Revolutionizing Patient Marketing: How PatientPoint Precision is Transforming DTC Campaigns

Heath Clendenning:
You are listening to a sponsored episode of The Top Line. Welcome, everyone. You’re listening to The Top Line, brought to you by Fierce Pharma and Fierce Biotech. I’m your host, Heath Clendenning. Today’s episode is sponsored by PatientPoint. We are joined by Andrew Schultz, president of PatientPoint Precision.
AJ, welcome.

Andrew Schultz:
Thanks for having me, Heath. Looking forward to chatting.

Heath Clendenning:
Today we’ll be diving into how context and hypertargeting are reshaping patient marketing. So let’s get started. We already seem to be in the middle of the data revolution. Many advertisers claim to be successfully harnessing the power of data, but when it comes to patient marketing, you believe that DTC marketers are coming up short?

Andrew Schultz:
Yeah. Thanks for kicking us off, Heath. I think the patient marketers have done an incredible job with the tools that we’ve presented them so far to date. I think that when you back up from the evolution of marketing, I think we’ve gotten really good at engaging patients based on behavior, based on data profiles that we can put together for those patients. When you really cut to the short of it, we’re still guessing. We’re getting really good at guessing, right? Our guesses and our approximations are getting closer and closer to identifying the exact patient that we’re going after, but we don’t know with a deterministic lens that patient is the exact patient that we’re trying to engage.
The second piece of it, I think, is really about context, the actual location that the ad gets placed. By and large, most of our advertisement is going to wind up somewhere out on the internet, some sort of a website experience. The challenge is that the mindset a patient brings to that website is not thinking about their healthcare. When I went to espn.com, I was checking sports scores. I wasn’t considering a treatment for a condition that I was thinking about.
I think where we are going as an industry is finding ways to blend those two concepts and really harness the power of data and the power of contextual relevance. For PatientPoint, that’s been the name of the game for a long time, right? PatientPoint has been known as a leader in the point of care space for 30 years, right? Operating in over 30,000 physician offices, and with 120,000 physicians that trust us to put our solutions into the four walls of their physical office.
PatientPoint Precision takes it to the next step. We’re now emerging outside of the four walls of the office, engaging patients virtually on their own private devices during moments that are adjacent to their care experience, things like logging into their patient portal or during the check-in or intake processes. We’re doing this in a way that we are also gaining consent to leverage their EHR data to personalize their experience. So we are quite literally getting to deterministic EHR level targeting paired with incredibly high contextual relevance.
We know that a patient is about to see their doctor. We know that they have a particular condition, and we are engaging them not just with sponsored information that’s relevant to their journey, but educational information that’s relevant to their journey because what we believe is the pairing of those things is really how you drive patient behavior, and it’s ultimately how you drive positive patient outcomes. All of that is good for the brands that we represent. When patients can get access to the therapies they need and they can make good decisions with their doctors about how to manage their conditions, everybody wins.

Heath Clendenning:
Okay, that makes good sense. But for those of us not well acquainted with EHR data, can you remind us all what that is and how are we accessing it? What’s so special about it?

Andrew Schultz:
Yeah, Heath, it’s probably one of the most important questions for us to talk about. I think everybody understands that your electronic health record has all kinds of information about you as an individual. How many times do you see the doctor, what kind of insurance you have, conditions or procedures that you’ve gone through, what treatments that you’re on. The ability for us to leverage that information is critical moving forward, and there’s a couple pieces of this.
The first aspect of accessing that information is gaining trust of physicians and ensuring that a physician wants to participate in a program, sees value in engaging their patients with personalized health experiences. The second piece is gaining patient consent and really doing it in a way that is completely transparent, in a way that sets their expectation, in a way that is easily manageable. If a patient wants to revoke their authorization or modify their preferences over time, it needs to be easy and turnkey for a patient to do that. Once that happens, we can then take a look at that information and do it in a completely encrypted, tokenized way that protects that patient’s data.
When you combine all of those factors, you get access to one of the most robust data sets in the world. With that information, we can really lean into precision targeting. It’s effectively a faceted search. A brand can come to PatientPoint and say, “Hey, here’s exactly the patient I’m looking at by age, by demographic, by clinical condition, by current insurance,” and PatientPoint can tell you exactly how many patients and exposures we anticipate to see in a given year, and then we can run unique and individual campaigns against that patient population. That level of precision marketing is really what we see as the future of all of this.

Heath Clendenning:
That’s fantastic. So understanding that this data represents a treasure trove for healthcare marketers, what should they be doing better to take advantage of it?

Andrew Schultz:
I think the first step they have to start asking is how they can use that data to add value to their patients’ experiences. As an industry, we are walking into a world of access and privileged information that we need to be really cautious about. We need to be good stewards of the trust that patients have put into us to engage them effectively. I think the number one rule to think about is, how am I adding value to this patient’s experience, to this patient’s life? Nobody minds advertising when it is adding value to their experience. If I get a coupon for the sweater that I was looking at and I get to purchase it at a lower cost, that’s fantastic, more than happy. But the minute you violate that trust and you’re spamming somebody or you’re giving them information that’s not relevant to them, that’s where we start to erode the entire promise.
So I think the first thing is that we have to have a mindset with our advertising, with our creative, with our execution, that adds value to a patient’s journey. Sometimes that’s going to mean branded promotional messaging, awareness of a particular treatment or the introduction of a new indication or new information about a drug. But it doesn’t have to stop there. It can go into patient support programs or coupons or copay programs, assistance programs, even clinical trial recruiting. All of those potential avenues are now options because of that combination of hyper targeting and data. And I really think that’s, so long as marketers have that concept of add value be useful in the back of their minds, I think that is a really amazing starting point.
The second piece that I would go into is the ability to really target an individual audience and ensure that the creative that we are delivering to that audience is reflective of them. So when you think about the continuation of multicultural marketing as a global goal that I think most organizations are very much aligned to, making sure that individual sees themselves in this advertisement is a tremendous opportunity With this level of patient targeting and this level of access to data, we can do that in a really interesting way. So for marketers to really start thinking about robust campaign plans that really map out unique patient sets and ensure that the creative that they’re deploying also matches the uniqueness of the targeting they’re using within that campaign.

Heath Clendenning:
Okay, that’s a great answer. So it seems like you’re talking about this as an entirely new DTC channel. So are healthcare platforms really capable of delivering this new, more precise marketing capability?

Andrew Schultz:
Yeah, I think we’re absolutely talking about a new way of looking at the world of display advertising. I think everybody has gotten really accustomed to the typical modalities and ad types that are offered online, and for us, what we’ve built is a really interesting platform that allows those marketers to really take it a step further. The ability for us to think about the patient experience holistically from pre-visit, getting prepped for the visit, checking in for the visit while they’re at an office, post-visit, scheduling a follow-up, checking lab results. All of those steps of the journey are now accessible in a way that they really weren’t before.
The reality of it is that not every healthcare platform can do this. It’s been something that we’ve been hard at work for a little over a year and fine-tuning the way that we would do it, the precision of how we’re going to do it, as well as something simple as the ad unit itself. So for us, patient Point Precision uses a really standard IAB 300 by 250 medium rectangle banner. That’s where things start in the platform. And we did that because every marketer out there has a brand approved MLR ready to go ads sitting on the shelf right now. We can get started with that. And then, as we start to learn through the programs, we start to find the right audience, as we start to fine tune campaign creative, we can update things on the fly. And our ability to be agile and to act quickly. I think is an incredible capacity that is moving the ball forward from this standpoint. I think that concept of aligning to a holistic patient journey is incredibly important, right?
Marketers have been talking about aligned to the patient journey for years. That’s not a new concept, but our ability to actually deliver it, to have the activation layer, so to speak, to be able to turn on an ad in every single one of those locations to ensure that patient is truly having a robust experience with this product, that is a new capability and kind of a new channel that we’re really excited to be in the middle of.

Heath Clendenning:
All right, so this sounds really good, but as you know, we’re in a fairly risk averse industry. There’s always concern about patient privacy, how companies get, store and use personal health information. So how do marketers make sure that they’re doing this safely and securely?

Andrew Schultz:
That is a fantastic question, and quite frankly, something that is of the highest importance to us, and I think as well to our industry partners as we move forward. The biggest thing that I think we need to start doing is by asking questions. So the big question I would want to start with is, what does the consent process look like? The fact that you have access to this information is fantastic, but how did you get it? And quite literally, I would start asking questions, what does it look like? What does it feel like for a patient to go through this process? Is it clear? Is it obvious? Does the patient understand exactly what they’re opting into, that they understand what we’re going to do with their data? Are we upholding our promises that we make to that patient? Right? How easy it is it for a patient to opt out of the program? If they want to modify their preferences, if they want to change direction, is it easy for them to do that? Same thing goes with additional steps like encryption and tokenization. What steps has a partner taken to take it to the next level to ensure that patient data is absolutely rock solid secure? That is an incredible question to be asking potential partners.
The next big thing that I would want to make sure is that once a brand feels comfortable with how a product is accessing PHI or accessing sensitive information, is that you really need to go back to that concept of data and context. It’s incredibly important to mix those things. That’s really where the magic happens. Having all of the data in the world is super interesting, but without a deployment method, without a modality that makes sense and engages a patient when they’re in that healthcare decision-making mindset, it’s going to fall short, right? The beauty and the magic happens when those things combined. So I’d really want to understand as a marketer, where are these placements happening? How are patients engaging with those placements? What’s the frequency that they’re using these? How is the entire system work together? Understanding how data and context play together is a huge next step in moving forward and really trusting providers to do what’s right for patients and to do what’s right for the industry.

Heath Clendenning:
AJ, great conversation. Come back soon and keep us all posted, will you?

Andrew Schultz:
Will do.

Heath Clendenning:
Thank you all for joining us on this episode of The Top Line. For more information, you can learn more in our show notes at fiercepharma.com. And that’s the bottom line from the top line.