Breaking Through the Barrier: Accessing Hard to Reach Physicians

In a time of decreasing pharmaceutical rep access to HCPs, gaining the attention of the appropriate physician audience is growing more challenging for pharma sales teams. The American Medical Student Association frequently updates a list of medical schools that do not allow pharma reps access to their physicians. The most recent ratings revealed that 118 of 174 medical schools (68%) strictly enforce a policy restricting the level of access for pharma sales reps. Even more concerning for pharmaceutical brands is that half of these schools apply that policy to the physicians at their affiliated teaching hospitals as well, meaning thousands of physicians are inaccessible to pharmaceutical reps.

How can a brand reach these important HCPs, when personal promotion is not an option?

Non-personal promotion can be an effective tactic for influencing hard-to-reach physicians. But targeting these specific individuals isn’t always straightforward.

At BulletinHealthcare we specialize in narrowing our physician audience to only those docs our advertisers care about. So I asked our data insights and analytics team to determine the number of restricted access physicians BulletinHealthcare reaches via our daily briefings. We found that our audience consists of over 40,000 restricted access physicians from around 200 teaching hospitals.

Here are our top 10 publications by the amount of restricted access physicians:

Breaking our audience down like this is just one of many ways that we can reach specific groups of physicians on behalf of our advertising clients. We target lists by NPI, geo-location, or specialty every day. In fact, we also offer our Specialty Plus targeting program, which utilizes prescriber data to find physicians who may be prescribing medicines or treating conditions that are counterintuitive to their specialty.

What Is BulletinHealthcare?

BulletinHealthcare delivers the news to over one million physicians, dentists, and HCPs – over 900,000 of whom are US-based – via a concise distillation of the stories and research that matter most to their specialties.

We are the perfect strategic partner for anyone looking to reach physicians and other healthcare providers in a highly credible, endemic environment. Why? Our audience of 1 million physicians, dentists, and other healthcare professionals comes directly from the nation’s premier medical associations, including the AMA, ACC, ASCO and others. So you’ll reach docs, never bots.

How Does Our Data Team Do It?

We Only Count Engagement You Care About. BulletinHealthcare’s advertising platform intelligently disregards all engagement activity from anyone other than your target audience, including BulletinHealthcare staff, anyone on our seed list, or other non-target HCPs. In the case of list match placements, only your target list is capable of viewing the ad in the first place.

Our metrics reports are a concise, easy-to-follow breakdown of campaign performance, and include total sends, briefing open rates, gross impressions, CTR, CTR by creative and creative size, audience profile, and other information. Additionally, for advertisers that meet certain budgetary requirements, we are able to work with verified, third-party organizations to perform ROI and attitudinal studies measuring the impact of advertising in BulletinHealthcare briefings.

Interested in learning more about how we might work together?  Email us at [email protected], or visit BulletinHealthcare.com for more information.

Citation: AMSA Scorecard 2016. Conflict of Interest Policies at Medical Schools (online), http://amsascorecard.org, Reston, VA:  American Medical Student Association 02/16/18.