Executive Interview: Patient Centricity in the AI Age

Hi there. My name is Rebecca Willimson. I'm the publisher of Fierce Pharma, and I'm here today with Doug Besch, chief product and technology officer at OptimizeRx. Doug, thank you for joining me today. A pleasure to be here, Rebecca. So tell me, from your perspective, what is the biggest shift happening in pharmaceutical marketing right now, and how is it reshaping the way brands engage with their audiences? I see the biggest shift right now, broadly speaking, as a move from being very product centric omnichannel marketing into AI powered patient centric promotion. And I think that shift is is happening as we speak right now. Even sensing it at the conference that we're at, that it's happening. And the reality is it's because of a desire to want to be more experiential for our patients and actually put on a good experience and be where they are. And in Optimize, we've been focusing heavily on this actually in the sense of empowering marketers with tools to understand where their people are. Because the trends are, I want to be where something new is, I want to be where something novel is, and sometimes we forget we want to be where our potential patients are. So the toolset that we put in there helps understand an audience and begins to help understand all of those channels and tactics that are relevant, not because they're new, not because they're neat, but because they're where our patients actually are. The same technology can be used for prescribers as well. As you can imagine, we want to be where they actually are as well. But that's the biggest shift, and AI is going to be central in actually empowering some of that deciding what channels should I be in, and the reason always is is because that's where my people are. There's been a lot of growth in point of care channels. What shifts have you seen there, and what are the upsides and downsides of the new wave of options? I think the biggest shift in point of care is the fact that the definition of point of care has broadened significantly. I'll put it in both buckets, a DTC bucket and an HCP bucket. So on the DTC side, the point of care is anything from intake software to screens inside of exam rooms and waiting rooms. Something that are all where patients will interact with those screens physically at a point of care or moments before they enter into that mindset of interacting with their prescriber. That point of care relatively has stayed static. On the prescriber side is where I've seen the definition really broaden. Certainly historically, Optimize has operated in the digital point of care tools on the HCP side with our EHR integrations and e prescribe integrations. But there's been this broadening to tools that are evidence based medicine now where the mindset of care is there. Whether I'm physically on-site at a provider's office or not, I'm thinking about care and I'm thinking about delivering care. It's really sort of broadened even beyond that now to if I'm doing anything at the physical point of care, I'm going to count that as point of care. And that's where the line starts to get a little too broad. We like to think that it's mindset is what we're trying to grab, so the best time to engage a prescriber is actually when they're thinking about care or in that thought process of delivering care. Now as pharma marketing becomes increasingly omnichannel, how can brands ensure their engagement strategies for healthcare professionals and patients are coordinated rather than siloed? And why is that coordination critical to driving meaningful The word coordination is like a buzzword for me around optimize in the sense that we've heavily focused on making sure that we're marketing and promoting to both known consumers and known prescribers, but truthfully, they're known and known to have a relationship together. And what we found is that when you actually are coordinating campaigns, so patients of prescribers you're marketing to, then you're actually way more likely to actually get a patient to start on therapy because both parties are coming together at that physical point of care, at that interaction moment, having been aware and educated on the very therapy or the condition. And it makes that conversation way more fruitful than if just one or the other. We're going to see a shift in the industry is that right now it's relatively siloed, where consumer teams are relatively siloed from prescriber, our HCP teams. I think that we begin to see more collaboration so that we can coordinate audiences. And a lot of the tools that we're focused on building is around collaborations. We start with the patients first and then we grab those patients' care team when we start to contemplate who should we be marketing to and promoting to on the HCP side, which allows us to facilitate those interactions. We're not the only company. There's others that are that are using the same buzzwords, collaboration, and I do think that that's gonna be something that's the wave here moving forward. So my closing question for you, tell me what separates brands that truly break through from those that simply add to the noise? I think it really comes down to the two things we've talked about already, which is one, it's the brands that decide my omnichannel or channel selection strategy is going to be where the people are that I'm trying to get to. And then the second piece that's gonna cause to those brands that are breaking through are gonna be the ones that are actually coordinating campaigns. So they're reaching across teams, working with either DTC or HCP team, and making sure that they're coordinating their efforts so that they're setting up those conversations to occur that are gonna be way more likely to actually cause conversion. Thank you so much for joining me today. Alright. Thank you.