Unlocking HCP and DTC Alignment Through Precision Patient Centricity

Hi. Thank you for coming and listening to the presentation today. My name is Teresa Greco. I'm the chief commercial officer for OptimizeRx. And today, I wanna cover a highly relevant topic and provide insight into how to drive alignment between health care provider and consumer messaging by taking a truly patient centric approach. Shift to health care digital marketing has been happening for quite some time, and was initiated as a means to supplement field sales engagement with providers and consumers by providing educational information that's relevant for life saving and life enhancing treatments. The lack of field sales access during the COVID pandemic actually really materially accelerated the shift, to more digital engagement. And in twenty twenty two, the pharma industry leapfrogged tech to climb to the second place on the ad spend leaderboard with the huge surge in digital engagement that occurred during that time. This digital transformation has really created a more highly level of competition within the marketplace, and has made strategic digital marketing execution truly paramount for brand growth. It's a critical part of any brand strategy. And while the heightened digital engagement has created a bit of patient and physician saturation by creating difficulty with kind of cutting through the noise, as I like to say, with clickbait and lots of miss, misinformation out there, It's also created an enormous opportunity to reevaluate omnichannel next best action strategies, rethink, reimagine, and re reinvent ourselves in this space. Today, we're still working within marketing silos for the most part, not universally, but pretty consistently. And we're thinking about and executing campaigns for HCPs and DTCs as separate and distinct audiences with completely different tactics and sometimes different messaging. Now different messaging may be appropriate because you want one to be a little more clinical, one to be a little less clinical based on the target. But having them align is critically important, and it's even more so as as digital engagement is growing. The tactics today, we still continue in this way because they're still essentially delivering market impact. But the question is, are we optimizing the highest potential impact? So to answer that question, we actually, did a little market research. So based on an independent survey where we had a hundred and seventy physicians across multiple specialties and primary care, we found a couple interesting insights, which I'll share here. First, twenty seven percent of HCPs said met patient medication requests were generally appropriate. However, the drawback is that patients aren't able to determine if the advertised medication is a good fit for them in their journey. If they have concomitencies where that medication may not be appropriate, their own second or or third line therapy and the patient is a first line therapy, etcetera. Lots of different things that may make it not a good clinical fit. Second, seventeen percent that DTC said that DTC marketing has significant benefits for patients. Hcps really appreciate proactive and engaged patient set, and they actually say that more there's a more favorable response in the outcome where the patient themselves have certain demographic characteristics like higher education, higher socioeconomic status, may have more positive, attitudes and outlook toward health care in general. And certainly when patients have, severe or acute c symptoms, they tend to be more engaged at those points. But all in all, HCPs are saying that DTC marketing is beneficial in the overall health care process. And lastly, one of the things shared was that HCPs said when they, you know, when they have limited time to spend, and we all know they do, it can be very frustrating for them when they're spending some of their time in the room with the patient correcting misinformation, which is a distraction from, providing solid patient care. However, there's some good news here. The survey also revealed something really intriguing that I think shows us an interesting path forward. Majority of physicians agreed or strongly agreed that when brand information is aligned across the HCP and the patient, it actually has the benefit of streamlining therapy start and improving care. Right now, only thirteen percent agreed that the alignment is strong and that we're doing a good job. So we have an opportunity here to really do a better job of of alignment of that messaging. So what does that look like? Well, here's what happens when you can close the gap with patient and physician messaging occurring in a synchronous way. So there's benefits for everyone. When you create the environment to synchronize those messages being delivered to patients and their care teams, you're essentially driving more informed conversations about therapy choices, which this can lead to faster treatment initiation, longer adherence, and ultimately improved outcomes. The ultimate goal is delivering content that is relevant for the recipient, whether it's a patient or a clinician that can drive conversations that convert to some type of actionable event. Okay? So how do we get there? To align HCP and patient to the patient journey. Simply put, let's just start with the patient. We start by building marketing approaches that profile and segment and target both with information based on current or anticipated patient care windows so we know which segment or, you know, patient segment or profile we're targeting and when to do so. So timing is a really important element here. Secondly, embracing omnichannel platforms that can turn that patient centric audience strategy into an actionable content strategy that allows for the ability to prioritize channels that are preferred individually by either the HCP or the patient. So how do we do this? Effective communication. Effective communication for patients needs to have several components to it. Right? It needs to be compliant, relevant, timely, and personalized. Compliance, anytime you're engaging at a patient level, HIPAA and state legislation and guidelines are foremost for any strategy in patient outreach. We must, must, must be sure to maintain patient privacy and adherence with the evolving regulatory landscape. And it is evolving very, very much so. Patients are more than their disease and compliance is extremely critical in this process. Second aspect is being relevant. Reaching patients precisely means taking a holistic view of their experience. So it's not just looking at their clinical profile or brand eligibility, but it's looking at additional factors that impact their relationship with the health care system. Things like insurance coverage, attitudes toward health care, education, and and more. It also means considering their behavior as consumers and making sure their channel strategies reflect their media preferences, including things like display and audio and social and streaming as examples of means of engagement and considering those media preferences along with the other dimensions of that patient as a patient and as a general consumer. Timeliness. Delivering the message to the patient and the caregiver at the appropriate time in their care window is more likely to yield the positive outcome. And then, of course, everyone benefits from personalized messaging. So the more personalized, the better the response. So patients are seeing information that more closely relates to their situation, their disease state, their disease awareness. Otherwise, it may just lead to patient confusion, and that's not what we're trying to to, to accomplish. Okay. Once we've identified the appropriate patient, as we just talked about, mapping that patient to their treating provider in a way to coordinate your engagement with that provider really helps get to the point of closing the gap on the communication between the parties. So traditional physician targeting, you know, tied more to specialties, high prescribers. In other words, you know, using what has already happened to determine your outbound strategies. You can use a combination of factors to predict providers that are more likely to have a brand eligible patient, but acknowledge that physicians are also consumers and their brand perceptions are influenced by more than what they're learning at a conference and journals and sales reps. So thinking of the patient or the, HCP as as a clinician and then also as a consumer and putting all the different elements together as part of an outbound strategy. But we also have to be mindful that physicians as a general audience are extremely overloaded with information. So if it's not relevant to the patient in front of them, it could just come across as noise and could be marketing waste, which we don't want. So what next? So patient centricity really can bridge this, the gap and synchronization of of messaging. I mentioned a couple of these things before, but it's really important, so I'm gonna restate a few things. So the marketing impact will come down to information, relevance, and actionability in the context of the individual patient. So relevance is defined by the patient's clinical profile. So it accurately reflects the best treatment option for that patient. But actionability is the timing aspect, delivering within the window where the patient is planning to meet with their HCP. So there's an actual opportunity for that patient to be put on therapy. We mean our goal of this alignment, and we can increase brand conversion and script lift when we use this brand eligible dynamic patient audience that reflects these factors and then use that as our basis for both HCP and DTC, synchronized communication. So how do we build the patient audience then reach those patients in HCPs? Well, we do it by using a combination of data and technology, applied to an integrated patient and physician audience dataset. So on the left, you're gonna start with the combined clinical profile, patient profile definition that considers multiple factors, clinical, consumer, behavioral. All of those facets of the circle from a few slides ago are really relevant in not only the brand eligibility, but the timing and place of that message. We use that data to not only create the ideal profiles or the relevance, I'm gonna say it again, but also to predict the upcoming patient care, and the visit windows and the therapeutic milestones or the actionability, relevance and actionability. So the predictions then allow for both patients and HCPs to be segmented into dynamic, highly prioritized audiences based on which patients are approaching their care window at what time. The output is dynamically updated as more data becomes available versus what we've still basically are using our historical kind of static list that are used to target. So the output of privacy safe geotargeted patient audiences combined with weekly dynamic HCP target list can be a very, very powerful advancement in how we're engaging the market and and synchronizing the messaging to patients and HCPs. This allows to be really consistent, compliant, and aligned. We need to be aligned, and marketing can then be focused on those priority patients and HCPs. Not just that, but also in their preferred channel. Right? So, here's an example of what, the aligned patient journey looks like. Right? So we start with that known patient, allows us to communicate with both the patient and the HCP leading up to that visit. When you embrace that patient centric approach, brands can proactively and consistently reach brand eligible patients and their treating HCPs ahead of or during the treatment decision process. Patients then are exposed to relevant, accurate treatment information, and HCPs also have that treatment information along with brand eligibility, clinical benefits, cost information, all top of mind and within the clinical workflow. Care decisions become more efficient. Patients and physicians are more likely to be confident in their selection. It's more likely to lead to a better patient outcome and strong brand relationships and more script conversion. This is truly what omnichannel next best action brand marketing looks like. We can definitely get there. The data, the technology, and the sophistication of the process already exist. The digital transformation has already occurred, and the multichannel access is is already there. What we need to do now is to promote cross functional collaboration and technology advances that lead to the synchronization of these messages that drive conversations that convert. Thank you, everyone, for listening in to the presentation today. If you have any questions, please contact us at info at optimize r x dot com. Thank you.