5 Essential Marketing Moves That Drive Early Intervention in Healthcare

Early intervention changes lives, but it’s not always straightforward. Once symptoms appear, people can spend weeks or even months moving between primary care, tests, and specialist visits. These small delays add up, raising risk, increasing costs, and getting in the way of care coordination.  

The good news: marketers already have the tools to spark earlier diagnosis and action, but only if we optimize them the right way. In our recent Fierce Pharma webinar, 5 Essential Marketing Moves That Drive Early Intervention, my colleague Maria Cipicchio and I shared five practical ways to help patients, caregivers, and HCPs move sooner, together. 

Move 1: Find the Pre-Diagnosis Audience 

A significant amount of pharmaceutical marketing only begins after a diagnosis or prescription. But patients may be suffering significant health challenges long before a name is put to their condition. 

Brands focused on early intervention flip this approach. Using privacy-safe, deidentified data, they can find clinical signals upstream—like: 

• Lab orders or abnormal results 

• Imaging or procedure CPT codes 

• Referral patterns that precede diagnosis 

I’ve spoken about this before, but my mother Eileen spent nearly a year trying to get a confirmed diagnosis for what turned out to be Marginal Zone Lymphoma (MZL). Along the way, her records showed multiple abnormal tests and specialist referrals—signals that appeared months before her diagnostic code. 

When marketers use these early clues to define medically driven profiles, they can target patients sooner and shorten the journey to care. 

Move 2: Align Patients and HCPs with a Shared Data Backbone  

The most successful life sciences marketing strategies synchronize two audiences. For early intervention, this means undiagnosed consumers and the HCPs most likely to see them next. The key is connecting patient and provider data within a privacy-safe framework. 

When brands use a pre-diagnosis medically-driven consumer profile as their “north star,” every marketing choice—from segmentation to media spend—ties back to clinical signals. 

Example: Alzheimer’s disease 

According to an analysis of publicly available studies and data, conducted using ChatGPT on Oct. 7 2025, about 3-5% of people with mild cognitive impairment and dementia may be eligible for disease-modifying therapy, yet less than 1% actually take them. While access plays a role, and lack of biomarker testing is a major barrier, this is also a perfect use case for marketing. Here’s what a strategy might look like: 

• Developing a medically-driven consumer profile, using signals like a recent PCP visit with cognitive screening, standards of care for dementia or MCI, increases or lapses in PCPs visits, etc. 

• Use those same medical markers to identify the extended care team, such as HCPs conducting more screenings, or who have the highest volume of patients that meet the pre-diagnosis profile, so you can see the overlap between your consumer and provider audiences. 

• Layer in channel and content preference data for both audiences, so you can place media based on their actual consumption patterns. 

In this way, clinical markers become the backbone of your ecosystem, enabling earlier, data-driven outreach to both patients and providers. 

Move 3: Reduce Reliance on Demographics Alone 

Precision matters, and budgets are finite. The most effective marketers look beyond demographics to combine clinical and consumer insights. 

For patients and caregivers: 

• Use real consumption patterns for your medically defined segment to guide the media mix across social, programmatic, CTV, and community touchpoints. 

• For example, we could look at specific media preferences for women with symptoms of MZL, like my mother, and use that as our basis to prioritize channel placements. 

For HCPs: 

• Remember that providers are consumers too, and active across social, programmatic, and other channels.  

• Don’t overlook point-of-care/EHR channels. While often viewed as “last-mile Rx,” EHR prompts can spark awareness early—nudging clinicians to review updated guidelines or diagnostic algorithms at the right moment. 

Move 4: Coordinating CTAs across the Pre-Diagnosis Funnel 

When it comes to early intervention, conversion isn’t one step. Every brand has a pipeline of “next-best actions,” from a specialty referral, to diagnostic workup or biomarker testing, to treatment consideration. As you build your strategy, each step should be identifiable in data and carry its own KPI and CTA. 

If we consider our hypothetical use case for Alzheimer’s early intervention, here’s what our CTAs could be across the funnel journey: 

• Consumer top-of-funnel: “Concerned about memory changes? Take a validated screening and talk to your PCP.” 

• Caregiver mid-funnel: “Ask about biomarker testing and what it means.” 

• HCP early stage: “New screening recommendations: which patients should you refer now?” 

• HCP mid-stage: “Order biomarker X before next visit to streamline therapy decisions.” 

When planning your CTA cadence, remember that patients’ needs and conditions can change rapidly. A static NPI list or six-month-old consumer segment won’t have the responsiveness needed to catch inflection points in real time, so consider a more dynamic approach to audience creation. 

Move 5: Measure What Matters (and Optimize Relentlessly) 

If you’re only tracking scripts, you’ll miss the wins that make them possible. Focus on leading indicators—such as: 

• Referrals to specialists 

• Diagnostic test orders 

• Biomarker completion rates 

• Documentation of diagnostic criteria  

For example, we recently supported a physician referral program for a rare pediatric disease, educating generalists inside the EHR to refer to pediatric endocrinologists for genetic testing. As a medical affairs program, it was focused on disease education, not necessarily a specific branded treatment, and a great example of KPIs we can look at for early intervention programs. 

Instead of looking at just script lift, we looked at overall referral rates, referrals to pediatric endocrinologists, and genetic testing rates. Using test-and-control exposure designs to prove causality, we could see clear signals that the campaign accelerated the right clinical steps, then reallocated spend toward the channels and messages that move those precursors fastest. 

Bringing It All Together to Drive Early Intervention 

By optimizing their marketing in the right way, pharma brands and their agency partners can shorten time to the right care. Whether you adopt one or more of these “moves,” the reward is twofold: better patient trajectories and a more defensible, data-rich story about marketing’s impact on health.