Digital Pharma East (DPE) 2024 kicked off this week in Philadelphia, with pharma industry experts convening for discussions around the latest trends in healthcare marketing.
Panels and speakers are focused on everything from HCP personalization to the nuances of applying AI in a practical way now that the hype has died down a bit.
The main event began Tuesday with a keynote address from actor Maurice Benard about his experience with bipolar disorder.
However, DPE officially launched Monday afternoon, with a few brand strategy workshops to whet the pharma marketers’ appetite.
Here are a few takeaways from day one of the annual industry conference.
An evolution of AI
The first workshop focused on brand strategy in omnichannel campaigns, specifically regarding the evolving use of AI.
Hosted by Syneos Health companies Evolvics and Addison Whitney, the workshop showed how medical marketers can begin to rely on AI “personas” of patients and healthcare providers (HCP) alike to help guide brand development.
For example, meet Sarah, a 34-year-old AI patient with psoriatic arthritis who works as a graphic designer. She’s looking for brand messaging that’s supportive, reassuring and liberating.
Also, meet Dr. Thompson, an AI persona of an older rheumatologist with a British accent. The doctor persona discusses the main channels she goes to for information about new therapies — including journals, medical conferences and webinars.
Meanwhile, Sarah discusses how she wants to feel supported when she comes across health information online.
It’s an example of Syneos Health’s “Mindset Engine” platform, which pulls together preferences, beliefs and attitudes of HCPs and patients from a proprietary survey of some 14,000 people.
Mindset Engine aims to drive prescriptions with a better understanding of the preferences for how people nterpret information. Syneos Health referred to it as their “living intelligence platform.”
Developing patient and HCP personas to guide brands is quite the evolution from even just a year ago at DPE, when panelist Jamie Cobb, SVP and creative director at Addison Whitney, also spoke about the budding potential of AI.
That year-over-year growth of AI is something he’s particularly excited about this year at DPE.
“It’s still nascent and young, but we’re learning how to pair it with data, how to protect our proprietary information and methodologies — but also still accelerate and amplify what we can do,” Cobb explained.
Compared to last year, he said AI has shifted from a novelty and shiny object into something more valuable.
“AI is now a responsibility that our clients look to us to offer to them responsibly, efficiently and safely,” he said.
Reaching consumers via telehealth
In the second workshop, Dorothy Gemmell, president and chief commercial officer at GoodRx, delved into how healthcare marketers can better optimize messaging on telehealth platforms.
Gemmell set the stage for the marketing audience, noting that HCPs are currently a scarce resource.
High levels of physician burnout and fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic has led to severe provider shortages, with 86,000 physicians expected to be in shortage by 2036. Long wait times and a lack of primary care physicians are other barriers for people to access care.
As a result, healthcare consumers are demanding change, with Gemmell noting that 77% of adults have started searching for healthcare online.
The use of telehealth and virtual visits increased significantly since the pandemic began in 2020, with 55% of patients indicating they were more satisfied with telehealth visits than in person ones.
That also means marketers will have to constantly adapt to these changes, as Gemmell said traditional commercialization strategies won’t work, while “digital solutions are the answer.”
Over the next five years, medical marketers will also have to adjust their strategies to deal with emerging “provider deserts” as well as the expansion of virtual care and care-at-home.
“There are neurology deserts, cardiology deserts, everything deserts,” Gemmell said. “That’s only going to increase. If you’re a pharma marketer, you’re launching drugs in a world where your sales force doesn’t have access, there aren’t enough specialists, and patients increasingly may not live near those HCPs. That will force the way pharma goes to market if you’re going to have a successful launch.”
Emerging trends at DPE
Compared to years past, when certain buzzwords like “AI” or “CTV” reigned supreme, DPE 2024 is shaking out to be a little bit different.
There are panels on any number of topics this year — HCP personalization, the shifting landscape of linear TV and CTV, the intersection of sports and pharma marketing.
Cobb, for one, is looking forward to learning about how other companies are evolving their use of mobile and social media.
“We’ve been in this big transformation of going remote, where everything’s mobile and distant,” he said. “I want to see if that’s starting to turn around or warm up a little bit.”
When it comes to reading between the lines at DPE, Cobb is excited about experiencing the small social moments and networking opportunities throughout the day.
“We were coming up the escalator and I saw ‘Digital Pharma East,’ and I said, ‘We all live in digital now,’” he explained. “I like looking for the little places where we’ve reminded ourselves that digital is the means to connecting, not the end of connecting.”
One example of that may be through the discussions that focus on storytelling in pharma marketing, he said. At least one panel on Tuesday will explore transforming the patient journey through storytelling.
“When we celebrate stories through these films or documentary experiences and then share them through the digital experience — how is that evolving?” Cobb asked. “Storytelling is still art, it’s still the universal timeless thing — and that’s what I’m looking forward to.”
