IQVIA Digital has developed technology to help pharma marketers identify nurse practitioners (NPs) and physician associates (PAs) who write prescriptions.
The product is built on insights from POCN Group, a social and professional community for NPs and PAs that IQVIA acquired in 2024. NPs and PAs write 35% of all U.S. prescription claims, POCN data shows. Yet IQVIA argues that the industry undercounts NP and PA prescriptions billed under supervising physicians. Undercounting could cause marketers to overlook a potentially important set of prescribers.
Seeking to enable more accurate targeting, IQVIA Digital has used artificial intelligence to analyze a healthcare professional’s affiliation, education, prescriptions, diagnoses, practice and behavioral data. The company is performing the analyses to infer each clinician’s clinical focus.
By mapping NPs and PAs to their supervising physicians, the technology provides an overview of care delivery, IQVIA said. The company is pitching the overview as a way for marketers to align engagement strategies with how care is delivered. Marketing teams can reach the full care team, identify overlooked clinicians, understand prescribing influence and map collaborations between healthcare professionals.
The technology is needed because “NPs and PAs often practice across multiple therapeutic areas and care settings, making them difficult to classify using traditional data,” Eric Lloyd, chief revenue officer at IQVIA Digital, said in a statement. IQVIA’s application of AI to the problem reflects a belief that static data and physician-reported information cannot reliably capture roles that evolve and span care settings.
While IQVIA identified barriers to reaching NPs and PAs, payment data show pharma companies engage many of the healthcare professionals through some channels. Researchers found that 35.8% of advanced practice clinicians received payments from pharma or medtech companies in 2021, compared to 35% of physicians. NPs and PAs are types of advanced practice clinicians.