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.
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:
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.
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:
In this way, clinical markers become the backbone of your ecosystem, enabling earlier, data-driven outreach to both patients and providers.
Precision matters, and budgets are finite. The most effective marketers look beyond demographics to combine clinical and consumer insights.
For patients and caregivers:
For HCPs:
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:
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.
If you’re only tracking scripts, you’ll miss the wins that make them possible. Focus on leading indicators—such as:
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.
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.