Nurse practitioners (NPs) and physician assistants (PAs) write over 1.4 billion prescriptions per year, making this group an important target for pharma marketers.
POCN Group, long known as the largest social and professional community specifically for NPs and PAs, has expanded as a strategic consulting agency for pharma and life sciences to better target this essential and growing group of healthcare professionals.
POCN has also launched a suite of six new tools, including location-focused data and precise prescribing info.
Also new is the addition of Sonja “Sunny” Foster-Storch as POCN’s first chief growth officer to facilitate further expansion of the business.
“I've known Sunny for over 20 years, and she's always been one of the most energetic and creative people that I've known,” Richard Zwickel, CEO of POCN Group, said in an interview with Fierce Pharma Marketing.
“She knows this business, she was the president of McCann IPG health, she was the head of Syneos Health Communications for many years. I can’t think of anybody better to come here and help us really turn this into a really substantial group agency that can bring something to the market that just doesn't exist.”
What POCN is doing isn’t exactly new; what is new, Zwickel says, is “making a big deal about it.” The group has been working with over 50 pharma clients for nearly a decade to reach the NPs and PAs out there.
Thanks to POCN’s fully opted-in professional community of more than 600,000 NPs and PAs, POCN can compile firsthand data such as where they went to school, where they've worked and the types of patients that they're seeing, be it primary care or specialties such as cardiology and oncology, down to the type of tumors they treat.
It’s this kind of information that is so valuable to the marketing groups and brand marketing teams in pharma in order to effectively target the $131 billion worth of annual prescribing power.
“I think that's the really important thing here is for us to leverage the know-how and understanding of these important groups of prescribers and then put them into a place where marketers and life science and even other other groups can better understand and know how to identify, reach with data and engage through some of the stuff that we have going on,” Zwickel said.
He also stresses that POCN isn’t trying to usurp anyone but to work in tandem.
“We're going to continue to collaborative team players across marketing teams and brand teams as they see fit. I love what we're doing, and I love the tenor that Sunny brings because of her expertise and her relationships and the trust that clients have with her.”