March 2025 • PharmaTimes Magazine • 22-23
// SCIENCE //
Next step navigation
Making accurate science stand out as the information explosion becomes deafening
In a world of multiplying data and discourse, stakeholders across life sciences and healthcare are increasingly struggling to recognise and separate important messaging from distractions and disinformation.
This situation is worsening daily, so the risk of missing something important will only grow.
As blockbuster drugs give way to more sophisticated and targeted treatments, the importance of communicating well and educating the market about them inevitably soars. That’s to ensure that developers and investors secure the best possible return. And so that the maximum number of patients benefit from their latest medicinal or therapeutic breakthrough.
Yet communicating a new treatment’s value to time-poor healthcare professionals and sceptical patients is no mean feat today, against a backdrop of increasingly loud and often contradictory market noise.
The majority of healthcare professionals today are burnt out. This leaves life sciences communicators competing for the scarcest amount of time to engage with and educate this audience.
To reach patients and their families, brands must also compete with an ocean of disinformation being spread daily across the internet and social media. Not least by health and wellness ‘influencers’.
Ensuring that targeted and credible messaging lands well is a considerable challenge in this ‘attention economy’ where an audience’s engagement is very hard won.
Pride and seek
Too often, ‘omnichannel’ communications campaigns, designed to harness the proliferating options for capturing eyes, ears, hearts and minds, have been devised with a ‘cover all bases’ mentality.
Messaging has not been joined up, and there has not been enough thought about meeting healthcare professionals, or patients and carers, where they are.
In fact, in a rigorously regulated environment that imposes limits on the claims or information that can be conveyed and how, the omnichannel obsession can be a distraction from what’s really needed.
A multichannel approach may well be advisable, but the greater priority should be to use the target channels appropriately. To get the right information out there, educate the market and engage audiences with science in a consumable way.
This requires agility as much as anything. The ability to respond swiftly to themes or concerns that are trending online or in the news, for instance.
It also requires skill in communicating the facts: the evidence-based science. And all of this starts with thoughtful engagement, based on a richer understanding of who the various customer stakeholders are and what exactly they need (and in what context).
Although physicians are well aware of the need to keep up to date with the latest scientific developments and medicinal breakthroughs, volumes of information are now doubling at least every 73 days. The time and attention to absorb new information is already close to zero.
There is no capacity for learning about new products during an intense work shift. The chance to engage is more often limited to snatched hours of downtime.
It makes sense to ‘meet’ them there, then, via constructive use of social media and/or targeted use of the online forums and educational sources they trust – such as Sermo, a social network for doctors; Medscape; PubMed; the National Institutes of Health (NIH); and the World Health Organization (WHO).
Other discovery options include an AI-based search app that scans research papers.
Track champions
Currently, compared to other intensely competitive markets such as retail, the pharma industry is behind the curve when it comes to meeting ‘customers’ where they are.
Although 82% of healthcare professionals consider global independent medical websites a very important or critical source of scientific content, for instance, less than 50% of pharma communicators recognise this.
‘Having identified where physicians go, the next challenge is to determine how best to engage them’
Where the pharma industry still looks for face-to-face time with clinicians, healthcare professionals are stating preferences for more convenient digital engagement, particularly in the wake of the pandemic.
Having identified where physicians go, the next challenge is to determine how best to engage them there.
One of the advantages of digital channels is the ability to track engagement levels. Usage data will show which content, delivered in which format, when and via what means, is enjoying the most traction.
The same applies to patients and their families or carers. Reliable data analytics are important to understand where audiences go for their information, and the kinds of content they engage with (and share) most readily.
These insights are important to inform targeted content decisions. For every scare story or factually inaccurate groundswell of opinion that spreads on social media, there needs to be a reliable counterpoint. A reassuring base of scientific reason that the public can return to.
How for now
When audiences are time poor and being bombarded by conflicting information, often the greatest need is for quick clarity.
In a public health context, that might be best served by a carefully crafted infographic, or an authoritative podcast, setting out the scientific facts (with source references) in a readily digestible way – for example to counter vaccine hesitancy, or boost treatment or diet plan adherence.
For an overstretched physician, evidence-based summaries or peer preferences can be more powerful than advertising brochures or in-depth clinical papers for commanding early attention.
The call for more sophisticated communications strategies requires a rethink both organisationally and culturally within the pharma R&D organisation.
Target audiences typically are not aware or will not care whether the information they are consuming is coming from medical affairs or from commercial teams. They just want to be assured that the message is consistent and consumable, and that it meets their needs.
Adding new or additional skills to communicators’ toolkits will be important too.
Modern capabilities should include a good overview of social media and how to monitor and optimise those channels’ impact, as well as knowledge of how to harness AI capabilities to direct innovation and boost dynamism.
That could be by freeing up more time for teams to be creative (by taking up the slack on routine admin/monitoring), or by identifying in near-real-time when and in what ways to pivot strategies towards the campaigns, formats and delivery routes that are working best.
Michelle Bridenbaker, is COO at Unbiased Science.
Go to vitalstatisticsconsulting.com
PharmaTimes
PharmaTimes is the UK’s leading pharmaceutical magazine, tracking the trends and issues that affect the industry here in the UK, in Europe and across the world. We deliver independent, authoritative and trustworthy content through impartial, balanced and informed opinion and analysis.