The pandemic has changed many things around the world, one of them being healthcare professional engagement. With social distancing regulations in place, the transition from physical to digital engagement was inevitable.
Quite interestingly, many bioscience and pharmaceutical companies discovered digital channels to increase growth and coverage rates positively. But to leverage the digital HCP engagement’s virtues, it’s essential to look at data analytics, engagement, content delivery, and several other factors that determine the extent of relationship building between HCPs and life science companies.
Companies need to adopt a well-curated commercial strategy and use a content delivery tool that checks all the boxes. Unfortunately, that seems to confuse many customers, with the most common question being; if I already have a customer relationship management tool, why do I need a specialized content delivery system like MobileLocker?
In this article, we touch on this subject and explain how MobileLocker exceeds the provisions of a regular CRM and helps you work around the limitations to remain competitive in the ever-growing healthcare field by ensuring swift content delivery and remarkable engagement.
Is Digital Engagement Here to Stay?
First and foremost, let’s discuss if digital HCP engagement is still relevant now that mass vaccinations are in place and the world is gradually returning to its pre-pandemic normal.
The short answer is Yes.
The landscape for HCP engagement has dramatically shifted and changed in the past two years with an increase in the use of digital and remote channels. Healthcare professionals also accepted these alternative channels, embracing their convenience.
A recent Accenture survey showed that pharma companies have learned to communicate better with HCPs in light of the pandemic. The survey, containing 720 respondents from different fields of medicine, found that this improvement in information transfer allowed healthcare professionals to offer better treatments to their patients.
For instance, many healthcare professionals said pharma companies had provided sufficient education on treating patients better during the pandemic. In addition, 19% of the HCPs said that they expect self-administration to be a permanent change even after the pandemic, whereas 36% of the patients requested remote treatment during the pandemic.
HCPs also said that these companies provide helpful information relevant to affordability programs, making it easier for them to help patients know where they can access imaging centers, infusion centers, and diagnostic labs.
Meanwhile, 65% of the HCPs said they prefer self-administration methods, like on-body and auto-injector devices, for their patients more now than before the pandemic. At the same time, 62% of them say they value remote monitoring tools more than they did before the pandemic struck.
Brad Michel, the life sciences lead at Accenture North America, says, ‘’This feedback, in combination with patients saying that they want to go into HCP offices less frequently even after the pandemic ends, suggests an increasing opportunity for pharma companies to be even more relevant to HCPs and patients’ changing needs.”
Impact on Virtual Communications
Before the pandemic struck, 64% of all HCP meetings with sales reps took place in person. Meanwhile, 65% of the meetings were conducted virtually during the pandemic. Healthcare professionals expect that these restrictions will continue for a certain time and may ever be permanent.
97% of the HCPs say they want an entirely virtual or a virtual-physical mixture of meetings even when the pandemic ends. That’s a massive indication for life science companies to work on their content delivery and customer engagement approach.
43% of the HCPs in the survey said they were practicing restrictions on who enters their office professionally. In simple terms, they were restricting the entry of pharmaceutical reps into their offices. In addition, 28% of these professionals said they are considering implementing their restrictions permanently, while 44% said they would keep them for the ‘’foreseeable future’’.
That’s not to say that HCPs don’t want to learn about new drugs or treatments. They just want to use different means. For example, 88% of the HCPs wanted to learn about new therapies despite the pandemic being the most concerning and attention-demanding matter at hand.
Every four in ten healthcare professionals admitted there is a higher likelihood of starting a new treatment method on a patient as they can monitor the patient’s response more flexibly.
When the pandemic put everything on hold, many life science companies worried that their interactions with HCPs might suffer a blow. However, the opposite seems to be true. 61% of the HCPs in the Accenture survey said they now interact more with sales reps than before the pandemic.
However, many of them feel that sales reps miss the mark quite often. Companies need to understand better the impact the pandemic has had on HCPs and patients. We’ll touch more on this later when we explain how MobileLocker can help life science companies bring appropriate changes in their strategies.
Preference of Virtual Visits
Besides the Accenture survey, other studies indicate the HCPs’ preference for virtual visits.
Of the 75% of HCPs who preferred physical visits from life science companies before the pandemic, 47% prefer less frequent visits and more virtual meetings now.
How Are MedTech Companies Adapting to this Shift?
According to McKinsey, Medtech companies are using multiple channels to adapt to the changing preferences of HCPs.
- Digital Marketing: 80% of the MedTech companies have shifted a part of their marketing expenditure to digital channels. In most cases, over 20% of the expenditure was shifted to digital channels.
- Portals: Two-thirds of the life science companies forecast online channels to contribute above 20% to their total revenue by 2025.
- Hybrid Sales Rep Interactions: Life science and MedTech companies are also training their sales rep to leverage digital content delivery and communication tools to enhance remote selling.
As evident from these approaches, life science companies are eager to accommodate the HCPs’ changing requirements. However, the report also establishes that these companies still need to reinvent their engagement methods with the stakeholders.
HCPs need better coordination across all channels. They also need more digital content that’s not only relevant but also tailored to their individual needs. For instance, an oncologist should only be getting access to new breakthroughs in cancer research and not be bombarded with knowledge of new studies in psychiatry.
Life science and pharma companies have to rethink their strategy and have a reliable content delivery platform to meet these expectations. Omnichannel engagement does not simply mean tweaking your existing model. It means shifting to a more refined and HCP-tailored model that couples digital engagement and design thinking to allow sales reps to deliver relevant knowledge to the right stakeholders through the right channel at the right time.
How Does MobileLocker Supersede/Complement Your CRM?
Despite its many positive findings, the Accenture survey discussed above also showed that many HCPs feel that reps don’t genuinely understand the pandemic’s effect on their lives. For example, 57% of the HCPs in the survey were of this view.
Meanwhile, 58% of them said a pharma company had spammed them. Now, if an HCP thinks you’re spamming them, you’re likely to get little to no engagement from them. Part of the reason why many life science companies come across as too pushy or ‘spammy’ is because they don’t utilize a streamlined content delivery tool and depend on their CRM to do all the hard work.
This is where MobileLocker comes in and fills the gaps left behind by your CRM.
Personalized and Precise Information Transfer
Bob Lempke, partner and Chief Revenue Officer at MobileLocker, describes his service’s efficiency quite well. He says, ‘’Mobile Locker is a software-as-a-service platform that seamlessly integrates with Veeva CRM and Veeva Vault. CRM is where your client data resides relating to accounts, contacts, and sales insights such as territories, emails, phone numbers, etc. In addition, it contains historical engagement insights and logs all activities and interactions with (for example) an HCP/Client over time.’’
Simply put, CRM has logs of all your clients’ historical insights. Meanwhile, MobileLocker gives you a real-time view of what’s happening right now. He goes on to explain, ‘’Veeva Vault is sort of like the catch-all for every piece of content your organization has ever created.
Think of it as the universe of all music ever recorded as an example, or Spotify. Think of Mobile Locker as building from the Vault a ten-song playlist for an individual while the Vault is Spotify. If you only want to listen to ten songs, why would you like to constantly search all of Spotify (The Vault) for those ten songs?’’.
Here’s the thing; HCPs are busy people. Keeping in line with Bob’s analogy, they don’t want to scroll through gazillion songs on Spotify to find the one they want to play. Instead, they want a precise list of 10 songs to listen to without wasting their time on the rest of the song collection.
Likewise, in a CRM, reps have access to all information there could be about a potential treatment or drug delivery method. But if the HCP specializes in dentistry, they would be only concerned with distributing the dental aspect of the treatment.
To create a delightful customer experience, companies need to ensure their content is relevant and valuable. Unfortunately, companies that try a one-size-fits-all approach with both delivery and analytics run the risk of overwhelming and frustrating their customer base.
In addition, MobileLocker’s precise and streamlined content delivery system allows you to tailor the information and content according to the healthcare provider. That increases engagement and retention in the long run.
Instant Content Access
It is estimated that medical knowledge doubles every 73 days, especially in oncology and similar categories where the influx of new information is much faster. As discussed above, despite their busy schedules, HCPs want access to new knowledge.
For this, they rely on life science companies. With MobileLocker, you can make any new information instantly available to HCPs and that too in their relevant fields.
They don’t simply want reminders or repeat information from med science companies. The regurgitation of this information might likely come across as spam to some healthcare providers.
Real-Time Insights
Often, customers compare the Closed Loop Marketing feature of Veeva with MobileLocker. However, it’s important to note that MobileLocker’s capabilities are more robust and expand further than CLM’s do.
As Bob explains, ‘’Mobile Locker delivers deep analytics that show not only if, when, and where the content was opened, but also how long it was accessed and exactly where inside a specific window of time the target spent their time and focus.
For example, if a PDF was viewed for 15 minutes, Mobile Locker can segment the time into what paragraphs or content grouping made up the total aggregate. These personalized insights allow for timely and highly targeted and relevant follow-up against specific areas of focus or interest.’’
With these personalized insights, you can provide the most relevant knowledge to an HCP. For example, if an HCP spends ample time reading parts of content discussing side effects or limitations of a potential treatment, it would indicate their interest in learning about the possible shortcomings of a treatment method before adopting it.
Thus, you can show them relevant information regarding the concerns or drawbacks of that method, drug, or device.
Moreover, MobileLocker also shows ‘’macro-level insights to the content creators that allow an aggregate analysis of engagement with a specific content asset.’’
With this keen focus on customer satisfaction, you can be among the 73% of the companies, as Forbes reports, with better than their competitors financially.
Activity Insights for Leadership
Since MobileLocker allows you to integrate multi-channel content engagement into your strategy seamlessly, the platform is focused on providing actionable insights to the leadership to point out the weak points and work on them through training opportunities and best practice implementations.
Due to this, MobileLocker successfully optimizes the investment of your organization in sales engines like Veeva.
Final Words
To sum up, MobileLocker fills the gaps in terms of seamless integration, insights, cost, and content delivery that may be reducing the effectiveness of your customer engagement approach.
The platform maximizes your revenue generation and engagement, allowing you to leverage the digitization of the healthcare industry that’s bound to continue into the future.