Oncology Marketing Strategy: A Breakthrough Case Study in HCP+DTC Alignment

Welcome. So a lot of you at this conference today are gonna be talking and hearing about, HCP and DTC communications and the why behind it. Mike and I will discuss with you today how one client actually saw results by synchronizing their marketing efforts. Raise your hand if you know or or you yourself have been affected with cancer. Unfortunately, this disease does not discriminate, and it's this disease that has touched us all. For me personally, I've had a very close friend at age forty three diagnosed with pancreatic cancer last week. Margaret is young. She lives a healthy lifestyle and has three kids and a husband that rely on her. The stats are real. Over two million new cancer cases will be diagnosed in the United States this year. More than six thousand lives will be lost. And behind every number is a patient, a family, a caregiver, and a care team trying to navigate this awful disease. Oncologists today are stretched thin. They're seeing up to twenty patients per day trying to stay up to date with the latest clinical guidelines and the latest drug approvals. The result, information overload and time pressure, making it hard to consistently navigate the right treatment option for the right patient. With every new diagnosis, it's like navigating a maze. Second opinions, clinical trials, insurance approvals, and multiple specialists. For many patients, progress stalls. It can take months to get on these life saving treatment options. And every four week delay in treatment increases mortality risk by six to thirteen percent. That's the difference between life and death. The cost of inefficiency is measured in lives and not just numbers. Everyone here today is here because we're all looking to solve the same thing. You wanna make a difference. This client was invested in doing that, and they took a joint HCP and DTC approach with their marketing. And Mike is gonna walk you through the results. Well, thank you, Jen. We talk with brands all the time, and most of those conversations go something like this. You do an HCP and DTC. Yes. We're doing them in a coordinated fashion. And then when you pull back one layer, there's no coordination at all. HCP and DTC marketing are happening in silos. Surprisingly, even though the talk is big talk, we're coordinating our campaigns. And so that kind of begs the question, if many brands are not doing this yet, is it even necessary? And what I think is really cool about this case study is I'm kind of a skeptic of whether we need to do this at all, but we kind of prove that it is true. You have to coordinate your tactics. When we talk about conversations with, between patients and doctors, we imagine this hypothetical scenario where a patient has been advertised to in DTC channels and then he comes into his doctor's office and says, hey doc, Isn't this the right drug for me? And doctor Smith on the right hand side says, why, yes. I just received an ad for that very same drug. It's the right drug for you, Matt. Do we really think that conversation exists? I can't think of a time that I've gone into my doctor and thought I knew the right drug for me. Even if it's a simple thing, I kind of trust my doctor to make the right decision. But this is what we're hanging our hat on. If we think that there are synergies between HCP and DTC, it's because we think this conversation exists. And I was a skeptic. But by coordinating tactics in this particular example, we saw that not only does this conversation exist, it yields a multiplicative effect on overall campaign success driving new patients and new scripts for the brand. So, thinking about this patient doctor example, let's just take Matt and his patient journey. Matt is a cancer patient going through various rounds of treatment, and let's say that orange moment is the moment that he's going to be a good fit for the brand that we're working with here. That's the moment that if we know ahead of time, we can try and sequence some communication to Matt and to doctor Smith and hopefully see those synergies. What we'd like to see is if we know that moment in the future, we can start sending messages to doctor Smith in HCP channels, let's say, in the electronic health record before Matt comes into the office such that when he gets there, now, doctor Smith will feel confident enough to prescribe that drug. And if we know that further ahead of time, we'll then be able to coordinate the tactics and drive Matt into that appointment with DTC communication so that maybe this conversation could happen. Matt might be able to see the communication ahead of time about the brand and ask doctor Smith when he gets there. And the way that we do this is through a patented process that we have at OptimizeRx called DAP or Dynamic Audience Activation Platform. Love an acronym. This, platform purports that the most important thing for marketing is also the most important thing for health care, which is just let's forget about what would make the most money for the brand and start with which patients in the US are good fits for the drug, whether or not we're going to drive success for the brand. If we know those patients going back into history, we can then build a model to predict which patients they will be in the future and when they're gonna be seeing their doctor. And on the top hand side of the slide here, we're gonna communicate with those doctors in their HCP channels. And on the bottom of the slide here, by sequencing these together, we're gonna communicate with those patients as well using privacy safe technology in their DTC channels. With the idea being starting with the beating heart of that brand eligible patient, these tactics will form synergies with each other. So did that happen? For this brand, here's an example of what would not have hap or what, would have happened if these were run-in silos. We would have run an HCP marketing campaign, let's say, an electronic health record banner ad that would have yielded pretty, small, but this is this is big for health care marketing, point four three per one percent increased script lift for every message we sent. On the HTTP side, that's pretty big per message. On the DTC side, if this campaign was run-in a silo, we would expect point zero zero three increased script likelihood. That sounds very small, and it is, but DTC marketing is very diffuse and that's why it's privacy safe. These campaigns will run-in silos. The combined expected effect would be point four three four percent. That's what happened. That's what probably should have happened. But here's where it it's crazy. It's magical. For some reason, I don't understand why one plus one did not equal two. One plus one equaled three. Point four three one plus point zero zero three equaled in this case point four four eight increased grip likelihood across the brand. So that's the outcome. That's what happened. But why did it happen? Going back to that conversation, it must have been real. The HCP campaign in market made the DTC campaign better. The DTC campaign in market made the HCP campaign better. These actually experienced synergies. This was real. So where's the mechanism of action if that outcome was one plus one equals three? It was this. It was the conversation. How else could that synergy have happened if not Matt talking to his doctor about the drug? This conversation did happen and it proves that this can be marketing driven, it can be ad driven, and it does exist. And why that's so cool to me is because it's one of the few cases in health care where what's best for business is also what's best for the patient. If Matt ultimately gets on drug, that's doctor Smith making a correct decision for Matt. And in this case, we've gotten him more patients like him on the drug and earlier on the drug. And even more than the just those outcome metrics, the predicate metrics that would lead up to that script impact also increased in this campaign. Because consumers in the program were twice as likely to then visit their doctor after they'd seen the ad. And those that were in the synchronized portion of the campaign where their HCP saw the banner and the DCC, campaign, those patients saw the banner, they were three times as likely to convert. That's an insane lift. And that one plus one did not equal two. That one plus one in our case equaled two point o eight percent. But, hey, eight percent synergy is still synergy. It's still magic happening because these tactics were coordinated. And again, I come back to the fact that it's not really about the impact for me, it's about the patient. What we did right for the patient here was good for business. But as Jen was saying, the stakes are high. More patients like Matt got on the right therapy for them, and the patients that were already on therapy got it earlier. And to me, that ultimately brings it home. Do we need to synchronize HCP and DTC marketing? I would say not only do we need to, for Matt's sake, it's mandatory. And with that, my name's Mike Grussell. This is Jen Dwyer. Thanks for your time. Thank you.