Best Practices for HCP Pharma Engagement

You have innovations that can help patients and solutions that healthcare professionals need. But if you're not connecting in an effective way with the doctors, nurses, and pharmacists who work with the pharmaceutical industry, patients may not benefit from those new treatments.

But there's a marked perception gap in healthcare professional (HCP) pharma engagement. Pharmaceutical companies think they're hitting the mark, but HCPs think otherwise. A Deloitte survey found that 80% of pharma executives are satisfied with their current engagement strategies, but only 35% of HCPs believe that customer-facing resources are meeting their needs.

While pharmaceutical professionals face pressure to cut costs and speed up product development, a solid HCP engagement strategy can help close the gap, making sure patients get new treatments sooner.

Let's take a closer look at how you can improve HCP pharma engagement.

An HCP in the pharma world stands for healthcare professional—this includes doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and other medical experts who are involved in providing patient care. These make up the key opinion leaders and decision makers influencing patient treatment. HCPs are involved in everything from prescribing medications to advising on treatment plans.

Pharmaceutical companies engage with HCPs in pharma to share information about the latest innovations on the market. Representatives such as medical science liaisons (MSLs) share knowledge and help build relationships between the industry and the HCPs who interact directly with patients.

Building strong relationships with HCPs isn't just helpful for pharmaceutical companies. While it's important for them because it expands reach and builds brand awareness, it's also a crucial part of improving patient outcomes. HCP pharma engagement gives providers the information they need to make informed decisions about new healthcare solutions.

In turn, HCPs share feedback with reps about drug efficacy and how patients are responding to treatment. This gives pharmaceutical companies something invaluable: real-world patient perspectives. Providers share insights on patient preferences, challenges with adherence, and social or cultural factors — ensuring guidelines are patient-centered and realistic. They identify gaps between patient needs and available treatment options. Their guidance can influence the standard of care, which affects coverage decisions of healthcare companies.

While in-person conversations remain relevant, HCPs are often short on time, making face-to-face engagement challenging. Busy schedules can make it difficult for them to stay up to date on industry innovations, such as new drugs, devices and therapies. Efficiency is crucial, and even more so as expectations for digital engagement are higher than ever.

A recent study found that HCPs increasingly want to consume content via social media , with 41% considering social media to be important (up from 33% in 2021). Social media is even more relevant among younger HCPs, with 64% of those under 34 years old citing it as important.

HCPs are also, with the best intentions, sensitive about how they interact with the pharmaceutical industry. Providers want to make decisions based on what is best for their patients, without outside influence. Digital outreach can be effective by maintaining appropriate boundaries and keeping a record of interactions.

Lastly, regulations also play a part in how HCP pharma engagement evolves. In some cases, they may mandate transparency in the financial relationship between the pharmaceutical industry and healthcare providers. Laws are constantly evolving and may continue to become more stringent.

It's important to remember that healthcare professionals have busy schedules, and they're juggling multiple priorities. Even beyond direct patient care, HCPs devote time to keeping their certifications current with continuing medical education, updating health records, other administrative duties, and, of course, balancing their personal lives outside of work. For this reason, HCP pharma engagement needs to be impactful, speaking directly to their needs without any fluff.

Consider these points as you develop an engagement strategy:

Early disease detection is now more possible than ever because of the ability of agentic AI to analyze large volumes of electronic health records, medical images, test results, and other patient data to identify patterns and potential risks and make early, proactive treatment recommendations. And because it connects the dots across extensive patient datasets, agentic AI tools can detect patterns, correlations, and conditions that can elude even the most experienced clinicians.

As you get to know individual HCPs, take note of their preferred communication channels. Jot down whether a certain doctor prefers short in-person meetings or engages more over social media. Healthcare providers are people with their own preferences, just like consumers. Some may prefer email because they can catch up at their convenience while others prefer to touch base on the phone because it may feel more personal.

Take your time demonstrating your expertise and respectfully staying in touch with HCPs. It takes a couple of years for physicians to adopt new drugs , so work on building trust by sharing objective evidence and providing context about new therapies. One of the best ways to build a long-term relationship is to remember that you're in an ongoing two-way conversation. In addition to sharing information with them, ask about the challenges they face. At the very least, you give them a chance to express their concerns. You may be able to offer solutions to some of the challenges their patients face.

Periodically check in with HCPs through informal conversations and simple surveys to find out how you're doing. Determine whether they prefer frequent, brief communication or longer, more in-depth meetings. One of the biggest benefits of digital communication is that it lets you gather metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and social media engagement to see what's working best.

Personalization can also help make sure HCPs get the most relevant information. List segmentation can, for instance, avoid sending cardiologists a message about a new acne medication. Customizing outreach for individual contacts can be prohibitively time-consuming, but artificial intelligence tools like Agentforce save time by predicting HCP needs and automating tasks such as email sequences.

Omnichannel marketing involves delivering a consistent message to providers across multiple touchpoints. Whether they open an email, scroll past a social media post, have a virtual chat, or run into a rep at a conference, they receive the same overall message about a given drug. Comprehensive platforms like Life Sciences Cloud can streamline omnichannel HCP pharma engagement.

Emailing a certain number of times or getting thousands of impressions on a social media post doesn't tell the whole story about whether outreach efforts are effective. HCP pharma engagement isn't about reaching the maximum number of people. An EPG Health study found that only a quarter (24%) of pharma companies comprehensively analyze HCP engagement data, and less than 20% measure knowledge gain, behavioral change, or impact in practice for most of their HCP education activities.

Effective HCP pharma engagement is all about reaching the right people and providing them with the information they need to make informed decisions and, ultimately, improve patient outcomes. Life Science Cloud can help by making it easier for you to intelligently engage with healthcare providers across every channel.