Capturing consumer engagement and improving their experience with therapy must be top priorities for life sciences brands to drive improved medication behavior. Consumers are expecting more across every sector and healthcare is no exception. Patients are becoming more financially responsible for their care and are demanding more information to make educated decisions about their health. If your marketing team isn’t paying attention to patient engagement trends, consumers will not start or stay on therapy.
Every year the pharma industry spends nearly $31B to get to the moment of prescription, yet 20-30 percent of patients abandon their script and never start the prescribed therapy, and more than half that actually start therapy drop off within 6 months. Additionally, the industry spends $5B annually developing patient resources, such as education and support programs, but only three percent of patients ever access them.
When consumer and patient engagement is low, everything from brand recognition, medication adherence, positive word-of-mouth and patient health outcomes suffers. So how can we bridge this gap to deliver stronger engagement strategies, greater long-term value for patients, and better returns for your brand?
The answer is to fully optimize modern digital marketing technologies. In this blog, we’ll explore how predictive analytics and AI can help your organization create an entirely new level of consumer engagement and drive medication initiation and adherence.
The Predictive Power of AI in Patient Marketing
AI technology uses machine learning to analyze identified patient data for insight into future behaviors and outcomes for that specific patient. Leveraging predictive analytics to drive your outreach strategies can bring greater overall value to a patient’s brand experience while more efficiently improving their medication behavior.
Some key uses of AI in pharmaceutical marketing are:
- Predictive modeling of therapy initiation and adherence risk for each patient
- Personalized intervention planning
- Generating next-best-actions at the individual level
AI combined with robust data makes it possible to predict each and every patients’ risk of script abandonment, dropping out before refilling, or similar gaps in therapy. Once the AI identifies high-risk individuals with the greatest likelihood of being influenced by an intervention, it provides you with the next-best-action for that individual: including a highly accurate prediction of which content, channel, timing, and frequency will work best for the person.
This is especially important considering the expanding needs of the healthcare economy, with about six in 10 adults having a chronic disease, and four in 10 adults having two or more. A growing chronically ill population requires care that places them at the center of their health journeys and offers them individually tailored support. With more complex healthcare needs and an overwhelming amount of information on the web, patients need individually tailored support to meet them where they are at to cut through the noise.
Pharma as a whole must move beyond the days of segmenting and persona-based marketing where consumers are grouped together based on similar characteristics rather than as individuals with unique needs and preferences.
While on paper two patients may be between the ages of 27-35, live in a home with two other adults, and work a full-time job, there are a myriad of personal variables that can affect their preferences, behaviors, and potential for medication nonadherence; an SMS text nudge may work perfectly well for one individual, whereas a phone call and email may work better for another.
Viewing patients as holistically and individually as possible ultimately leads to better engagement, therapy initiation, and long term adherence.
Improve Patient Engagement, Outcomes, and Brand Performance with AI
In order to thrive within the rapidly changing healthcare economy, manufacturers must maximize the potential of available patient-level data. Now is the time for the industry to step up its approach and deliver consumers and patients the personalized engagement, support, and outreach they desire and deserve, and AI can take patient engagement to the next level.
A truly personalized approach allows pharmaceutical and other healthcare organizations to provide education and support programs that improve engagement, patient outcomes, and brand performance – and your company could be next.
Connect today to discover how you can leverage AI to create a better brand experience and bolster patient engagement and medication adherence, and check out our brand-new Impact Calculator.