How Healthcare and Pharma Brands Scale Personalized Digital Experiences

The impact that the global pandemic has had on the healthcare and pharmaceutical industry — particularly around the communication of critical health  information and services — has been immense. Never has it become more abundantly clear that medical affairs and health organizations need to fully embrace digital transformation. Yet in such a highly regulated industry, the adoption of new technologies for large pharma and healthcare organizations can be compared to driving a Ferrari down a road full of traffic lights. How can these major life sciences companies maintain trust and authority while achieving impactful digital innovation? 

Combining Content and Data for More Human-Centric Communication

Providing seamless and personalized digital experiences is no easy task. The healthcare and pharmaceutical space has long struggled with how to deliver personalized, relevant solutions to healthcare professionals (HCPs) and patients while adhering to strict compliance and privacy concerns. Traditional methods no longer are being accepted because content consumers' expectations for digital experiences are high — similar to what they receive from Amazon or other popular consumer applications.      

During Acquia’s annual Engage conference, healthcare solutions company Indegene discussed the need for medical and health providers to deliver data-driven, patient-centric experiences. Indegene has seen many medical and pharmaceutical businesses embrace AI and machine learning technologies that offer a more complete view of their patients and caregivers and help inform the next best action in their journey, such as providing a list of common symptoms or helping a user schedule their next appointment.

Especially as the recent global health crisis spurs more people to seek virtual care and consultations, doctors and healthcare providers need access to real-time, multichannel insights to understand the best way to reach patients. Predictive machine learning models have also been valuable assets for helping marketing teams learn the most appropriate times and frequencies to communicate with their audiences in order to avoid complicating their journey with unnecessary information.  

Pharma brands need technology that unifies content with business intelligence so that they can understand patient experiences and communicate feedback through personalized content. Embracing tools like AI-powered chatbots lets providers respond to ad hoc patient queries in real time, informed by data from unified profiles. Chatbots and voice assistants are both becoming more popular in the medical fields as patients can more readily get the answers they need in a more digestible, human-focused way as opposed to the complex language of medical journals. 

Streamlining Patient Journeys and Scaling Sites Faster

Multinational healthcare and pharmaceutical brands often have thousands of product lines and regional brands in their portfolio. When these brands and teams work in silos, it often leads to disconnected or confusing experiences. When patients come to organizations in need of care or important medical information, they shouldn't have to waste time searching through irrelevant content to receive help.  

In another Acquia Engage session, global pharmaceutical manufacturer Perrigo referenced the critical challenge their teams faced in communicating to all of their various stakeholders.  Optimizing campaign spend and deploying campaigns in multiple languages without passing complexity onto visitors were two key requirements. Previously, Perrigo had relied on external vendors that fell short of their needs because of siloed technology that didn’t enable their teams to re-use the site components they had already built. These silos between their technology teams, internal marketing and developer teams also meant Perrigo lacked visibility into important customer data — a critical concern when navigating ADA privacy rules.

In search of a more efficient approach that would allow them to nurture and serve patients on every channel and touchpoint, they partnered with digital transformation solutions company and Acquia partner, Ameex Technologies. Ameex helped Perrigo deliver a scalable, reusable and innovative digital architecture by leveraging the Acquia Drupal Cloud platform. By switching to a content management platform with powerful self-service content authoring and editing capabilities and a robust library of reusable global features, Perrigo and Ameex gave healthcare brand managers in different regions the flexibility to glocalize their site elements to suit local campaigns and messaging while still adhering to privacy and security regulations and overarching brand standards. Perrigo reduced total page development time across their sites from 8 weeks to 3 weeks! The new platform empowered them to create connected patient journeys and build trust while targeting content to the right audiences at the right time.    

Investing in digital experiences and adopting a human-centric mindset will open new opportunities for healthcare and pharmaceutical brands to deepen their relationships with patients and turn mountains of big data into actionable patient insights. For more on how these types of organizations are adopting new digital strategies, get our e-book, Healthcare Today: Unprecedented Uncertainty, Growing Expectations