Bridging the engagement gap between healthcare professionals and pharma companies

Despite an increasing focus on the HCP engagement, many pharmaceutical companies are still engaging with healthcare professionals/providers via isolated and disconnected silos. Delivering HCP engagement in silos can significantly damage the overall healthcare professional’s experience.

“We predict that through 2020, silos of customer engagement will be one of the top three leading causes of customer dissatisfaction for enterprises across all industry segments.”- Gene Phifer, VP and Analyst at Gartner.

Understanding the Challenge: Because the silos are disconnected, when a healthcare professional journey reaches a silo boundary, they are forced to change context, re-enter data, go back in the process, create a work-around, or completely start their journey all over again. Although silos are a natural outcome of the way modern pharmaceutical companies are organized, the poor HCP experience that they create can turn their customer into ex-customer. Some healthcare professionals become frustrated and abandon their journey altogether, taking their preferences elsewhere, some resort to negative posts on social media, leading to long-term impacts on pharmaceutical companies’ revenue.

Many pharmaceutical companies engaging with healthcare professionals on various touch points/channels/devices, but very few have orchestrated journeys across all their interaction to deliver a unified digital experience. The big questions every Pharma company should have - How they can fully digitize Interactions with healthcare professionals to improve their experience and enhance their revenues.

Delivering the Solution:

The obvious solution is to break the HCP engagement silos down. However, it’s difficult to knock down the silos of HCP engagement completely but we can definitely optimize it to receive better outcomes.

Instead, bridging the silos of engagement between healthcare professionals and patients, allows patients and healthcare professionals to seamlessly transition along with their journeys, improving patient experience and allowing for cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.

We can bridge the silos with 3 key points: User experience, Process & Data

Bridging the silos of customer engagement leads to a seamless transition across channels and devices. Moving from a disconnected, siloed customer experience to a truly unified customer experience is an important step in maintaining and improving the customer experience. This may be nothing new, but the difference now is that it is no longer a ‘nice to have’. It has become a necessity for survival. - Gene Phifer, VP and Analyst at Gartner (Healthcare KOL)

Concluding Thoughts

One of the great pluses of working in Mylan Pharma Marketing is knowing that the products we’re promoting make a real difference in 7Bn people’s lives. Pharma industry produces and distributes products that save lives and alleviate suffering. And yet, with that status comes great responsibility. To the extent that marketing tactics enhance awareness of the availability and utility of potentially life-saving medications, the greater the benefits to public health. When you, as a marketer, adhere to the marketplace’s new rules of engagement to connect and engage with HCPs appropriately and meaningfully, you help to create and nurture the educated healthcare professional—a noble endeavor, which will help a greater number of patients in the long run.

By building intelligent marketing IT ecosystems and understanding HCPs preferences, pharmaceuticals companies can create more engaging and fruitful digital relationships with healthcare professionals.

 Relate. Engage. Grow.