Everywhere That Matters: Rethinking Omnichannel Strategy in Pharma

So hello everyone. My name's Mike Palladino. I'm joined by my colleague, Doug Besch. And we're in the omnichannel track, and today we're gonna discuss everywhere that matters, rethinking omnichannel for real impact. By brief intro, Doug and I are pharmacy nerds. We started our health care journey roughly twenty years ago. I cut my teeth around the corner at Temple Hospital and Thomas Jefferson Hospital in patient care. Doug worked in the outpatient pharmacy setting, and we made our way here at OptimizeRx. Doug leads our product and technology. I lead our client solutions team. And today, we're gonna cover three brief topics. And number one is why we do what we do, right? How do we bring education to patients in HCPs? Number two is I'm gonna walk through a case example of a real life patient, and then Doug is gonna tie it together and let everyone here know how we actually do this and how we improve patient care. So those are the three things we'll cover in the next twenty, twenty five minutes. So real quick survey. Not a huge audience, but I'd I'd love a raise of hand if you have used our healthcare system here in the United States, either yourself or as an advocate to a parent, a child, and have found it very challenging and confusing. And it's nearly everyone in the room. Right? And it shouldn't be that way, and shame on me, when I was in the hospital, some of my remit was discharging patients home safely, and we would give patients ten pages of discharge instructions with medicines and follow-up appointments and lab orders and imaging. And it was confusing to an HCP, so this is a problem we've been trying to solve for a really long time. And what we believe now is all of us in this room, nearly all of us, have access to knowledge and data and information. And I believe we can really start to improve the way patients understand their therapy, understand their care, as well as HCPs. So this this particular slide here is really the why. When we can target a patient like the individual on the left, and we can exactly understand who she is or what she's going through, and we can also target her HCP and understand that she is gonna see this type of patient, and we can educate them in a similar manner. Well, when they meet, they can have a very productive conversation and hopefully better patient outcomes. At the very least, we know there's gonna be more patient satisfaction. And when there's patient satisfaction, usually not far behind, better outcomes occur. So this is part of the presentation of the case example, and this one is very near and dear to me. This is my mother, Eileen. She is, pictured here. She is seventy six years old. My father, Michael, and my daughter, Aria. My twelve year old son, Michael, did not make the cut. Quick anecdote. I was speaking to my sister prior to this, and I gave her the overview. And she said, Why are you talking about mom? She's like, Talk about dad. My father smoked three packs of reds a day for forty years. And I said, Tracy, I'm like, We don't have enough time in this day to go through dad's patient journey. So my mom drew the short straw. Anyhow, from as long as I can remember, my mother has been extremely active. She exercises daily. She continues to do so. She watches her grandchildren multiple times a week. When she's not extremely active, she's looking at Facebook or watching the news at night. Okay? But this story starts roughly two years ago. She's been very busy playing a lot of pickleball, And she started to develop arthritic knees. So about two years ago, she goes to her ortho. It was a nurse practitioner. And he starts injecting gel shots into her knees to help with the pain. And it works. To no surprise, though, in a seventy six year old, she starts developing some bruising. Again, not unusual. But what happened very soon after in early twenty four is that bruising just wasn't around her knees. She started to bruise really easily when she would brush into a wall, when she put a knee brace on. It seemed excessive. So that signaled her to go to her PCP and really show some concern. Okay? They did some really normal blood work, and we noticed her INR was elevated. This is a a a blood work that we usually run for folks on blood thinners, but my mom's not on blood thinners. So why in the world is her INR high? Okay? We also noticed some abnormalities in white blood cells. So this just didn't make sense. But on the other hand, the provider's saying, hey, you play pickleball, you walk every day, you go to lunch with your friends, Your organ systems are all intact and look really good. So in health care, we say you don't treat the lab, you treat the patient. So it's almost like I couldn't disagree that they were saying, hey, Eileen. Like, everything is generally good. Just be happy. Thank God my mother is an extremely persistent individual and did not like those responses, okay? So that's where then she went through this year and a half, what we call diagnosis gauntlet. So she went back and back to her PCP. We counted over ten visits to a PCP in less than six months with these concerns. The PCP then sends her to a general hematologist and they say, hey, these white blood cells look a little high, but again, Eileen, everything seems okay. Right? Your GI tract is okay, your spleen is okay, your lungs look clear. I really don't have much to say, but you know what? Go to this other general hematologist, and we'll do a blood smear in your white blood cells and look at the morphology and see if there's anything happening there. So when Eileen then went to this other hematologist, they said, wow, something is going on with your blood cells. This is abnormal. She was referred to Cooper University Hospital, specialized hematoc and lymphoma at Cooper University Hospital, across the bridge in Camden. And that's where my mother was diagnosed with marginal zone lymphoma. Thankfully, this particular disease state is pretty indolent. It's usually diagnosed very later in life and the mortality rates are really low. You just kind of wait and watch and treat signs and symptoms as you go. Okay? Now, I outline this story not to just exploit my own family because everyone had their hands raised and been through situations like this. This was a year and a half, two year process. It was stressful on my mother. She felt uncomfortable. She saw ten PCPs, or I should say ten PCP visits, multiple general hematologist visits she went to, he mock appointments. It's extremely stressful. Okay? Again, thank thankfully that she's so persistent that she kept going. So I just share that story because that is the case example of if we use all of the information that we have and the technological advances we have today, I do believe we can shorten this diagnosis call it. And so at that point, I'll hand it over to my colleague, Doug, and Doug will walk through how we can exactly identify this population, message them appropriately, and hopefully have better outcomes. Awesome. Thank thank you, Mike. Thanks for that setup. And one thing Mike forgot to share about us is so we're both PharmDs, both MBAs, so have a lot of similar background in schooling, but he is an Eagles fan obviously, and I'm a Chiefs fan. So we somehow still get along very well. Big weekend is weekend. It was yeah, for sure anyways, but that's fun. So one of the things while we're on this slide is that is at the heart of every single example like this, is how could we affect Eileen's journey, at the end of one, but thinking about it from a much broader scope like we all need to, in this room. And so there's been three themes that have sort of popped up yesterday in some of the sessions that I was in, some of the sessions this morning. The same themes keep popping up at this conference. Not to a surprise, but I wanna go through a couple of them because I think as we go through some of how we approach things, those same themes bubble to the surface for us as well. So one of them came from the commercialization track. I'm not sure if anybody was in, yesterday morning, but there was two tracks, that were back to back. One was Syneos and then a panel that said start early. So start early. The one thing I wanna encourage all of you is that you actually already have the information necessary to start early when it comes to your approach to omnichannel, and it's something that we can we can help. And you're gonna see that. I'm gonna point that out here in a second. The second big thing was coordination was a word. So Al Riba with BMS mentioned that on his panel yesterday, And certainly there's a coordination effort that's needed across teams, but there's also a coordination effort when we're thinking about omnichannel. Hence, the title that Mike and I were focused on today of, we need to coordinate these channels together. Jim just mentioned this right before us, but we need to coordinate these and we also need to coordinate our audiences. So as we're thinking about our consumer audiences and our physician or HCP audiences, coordination should be at the foundation. And we find time and time again, they're two independent audiences. They're not coordinated. But to Mike's point, wouldn't it be great if we're actually simultaneously marketing to a coordinated audience where it's Aileen and actually Aileen's care team, versus some care team and some Aileen? And then the the last piece on here was, something, that was mentioned, also in the commercialization track yesterday, and it was just, add digital. It was a saying that said, hey. Every time we add digital, obviously, massive impact's happening. And I think as we look at it, I wanna combine that with something that Miles Lawless set up here just a few sessions ago, and that is add digital, but add the right digital, the digital that actually matters. And that's where we're gonna focus on what we can do, today here. So at the heart of all of it actually starts with audience, and you might say, Doug, why are we focused on audience? Well, it's because if we move on to the next steps of actually profiling an audience to understand more of where that actual audience is, we gotta make sure we have the right audience. So I'm not gonna hammer into the details of exactly how we'd pick the audience for Eileen, but it's a combination of diagnosis codes, procedure codes, labs. It's all of the real world data that we have access to, and we have plenty of the data. So this is, what our team actually takes all of that. We work closely to understand what the Eileen's look like, train models. I don't wanna overuse AI because I think every presentation's had it, but, yes, we should use machine learning to have an understanding of what patients look like, before they hit that large eligibility window. So for Eileen, eighteen month process before she finally gets there. If we can speed that up and shrink that, we get her to therapy much faster. So we start with the real world assets, then what we're going to do is we're gonna deploy AI engines. Our AI engines at Optmyze, we focus on two things. One is finding those eligibility clips for an outcome. So the outcome might be they're ready for your therapy. The outcome might be they're ready to be diagnosed. The outcome might be, we're looking for an office visit to get scheduled. So we we will train models for the outcome so that we find patients that are highly likely in the next care window for that outcome, and then we also do a second thing. We actually begin to, as we're looking at the HCP side of the house, we look at their care team and said, when are they next likely to interact with their primary care physician or their hematologist or their oncologist? So we'll actually begin to predict these care windows as well so that we can do a coordinated effort, and that is actually simultaneously build awareness for the consumer as well as build awareness for that consumer's care team in and around the time they're gonna be next care window. So out of that comes two different audiences. Effectively, it's the our privacy safe audiences that optimize. We call them micro neighborhoods, but they're privacy safe audiences that were out of that window of time, and, they're going to be the groups that we're gonna then profile. So we first have the right patient, mix of audience, and then we're gonna profile that. Same with the HCPs. We create, audiences based on timing that are their their prescriber groups, so the care team of the patients that we're actually, finding is highly eligible. And then lastly, one thing to mention is our audiences are living audiences. So when we have these models, they're continually being trained and they're continually putting out new care windows. So you have, changing audiences that are updating just automatically for you all based on the same criteria and definitions that you started with. So let's move on to the last piece. Why is profiling these audiences so important? Well, it comes to omnichannel. If we choose to just say we want to be in all places all the time everywhere, Some budgets can handle that, and certainly, certainly could be an approach, but one would argue that, your audiences really need to be profiled to understand that audience and where that audience can best, best be found. And so we end up going down this list and all of these, these profile these might be the types of questions we can help answer with this data is certainly the targeting. So we're looking at the right segments, and we wanna make sure that we understand what are the media, behaviors in those segments, where are they, where can we find them, certainly messaging. So part of what we find is what their hobbies and interests are. So, I know that's not the focus on here, but it helps inform what the content might actually look like to actually elicit that response, that Jim was talking about just right before us. And then there's channel selection. We'll go heavy into that. That's something that we work very closely on and that's why we say instead of everywhere, pick the ones for this audience that actually make sense. And it's gonna be different than for your next audience and your next audience, but we can help allocate, your dollars appropriately per each of the audiences. So that's budget allocation. And second, optimization is the last one on here that we inform too. So as we're beginning to see how these audience are actually performing, that goes back in and we can we can tweak all of it. Go ahead. I feel like yeah. You can do that. So then, what what we wanna go is into the consumer side, I actually want to show you some data. So Mike actually had his slides started with his mom on them and I was fascinated to see after we went through some of this data how close this was. So I decided to say, hey, let me pull, in our databases, why don't we pull some of this data and just give a teaser out for the crowd on MZL and what this cohort looks like. This happens to just be the female cohort. So we're not we're not looking at the audience at large, we're looking just, female cohorts. And what I found is very interesting is like news was seventy seven percent of this cohort is has a high likelihood for watching the news. So they watch the news also into documentaries into home improvement, which is interesting when you start to look at it. So this this helps tell us a little bit of a story. It doesn't tell us exactly everything, but a little bit of the content affinities that that the group has. Like, we can go to the next slide. Alright. So then then we further go down and and a question that I might have would be, well, what type of networks do they like to watch the news? That could be some helpful information, and what's interesting here is it's pretty equal between many of the main big networks which one would expect. So this helps me understand do I want to do direct buys, do I not want to do direct buys, how do I begin to start thinking about how I might be, allocating dollars to these these networks, but as far as news goes, really not probably public TV. I'm gonna focus on the main ones. Go ahead and mic to the next one. So lastly, kind of going on that that vein, the same vein of TV and what we're looking at there is, hey, how do they actually consume this? And what's surprising here is, thirty seven percent cable, thirty percent satellite, and then a very small number of actual streamers, which I often joke and will use my own mom as an example because for years I've been trying to get her onto a streaming service and she's stuck with Dish because it's familiar, she loves it, she overpays for it, all because that's what's familiar to her and she would probably be somewhere that's on here of saying, hey, satellite, makes good sense. So at the end of the day, one might think of a strategy here of saying, MVPDs might be coming to mind. So we've sort of moved from what are their content preferences to what types of networks in particular all to triangulate how might I be trying to reach the Eileen's of the world in this patient, cohort. So let's go to the next one, Mike. So moving out of TV, let's move into social media. Partly because Mike, had a reference to where Eileen's social media affinity is and at the end of the day, I'm not surprised that Facebook, that's pretty pretty widely, used, across many generations. So Facebook sure enough comes up. Overall, social media wasn't a massive use though and so if you were looking at dollars, you certainly would begin to say, I still probably worth putting some dollars here, but if I do I'm gonna get very particular in where I put my dollars. For this audience, this could be completely flipped for the next audience that you're that you're thinking through. But it gives you an idea. So Pinterest was one that I highlighted as well just as interesting because if you saw home improvement was one of the the content pieces at fifty nine percent have a high likelihood of watching home improvement. It makes sense that they've got Pinterest. Those two kinda seem to go along, from my perspective. So, Mike, why don't you, yes. This slide right here. So there was two things that that we went on, for Eileen that was really wild to me is Mike put this slide together, I did the analysis after the fact totally separate and what come came up was interesting that Eileen actually is a news watcher, she scrolls Facebook. So had we actually predicted this and started early long before we knew Aileen, we probably would have caught an Aileen in our campaign. She would have been in the mix of the audience. We probably would have been in the right spots that matters for Aileen, and we may have been able to actually impact, her eighteen month journey and make it much shorter. Great. Thank you, Doug. So we'll finish where we started the the three things we wanted to cover, why we do what we do. We wanna improve a patient outcomes. We wanna discuss and highlight how complex patient journeys are, and then Doug really wrapped it up nice in terms of finding the right audience at the right time in the right channel and being as efficient as possible. So that concludes this conversation. Any questions? We do have a few minutes. If there's no questions, we do have an OptimizeRx booth upstairs. Please swing by and say hello. Doug and I will be there, or we have many colleagues walking around today. So appreciate it. Enjoy your time here in Philadelphia.