Revolutionizing HCP engagements to maximize ROI
Healthcare professionals (HCPs), like all consumers, live in an on-demand world shaped by the convenience of digital platforms for transport, entertainment, errands, and so much more. With a wealth of data and insights into their target markets, these everyday services continuously make their customer offerings, sales, and marketing more personalized, relevant, and engaging, raising the standard for practically all industries.
While healthcare companies have responded by putting time and resources behind developing their digital infrastructure and campaigns to strengthen HCP engagements, they have faced challenges in keeping pace with rapidly evolving digital trends as well as audience behaviors:
- HCP information overload and delay: As doctors are fed with time-sensitive information across a growing multitude of channels, healthcare companies realize the urgent need to cut through the noise and ensure their audiences are engaging with the right content, and before it is out-dated.
- Limited bandwidth: Doctors are also grappling with availability for face-to-face meetings with medical representatives (MRs), which take away from valuable practice time. Similarly, MRs can only reach a certain number of relevant doctors at any given time, prompting healthcare companies to assess how they can better optimize HCP engagements.
- Siloed insights: These face-to-face meetings between MRs and HCPs do derive meaningful insights, but they can be challenging to collect, share, and leverage consistently – an example of how insights within healthcare companies can get siloed due to gaps in digital implementation or regulatory and privacy concerns.
Healthcare companies therefore recognize that there is an opportunity to complement on-ground teams and get more optimized yet scalable results from their HCP engagements. However, the internal resources required, such as infrastructure, manpower and budgets, have constrained them from fully accessing this white space, limiting their ability to maximize sales and marketing return on investments (ROIs).
The value of VMRs
A solution has emerged in the form of virtual medical representatives (VMRs). Equipped with profound audience insights, strong pharmaceutical expertise, and digital savviness, they transform the ability of healthcare companies to deepen and scale HCP engagements.
Pharmaceutical and medtech companies across Southeast Asia have worked with Docquity’s VMRs, which we offer as a critical component of being a Contract Sales and Marketing Organization (CSMO) and through our proprietary Awareness to Advocacy (A2A) Program. Leveraging our unique position as the region’s largest community of HCPs, our VMRs get the most value out of each HCP interaction through their deep understanding of HCP profiles across our network and other digital touchpoints, how HCPs engage with content (including subtle feedback not easily captured by traditional methods), and HCP intentions to connect for deeper engagements with a brand.
Tracking the effectiveness of insights-driven VMR engagements is Docquity’s Intent to Prescribe (ITP) metric, which measures a doctor’s overall intent to prescribe a client’s brand compared to a competitor product. By gaining insight into a doctor’s ITP before a campaign, our VMR-led engagements are customized and optimized to improve the ITP post-campaign. This also provides clients with transparency on campaign performance and insights on evolving HCP preferences, resulting in stronger business decisions.
From insights to impact
Insights-driven VMRs recently delivered inspiring business impact for one of our clients, a Philippine-based pharmaceutical firm in the competitive pain management therapeutic area. The client’s internal resources had previously only enabled it to connect with around 15% of its target market, but the expertise that our A2A Program and VMRs brought to the table boosted the capabilities of its sales and marketing functions, improving HCP reach by 2.5x. Through this collaboration, the client was able to grow prescriptions and revenue, gaining 10% market share in just one year.
For another client in the Oncology therapeutic area, a VMR-led multichannel campaign successfully educated target Urologists and Oncologists on product safety and efficacy at 17% of the cost compared to traditional methods.
These are just some of the many success stories demonstrating the value of insights-driven VMRs amid a continuously evolving industry landscape. We hope to work with more companies to harness the in-depth insights that our VMRs bring and complement their sales and marketing teams to optimize HCP engagements, achieving the sweetest spot of scale and impact that maximizes ROI.
Hardik Shah, Product and GTM, Docquity
For a deeper discussion on the value of insights-driven VMRs, please get in touch with Christophe Meugnier, Vice President of Business Development at Docquity: christophe.meugnier@docquity.com.
