Leonie Goddard is Practice Manager, Strategic Insights at Veeva Systems

Veeva is the global leader in cloud software for the life sciences industry.

Committed to innovation, product excellence and customer success, Veeva serves more than 1,000 customers, ranging from the world’s largest biopharmaceutical companies to emerging biotechs.

As a public benefit corporation, Veeva is committed to balancing the interests of all stakeholders, including customers, employees, shareholders and the industries it serves.

A big focus for us has been helping biopharma companies understand the HCP (healthcare professional) access environment and identify the strategies to unlock greater engagement with their customers.

By analysing Veeva Pulse data, which aggregates and anonymises +600m field interactions recorded across Veeva CRM, we have created a customer-centric view of HCP activity, allowing us to understand who is accessible and how they engage with pharma.

In the first report series of 2024, we shed light on current access conditions across the US and the top five European markets and shared examples of how industry leaders are increasing HCP access and engagement.

Generally, we see increased demand and integrated data usage to drive business decision-making. Just five years ago, there wasn’t large-scale census data like this to provide an accurate picture of HCP behaviour.

Targeting strategies were largely driven by reps ‘knocking on doors’ in combination with small surveys. With Veeva Pulse data, we can identify the full universe of accessible HCPs helping teams know where to focus, save time and get the right information to the right customer.

This has been a massive shift for the industry and it’s been exciting to see the industry shift to more data-driven decision-making.

If I focus on HCP access conditions, we see that access has fallen back to pre-pandemic levels after an initial jump in activity post-COVID.

While the access conditions vary greatly between European markets, we see HCPs more open to digital and video engagement.

In the coming years, I expect the access conditions to remain relatively stable with ~53% of HCPs accessible to field pharma, however, the competition to win priority time with the HCPs will continue to increase.

Pharma companies will have to become more agile in how they connect and align across all functions.

Ultimately, they need to provide more inbound channels like compliant chat to meet the customers where and when they need. I expect this to become a key differentiator in the future.

The UK has one of the toughest HCP access conditions of any market globally.

It is difficult to gain access to key customers. For UK pharma teams building their targeting strategies, HCP access data provides the first nationwide view of who is accessible, the call pressure they are receiving and channel preferences.

In a competitive market, these insights are critical to maximising reach and engagement with customers.

We have multiple customers who have achieved double-digit growth in sales and treatment adoption through enhancing their targeting strategy with HCP access data.

I hope that as the industry continues to unlock the power of data in driving business decisions, we can learn more about our customers and deliver more connected engagement that helps patients receive the support they need in the moment of need.

We currently have huge potential as an industry with many tools and technologies at our disposal from which we are not getting the best value. Here are my three big bets for the future:

1. The industry rapidly increases its targeting capability, becoming more dynamic and responsive to industry data.
2. Inbound channels like compliant chat become standard practice, allowing HCPs to tell pharma exactly what they want.
3. The industry unlocks the untapped value from content insights and builds the capability to personalise content at scale.