A Guide to HCP Digital Engagement Strategies
Article updated January 2025.
In recent years, there’s been a push toward healthcare consumerism, wherein patients become active participants in their care choices and strategies. A growing population of these are truly digital natives and fully expect a personalized, convenient customer experience – whether that’s in-person or in the digital sphere. To foster this engagement and make informed purchasing decisions, patient-consumers require more information, decision-making tools, and incentives for making wise choices.
Currently, healthcare professionals (HCPs) are the people that patient-consumers trust the most when it comes to healthcare-related purchasing decisions. For this reason, it’s crucial that pharma reps are able to reach HCPs and engage them in order to collaborate and gain insights from the field medical level to deep KOL engagement levels and beyond. As such, businesses in the pharmaceutical and life science sector that wish to reach these industry influencers must be purposeful in their HCP engagement strategies, especially when it comes to digital. But what does a well-crafted HCP digital engagement strategy look like? Read on to learn how to strengthen HCP engagement.
01: Responsibilities of HCPs
Healthcare providers play a pivotal role within the healthcare ecosystem, acting as the primary drivers for preventing and managing health conditions. And the term HCP encompasses a range of medical professional roles, namely primary care physicians, nurse practitioners, family practice doctors, and medical specialists. This is why pharma reps seek to engage with HCPs, since they work most closely with consumers and have valuable insights. From initial contact to ongoing care, HCPs provide a wide array of medical services, including but not limited to:
Health education and guidance
Diagnosis and treatment of chronic and acute illnesses or conditions
Preventative health services
Health promotion
With varying levels of success, the movement to replace the traditional fee-for-service medical approach with a value-based care model, encourages healthcare professionals to transition from a reactive treatment posture to a proactive one. This shift created a new spate of industry challenges for HCPs and pharmaceutical representatives who wish to reach them.
02: Challenges in reaching HCPs
In the past, the vast majority of interaction with HCPs by pharmaceutical and life science companies was conducted on an in person basis rather than through digital channels.
COVID-19 completely altered the landscape of the healthcare space, changing how HCPs operate with both their patients and pharma reps or life science liaisons. The in-person restrictions combined with mounting health concerns made it even harder to market to and interact with HCPs effectively. While in-person events and their inherent value have largely returned, the paradigm shift in engagement has forced pharma companies and their representatives, including field medical teams and MSLs, to reevaluate how they traditionally sold their services, going beyond simply providing product info.
Even before COVID-19 struck, the industry already faced some serious hurdles regarding this type of outreach, including:
Difficulty demonstrating that the value of the company offers aligns with the HPC’s needs
Smaller sales forces
A shift from primary care to specialty drugs
Diminishing face-to-face access
One Accenture COVID-19 Healthcare Provider survey revealed these three key findings:
1. COVID has created lasting changes in what healthcare providers need and value.
2. Pharma companies are redefining their relevance within the new landscape.
3. Virtual engagement and other digital communication strategies are here to stay.
03: The Importance of Digital Engagement in the Pharmaceutical Industry
Throughout the pandemic, digital solutions bridged the gap between healthcare consumers and HCPs. They helped bring medicine and telehealth services directly to a person’s home. Now, healthcare providers want even more of that, particularly when it comes to digital interaction. They need tools that allow them to efficiently accomplish tasks in the ways, places and times that work for them, wherever they might be. Historically, this is an area where pharma has moved at a snail’s pace to adopt. According to a McKinsey study on digital maturity, pharma lags behind every single industry besides the public sector.
Within this scoring system, pharma shows a consistent lack of customer orientation:
For pharma, this indicates that companies pay too little attention to the customer decision journeys that patients and healthcare providers undertake to access, interact with, and benefit from their products…Nearly 40 percent of pharma companies admit they do not understand these journeys well enough to map digital touchpoints and align them with their digital strategy.
According to the study, pharma companies who are ahead of the curve have made a concerted effort to base their strategic decisions on how digital can positively impact their business model and are constantly looking to scale up digital initiatives and capabilities. Companies that wish to be competitive must adapt or fall even further behind. There was a significant (65%+) decrease in interaction frequency between HCPs and pharma reps during the pandemic and the decline in pharma-HCP engagement isn’t expected to recover fully post-pandemic.
According to another McKinsey study: 28 percent of surveyed physicians indicate that the crisis will have a lasting impact on their willingness to welcome pharma reps for live meetings. U.S. physicians expect a 15 percent reduction in overall interactions, with all of that decline coming from in-person interactions. When it comes to collaboration and engagement, digital solutions can aid the pharma industry and fix some of the future challenges of working with HCPs.
04: What Is HCP Engagement?
Today, HCPs prefer to access digital channels to connect with peers and patients, study research updates, and engage with medical and scientific information. Modern pharma HCP engagement focuses on providing multi-channel tools and solutions to help facilitate health representatives’ conversations with the people that matter the most: doctors, patients, and payers.
By adopting engagement technologies and tools, such as the Within3 insights management platform, life science companies can create value with virtual engagement and revolutionize the way they gather important insights from HCPs.
05: Types of Digital Tools and Channels for HCP Engagement
Within3 has made smarter virtual HCP engagement possible. It’s a better way for pharmaceutical, medical device, and other life-science companies to interact and collaborate with HCPs and patients. As a virtual engagement platform, it empowers essential stakeholders to engage in meaningful discussion anywhere, anytime, and from any connected device.
The Within3 insights management platform promotes better HCP engagement and more collaborative insights from the pharmaceutical industry in several ways, including:
VIRTUAL ENGAGEMENT PLATFORMS
Traditionally, video conferences have been the way key decision-makers met digitally. But even these are outmoded. Now, you can utilize a virtual advisory board on a virtual engagement platform, such as Within3, that delivers superior insights and engagements. Features include:
- Asynchronous discussions – Foster 24/7 discussions that empower both advisors and moderators to engage at their convenience when and where they want.
- Moderation tools – A central moderator dashboard gives you a virtual middle ground where all stakeholders can come to engage and participate by checking progress, sending private messages, and reviewing prompt responses. Which now includes an AI-powered Moderator Assistant, providing 3-7x more real-time feedback versus typical methods like web conferences or in-person meetings.
A singular platform – Within3 was custom-built with flexible HCP engagement in mind. A variety of collaborative tools and smart features make it easier to produce meaningful insights and then leverage those to make better decisions.
Historically, multi-author publications were slow and laborious. And the need for a constant back-and-forth between all parties becomes even more complicated when the authors are in different locations. Within3 creates a collaborative environment where authors can contribute, engage, and edit manuscripts from wherever they are in the world. Powerful tools include:
STEERING COMMITTEES AND PANELS
Steering committee members need to have an open line of communication that’s accessible around the clock. Now, there’s a better way for stakeholders to organize essential materials, interact with one another, read resources, and provide feedback. HCPs can engage with one another on-demand using tools like:
Resource Center – A centralized resource library helps organize and secure important materials, making it easier for stakeholders to access critical documents when they need them – whether it’s meeting minutes, trial participant responses, or study results.
Virtual meeting management – Conducting studies from a decentralized space can be a massive organizational challenge. Simply arranging a time and a place to meet virtually can waste precious time. But now, it’s possible to schedule, execute, and archive stakeholder meetings from a singular, secure, digital location.
Asynchronous discussions – Give committee members and panelists the freedom to participate in meetings and collaborate in discussions whenever possible. In doing so, HCPs can enjoy accelerated insights and user-friendly engagement.
Within3 clients get more value from their steering committee activities because of in-platform language translation, AI-powered moderation assistance, and proactive prompts to ensure participation.
Take a closer look at how our technology impacts steering committees and panels.
21ST CENTURY PUBLICATION DEVELOPMENT
Virtual discussions – Conduct outlining and early drafting on manuscripts and studies virtually, so the entire team is on the same page.
Remote editing – Collaborate with co-authors remotely in real-time, making comments and edits on the fly.
Engagement tools – Powerful engagement tools like participation reminders and status updates help revolutionize the way HCPs collaborate and stay on track. This means shorter timelines, fewer logistical headaches, and better engagement.
“Teams that use Within3 cut their publication timeline, including reports from by 33%. In one specific user experience, “Using Within3 for our [rare disease guideline] work likely accelerated our first guidelines by eight to 12 months, even as global travel effectively ceased in early 2020.” – Jeffrey Donohue, Co-Founder, Care Beyond Diagnosis.”
INTERNAL ENGAGEMENT AND TRAINING
Often, teams must collaborate across the country, if not globally. Because everyone is in different time zones and on different schedules, you require a platform that’s accessible 24/7 and which facilitates internal engagement and training. This is especially important as many companies plan on becoming more intentionally virtual following the COVID pandemic. A virtual engagement platform empowers teams to do this by providing:
Training and knowledge assessment – On-demand training allows individuals to access and complete necessary training materials and programs.
Total participation – Asynchronous discussions make it possible for teams to collaborate and work toward a shared goal, engaging with one another around the clock.
06: How to strengthen HCP engagement to improve pharma industry
COVID-19 accelerated the transformation that was already underway within the world of healthcare. Now, HCPs want digital solutions that bridge the gap, helping them better engage with patients, colleagues, and pharma representatives.
Today, there are tools, such as Within3’s insights management platform, that make it easier than ever for pharmaceutical, medical device, and other life-science companies to have conversations with the people who matter most.
Trusted by the world’s top 20 pharmaceutical companies, Within3 gathers, integrates, and analyzes insights better than any other platform on the market, reducing insight reporting from months to days and eliminating 90% of the workload.
07: AI’s capabilities and potential in patient care, improving HCP engagement
AI has been inescapable. It is transforming our personal and professional lives, from navigation software to facial recognition, voice assistants, search engines, grammar and spell check tools, and even our personalized social media feeds.
From a 2024 deep dive into AI for patient engagement, “At the closest point of care for clinicians and associated HCPs, AI is currently supporting the provision of care by:
- Reducing administrative burden and improving patient engagement
- Summarizing long documents and highlighting certain aspects of them; clinical trial reports, case studies or care guidelines for example
- Authoring a document with instructions from the physician or clinician like a letter justifying a procedure to a payer
- Provision of notes at about patients’ conditions in their own language, in age-appropriate terms of understanding in some cases
- Saving time per patient interaction. Paraphrased from a recent ISPI webinar, “Saving four minutes on notes when minutes matter over the course of time and multiples of patients at a time when demands on clinicians related to numbers of patients seen is very high has a great deal of value.”
AI, including generative AI and machine learning, are currently helping clinicians spend more time on patient care and less time in reporting or chart generation. It’s helping make the most of their time in advisory board engagement for pharma and engaging with patients and their caregivers in ways that clarify communication and recommendations. This is made possible thanks to well trained large language models and needs, tasks or applications in which the technology effectively reduces risk with high potential to improve patient engagement, satisfaction and outcomes.
08: Success Story: Increased awareness and education among HCPs
Slow adoption can point to shortcomings in education and HCP engagement – a mini case study in HCP engagement to improve pharma therapy adoption and performance.
- A medical leader was charged with discovering why a therapy had slower than anticipated adoption after two years on the market despite better clinical efficacy compared to the standard of care.
- To mine the high volume and multiple types of information to understand what’s really happening in the marketplace – field notes, congress information, online chatter including social listening, advisory board notes and insights and other associated medical information – the business team implemented a third generation AI tool to try to effectively answer those questions, collectively analyzing data from multiple sources, including field data, clinical trial data, advisory boards, and social listening.
- They found that 22% of the relevant HCPs had no knowledge at all of the treatment. They learned that they didn’t really have KOLs, they had STLs – the same 12 leaders. They met with the same 12 leaders all the time for everything. The familiarity of the company with those KOLs and vice-versa was distorting their view of how expansive, or limited, their education efforts have been.
- Because their delivery mechanism and market access was complex as well, they hadn’t understood the relationship that access difficulty is directly related to interest in and learning about a therapy. They weren’t appreciating the interrelationship between the difficulty of access and lack of education.
- The process-improved learnings drove hundreds of hours of savings and extended the market share opportunity by more than 40%.
