30 - Arcondis

Meet Dr John, a typical HCP who, when he’s not working, shops online, watches Netﬂix shows, uses Siri to navigate his phone and ﬁnd information online, and relies on Google Maps for turn-by-turn navigation when driving. In short, Dr John is like the rest of us – he’s come to expect personalised, high-engagement, joined-up online services.

At the hospital where he works, Dr John often interacts with pharma companies, both online and in person, to stay up to date with new treatment options, clinical trials data and other information. He can log into the HCP portals of individual pharma companies, where he can search for the information he needs. But he experiences little of the pleasure he derives from using Netﬂix, Amazon or the many Google services.

What’s missing from these pharma portal sites? It’s not that the content isn’t there; it’s that – in many cases – the content is all there is. Not much effort is made to get to know the HCPs as individuals with particular patterns of needs and wants and then personalise the service to them. The result is a service that feels like hard work to use – Dr John has to do all the work to ﬁnd what he wants. Compare that to Netﬂix, which serves up one recommended show after another.

Unfortunately, not very favourably. Most of the online services available to HCPs today are still stuck in the least mature stages of service evolution, essentially just providing content –sometimes targeted – in a digital format.

Compared to the sophistication we experience in some other industries, such as travel and retail, pharma industry interactions with HCPs have a lot of catching up to do.

This is all the more surprising when we consider that pharma industry companies often know a good deal about individual HCPs because they are required to register to prove they are an HCP. This alone is a huge missed opportunity to provide a richer customer experience. The starting point for the pharma companies in developing the HCP customer journey should be ‘How can we make the HCPs life easier and by that improve the overall patient care.’ The aim should be to offer an enhanced, personalised digital service to Dr John that expands beyond the marketing-driven portals currently being offered in the industry,

Pharma companies have some catching up to do to start offering services whose digital maturity is on a par with what we are used to from other industries and even from government. Services should at a minimum meet the ‘content as a service’ model but should aim for true ‘transactional services’ within the next two-three years. For this to happen, three shifts need to take place:

01. While it’s true the pharma industry is highly regulated and this will to some extent limit what can be provided (in the short term), there needs to be a shift in the ingrained view that ‘pharma is different’ from other industries.

02. A more customer-centric approach is needed so that HCPs have a consistent ‘joined-up’ user experience when dealing with different people and departments within the pharma company. Each department should be able to see the complete history of interactions with the HCP.

03. The ecosystem of HCP services should be integrated with shared technical infrastructure so that HCPs can log into diﬀerent services (even across different pharma companies) with the same ID, proﬁle information and preferences.

The Digital Customer Engagement Gap