An effective HCP engagement strategy helps you cut through the digital noise to create valuable clinical partnerships. Using a mix of traditional and digital engagement strategies, a personalized, omnichannel strategy delivers optimized content aligned with specific provider needs.
What if the next communication you sent to a healthcare provider (HCP) was perfectly aligned with their clinical challenges, precisely timed, and so genuinely helpful that they responded positively and actively looked forward to hearing from you again?
That's the new standard for HCP engagement in today's healthcare environment.
Rapid advancements in healthcare, such as new treatments, personalized medicine, and innovative technology, make effective engagement more urgent than ever. These advancements can save lives. However, doctors don't have time to engage with irrelevant information.
Getting the right information to providers at the right time is the key to creating successful healthcare professional (HCP) engagement strategies. Customers and healthcare providers want to be heard. In fact, 73% of customers say they want the companies they buy from to understand their unique needs. In the healthcare industry, this translates to delivering scientifically supported, high-value content to each provider efficiently and in the right context.
HCP engagement is how often and how well healthcare professionals and pharmaceutical and medical device reps work together to improve patient outcomes. Effective healthcare professional (HCP) engagement builds relationships and fosters collaboration between healthcare providers, pharmaceutical companies, medical device manufacturers, and healthcare organizations. These relationships help improve patient outcomes and experiences by sharing medical information, discussing new drugs and treatment options, and introducing technology advancements.
To achieve these goals, companies need HCP engagement strategies that:
Healthcare organizations and sales representatives have traditionally relied on in-person meetings, presentations, conferences, and calls to engage providers. These interactions still matter, but they increasingly share the spotlight with digital engagement methods. A recent study by BCG found that 84% of physicians
want to continue or increase their virtual interactions with pharma companies, despite in-person
meetings returning to pre-pandemic frequency.
Physicians also want personalized interactions.
They don't have time to interact with information that doesn't impact them directly.
In-person interactions, whether one-on-one or in a conference setting, allow representatives to establish trust-based, long-term relationships with providers. Physicians may be more likely to ask questions or provide feedback in a face-to-face conversation, which can influence treatment decisions and prescribing choices. These contexts also encourage deeper clinical conversations, allowing companies to gain insight into patient needs, provider challenges, and physician preferences.
Digital engagement strategies complement in-person interactions by delivering useful, relevant information to the right person at the right time. For example, providing a relevant digital resource following an in-person conversation can keep the conversation front of mind.
Digital engagement strategies may include:
Most doctors prefer a mix of engagement channels based on their goals. In-person meetings may be the best choice for new product launches, while webinars and targeted emails are helpful when communicating research and data.
The demand for virtual and digital engagement surged in 2020, when medical providers were abruptly thrust into the digital environment. The COVID-19 pandemic created an immediate need for more sophisticated virtual engagement strategies and tools that have now become standard.
The fundamental challenge for HCP engagement remains the same. How do we connect meaningfully with providers who barely have a moment to breathe? Let's look at four common engagement challenges and how you can overcome them.
Physicians receive a daily deluge of emails and documents they don't have time to read, and even virtual meetings require a perfect alignment of calendars. The shift toward value-based care adds another layer of complexity as physicians face increasing pressure to document and demonstrate outcomes.
This time crunch calls for smarter, more integrated approaches that deliver maximum value with minimal time investment, such as:
Virtual meetings and digital engagement can add to information overload. Healthcare providers are flooded with communications about pharmaceutical advancements, new treatment options, medical devices, emerging research, and patient care.
Wading through all that information takes time and can make it harder for providers to engage with life science and pharmaceutical companies. To stand out, communications should provide immediate value without requiring huge time investments. For example:
Communication barriers may include limited face-to-face interactions, lack of trust, technology challenges, and channel preference mismatches. As more doctors feel comfortable engaging virtually, pharma and life science companies need integrated HCP engagement strategies that tailor communications to individual situations. An effective approach should include:
The healthcare industry operates under strict regulatory frameworks that limit how and what information can be shared. These regulations vary by country and specialty, creating complex compliance challenges that can impede natural communication flow.
HCP engagement tools and software platforms should include healthcare-specific data privacy protections and compliance protocols.
How do you create a successful HCP engagement strategy in today's digital overwhelm? How do you send the right communications at the right time without getting lost in the crowd? And how do you achieve both of those outcomes at scale? Successful engagement requires careful planning.
Follow these best practices as you build out your strategy:
Know who makes the decisions at each healthcare organization or practice. These may include physicians, specialists, and organizational leaders. Create a targeted engagement strategy for those individuals based on their goals and needs.
Use technology tools to manage your strategy and implement it at scale. For example, your toolbox might include:
What are you trying to achieve? What is the provider trying to achieve? Align communication around those objectives by presenting relevant details and action items. Engagement goals might include:
HCP personalization starts with understanding the customer journey and engaging strategically with providers at each stage. For example, consider needs, challenges, and questions as part of a learning continuum rather than as individual interactions. Use this information to create tailored content and distribution strategies for providers based on what they are looking for in the moment.
Digital, in-person, and hybrid engagement may all be helpful for a given provider at different points of interaction. For example, younger providers may instinctively turn to online resources, while more experienced providers may prefer a conversation with a trusted company representative. However, each of those groups may use alternative channels in certain situations. Use your CRM data to track interactions and outcomes so you can tailor your communications to each provider's needs.
Monitor key metrics such as email open rates, content downloads, meeting attendance, and clinical adoption. Adjust your strategies accordingly and use the data to determine the next best action to take with each provider. If a particular tactic doesn't get results, choose a channel that aligns more closely with that physician's behavior patterns.
Create a standard engagement cycle from pre-visit planning and scheduling to post-visit follow-up and documentation. Document this cycle in a platform to optimize scheduling, ensure productive interactions, and enhance follow-up.
Remember when telemedicine seemed like a temporary shift during the pandemic? Since then, digital delivery models have become mainstream, helping physicians use their time more efficiently, meet patient needs, and interact with information efficiently.
Life science and pharma organizations can also build on that digital foundation using an omnichannel approach that leverages technology tools to gather data and guide engagement strategies.
Presenting virtual conferences and educational events on digital platforms has made it much easier for healthcare professionals to stay current on industry advancements. These interactions save time and help physicians learn about new options without the time and expense of travel. Digital platforms can also streamline patient relationship management, helping providers improve patient care and experiences.
AI is transforming the healthcare industry, from pharma software to patient engagement strategies. AI-powered platforms, for example, can handle routine questions instantly, and AI-enabled self-service portals suggest content based on a doctor's specialty and interests so they can quickly find what they need.
Healthcare professionals want value-added conversations that address real challenges, not sales pitches. Life sciences software solutions like Salesforce Life Sciences Cloud connect your engagement data with clinical information so your team can create strategies that resonate with specific groups.
Optimizing HCP engagement with data-driven insights in a single platform enables powerful analytics to predict individual needs and identify next steps. Look for a platform that can track details like provider specialties, patient referrals, content performance, and more. A good fit will bring data sources together to deliver calculated insights and build predictive models that drive decision-making.
Medical advancements can save lives if healthcare providers know about them and use them to improve patient outcomes. Looking ahead, we can expect even more sophisticated AI-powered systems that anticipate and respond to HCP needs before communication barriers arise. In the future, we could see engagement platforms that automatically deliver the content each provider needs exactly when they need it based on specialty, patient population, and past interaction patterns.
Some organizations are already moving toward a model where data from multiple sources like clinical encounters, research interests, prescribing patterns, and digital behavior can be used to create provider profiles. This information will enable personalized interactions that feel valuable rather than intrusive, respecting the precious time constraints HCPs face daily.
In this environment, HCP engagement should view each provider interaction as an opportunity to become a trusted partner. By embracing omnichannel approaches, leveraging software and technology tools, and prioritizing personalized interactions, healthcare and life sciences companies can build meaningful relationships that benefit everyone.
This article is for informational purposes only. This article features products from Salesforce, which we own. We have a financial interest in their success, but all recommendations are based on our genuine belief in their value.
HCP engagement is how often and how well healthcare professionals and pharmaceutical and medical device reps work together to improve patient outcomes. Effective healthcare professional (HCP) engagement builds relationships and fosters collaboration between healthcare providers, pharmaceutical companies, medical device manufacturers, and healthcare organizations.
Effective HCP engagement strategies help organizations bridge technology gaps, support improved patient care, build long-term stakeholder relationships, and gain collaborative feedback to improve processes.
Key challenges to effective HCP engagement include time constraints, having too much information to sort through, communication barriers both within an organization and with their various partners, and the need to adhere to compliance regulations and be aware of when they are updated.
