Over recent years, the biopharma marketing landscape has experienced monumental shifts — necessitating a transformation. While the 1990s saw marketing efforts largely steered by sales forces making in-person visits to healthcare providers (HCPs) and direct to consumer advertising, the subsequent decades witnessed a substantial reduction in the size of biopharma sales teams. This reduction was further compounded by increasingly restricted access to HCPs during the COVID-19 pandemic.

As we’re ushered in to the “post-COVID” era, over 95% of interactions between sales reps and HCPs have transitioned to virtual channels —with over 75% of physicians echoing a preference for sustaining or even increasing this digital shift. Triggered by the pandemic’s onset, there was a remarkable surge in investments directed toward digital marketing initiatives. Evidence of this is found in the approximately $9.53 billion spent on digital marketing to HCPs, reflecting a 14.2% escalation from the preceding year.

Much of today’s digital marketing spend is allocated to top-of-funnel tactics like non-endemic social media, banner ads, video, and connected TV. While there is a place for all these tactics in your overall marketing mix, there is an ever-growing desire to bring digital marketing directly to the point-of-care, where marketers tend to see more focused, lower funnel conversions. At the lowest point in the funnel sits the electronic health record (EHR) — a tool that HCPs use, on average, for 16 minutes per patient encounter, equating to roughly 4-5 hours each day.

Until recently, EHR media inventory was only something marketers could purchase directly from the EHR vendors themselves, and for good reason. There are several benefits to buying directly from an EHR vendor. For example, when buying direct, you can combine both NPI and trigger-based media activations. The unique value in direct ad buying remains in the ability to leverage de-identified, structured data in the EHR to ensure delivery of relevant messages when and where it counts the most.

Now, through strategic collaborations between Veradigm and industry leading demand side platforms (DSPs), marketers have the option to buy EHR inventory both directly and programmatically.

Veradigm’s Digital Health Media inventory is now integrated and available via programmatic activation with PulsePoint and Lasso, with other DSPs soon to follow.  These collaborations enable marketers to reach HCPs of interest within the Veradigm Network’s proprietary ambulatory healthcare provider base, while leveraging the planning, targeting, optimization and reporting capabilities of industry leading programmatic platforms.

Customer centricity is at the core of everything we do at Veradigm, and these innovations in the way health marketers buy EHR media inventory provide the optionality needed to maximize omnichannel marketing impact at the point-of-care.

From the October 01, 2023 Issue of MM+M - Medical Marketing and Media