One of the top 10 FiercePharma article of this past year is a featured a story “Novartis' Netflix moment? Big Pharma launches a new on-demand video hub to boost digital engagement with doctors”.
As you can imagine, the article generated a lot of attention from pharma executives and life science agencies because it describes a new, modern way to engage HCPs on their own terms and drive pharma's business objectives.
In this article I’ll share the 3 reasons why big pharma companies use Netflix-like personalized on-demand video hubs to engage HCPs.
If you want to learn how to have your own Netflix-like content hub for HCPs, click the button below to find out how
Back to the three reasons.
Reason #1: Pharma is Losing Direct Access to HCPs
Doctors are simply closing their physical and virtual doors to pharma reps.
And when a business doesn’t have a way to access their customers, it’s not a fun situation to be in. We are talking about failed product or indication launches, and inability to reach the investor forecasts.
To make things worse, other traditional channels such as emails, webinars, HCP portals and speaker programs are all losing their effectiveness due to lack of differentiation.
Reason #2: HCPs Prefer to Self-Educate Through Content
A doctor's journey of discovering new treatments and starting to prescribe them goes through the following three stages:
- Disease education (“What’s new in my specialty?”)
- Product education (“How can this new drug X be used in my practice?”)
- Product adoption (“How can I start using this drug (questions about co-pays, samples, patient types…))?”
Before COVID 19, all three stages were driven by sales reps or MSLs.
After COVID, all of that has changed….The EPG Health Report 2022 says that “only 4% of HCPs consider pharma field force critical in discovering new scientific information…”
Doctors want stages 1 and 2 to be driven by peer-to-peer and KOL content, and only after they show interest and build trust in the company, they may opt-in to see a pharma rep and learn more.
In other words, ⅔ of HCP's product adoption journey is now driven by on-demand content.
Reason #3: HCPs Want Snackable, Personalized Video Content Experience (à-la Netflix)
HCPs are in control and want to engage on their own terms.
What does “engage on their own terms" really mean?
- On-demand (“Watch anytime anywhere”)
- Personalized (“if you watched this you may want to watch that”)
- Snackable (“I have 5 minutes. What’s new in my specialty?”)
- KOL or peer-to-peer authored ("Can I trust this content?")
- Intuitive, easy to use (“I want a Netflix-like experience”)
- Visual ("Is there a video for this? If not, maybe a podcast?")
In other words, the future of HCP engagement is Netflix-like, requiring pharma companies to increase the amount of rich-media, video and audio content in order to regain direct access to HCPs and continue to build trust in their science and products.
For pharma teams, this is an opportunity to improve their content game and stand out vs competitors.
If you want to learn how to have your own Netflix-like content hub for HCPs, click the button below to find out how
References from this article:
* FiercePharma Featured Story 2022: Novartis' Netflix moment? Big Pharma launches new on-demand video hub to boost digital engagement with doctors.
** Veeva: HCP Engagement Trends 2022
*** EPG Health 2022: The gaps between HCP demand and pharma supply of medical information