in a glove. Top marketers select the POC techniques that make the most sense for their brand, implement them in the right sequence, and measure the impact as part of their ROI due diligence.
Case Study: Point of Care Marketing Works
Internal ConnectiveRx data confirms the effectiveness of POC marketing to HCPs. An analysis of recent messaging programs showed that HCPs respond to in-workflow messages that include current formulary information. A study of eight programs in which the messages included such information yielded an average 11.9% script lift. Additionally, a study of 27 programs that featured brand messages plus patient savings offers resulted in an average 11.5% script lift.
Properly Measuring HCP Engagement in the EHR
It's important to understand the difference between sessions and impressions when measuring HCP engagement with POC messaging. While an impression represents an opportunity to influence an HCP with specific information in the EHR, a session is the accumulated number of impressions served during an allotted timeframe.
Throughout a session, banners appear in real time when an HCP meets the triggering criteria and then remain on screen through the entire medication selection process.
Over the course of a patient visit, brands have the ability to send HCPs a range of targeted information including coupon/copay program details, clinical/study information, and changes in dosage/formula. All content for patients is generated by the HCP’s actions and sent via patient portal, print, or text message.
Measurement of a POC messaging program should be determined by overall program objectives. Test and control analysis is another methodology that can be highly effective for measuring POC messaging programs. By exposing an audience to a specific tactic while not exposing the same tactic to a subset of that audience, we can measure the test audience, providing a good read of resulting changes in prescribing behavior.
Digital Cookies Don't Affect POC Marketing
With the ongoing decline of digital cookies and growing concerns over data privacy, reaching your target audience through traditional digital advertising channels is becoming more and more challenging. As of recently, popular search engines like Apple's Safari, Google's Chrome, and Mozilla's Firefox are all working towards phasing out third-party cookies.
There are plenty of resources available to help digital advertisers prepare for this new reality before it happens, but what’s cool about the patient awareness space is it’s not affected by the demise of cookies. Point of care marketing has never required the use of cookies to target prescribers and their patients because the EHR is a self-contained record of a patient’s medical history that stays within the system, meaning the patient’s personal information is protected from any outsiders gathering and using their data for non-medical reasons.
Remember, being able to use personal data to target individuals for reasons other than what the user originally intended is a major reason cookies are becoming a thing of the past. However, service providers can use the EHR for its intended purpose, namely, providing timely clinical and educational information that will support patients along their medication journey.
The Importance of Point of Care Marketing in Today's Pharma Market
Point of Care marketing stands apart by effectively engaging healthcare providers at the crucial moment of care, supporting informed and timely treatment decisions for patients. Unlike traditional advertising, this targeted approach ensures that relevant information is delivered precisely when it is needed most, offering both clinical value and impactful results for brands. To learn more about how our Point of Care marketing solutions can benefit your organization, reach out to our experts on our Connect page.
