Pharma companies continue to struggle with reaching prescribers given all the non-clinical work that prescribers contend with in our modern healthcare system. PrescriberPoint CEO Dan Cornwell joined Fierce to discuss the ongoing challenges healthcare providers face when trying to start their patients on therapy. He explained how complex steps around drug access, coverage awareness, prior authorization and sampling create administrative obstacles that slow prescribing and frustrate providers.
Cornwell outlined PrescriberPoint’s three-part system. The Activate platform uses an omnichannel approach to reach 70% to 90% of targeted prescribers, introducing them to PrescriberPoint as a service-focused destination rather than a promotional channel. Once providers engage, the Access platform offers drug pages, coverage tools, sample ordering and agentic-AI-driven support for prior authorization, including capabilities within an intake pharmacy and EMR integrations. The Optimize platform then measures activity against claims data to determine which actions meaningfully shift prescribing behavior.
Cornwell said the team is also expanding its use of AI, including agentic tools that can make or receive calls, support chat interactions or help providers handle payer communications tied to medical benefit approvals. He described these tools as part of a larger effort to streamline work for both pharma teams and clinicians, creating a feedback loop that improves targeting, access and eases the prescribing journey.
Chris Hayden:
Hi, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. My name is Chris Hayden, our Producer here at Fierce, and today, I'm joined by Dan Cornwell. He's the CEO of PrescriberPoint. How are you today, Dan?
Dan Cornwell:
Hey, Chris. Nice to see you again.
Chris Hayden:
Yes, you as well, you as well. I know we've done this once before, but I would love it if you could just introduce yourself to our audience.
Dan Cornwell:
My name is Dan Cornwell, CEO of PrescriberPoint, and I have been passionate for quite some time in finding ways to improve our healthcare industry. As a patient or a consumer, it's maddening, like many of us experience and feel. But as an entrepreneur, it's exciting because there are lots of problems we solve.
Chris Hayden:
Our president once said, "Healthcare is very complicated," and that's the understatement of the century, isn't it? Healthcare is quite complicated.
Dan Cornwell:
Very complicated.
Chris Hayden:
So let's just dive right into the questions, all right? For viewers who may be new to PrescriberPoint, how do you describe what the company does and the core problem you're trying to solve for pharma brands and for prescribers?
Dan Cornwell:
Yeah. At the highest level, what we're trying to do is help healthcare providers get their patients started on therapy. So, we're very focused on medication access. And typically, there are a set of steps involved in that that create lots of challenges and burdens for healthcare providers. And as a consequence of that, prevent scripts from coming through. And obviously, that's problematic for the pharma industry. So there's lots of challenges around drug awareness, drug education, cost and coverage awareness and education, prior auth obstacles, trial, clinical confidence, access to samples, a host of value propositions like that. So, we think of all of that as adding up to the prescribing journey, and we're very focused on trying to help healthcare providers reduce the administrative burden of unlocking the prescribing journey, and then obviously drive script lift for brands as a consequence of that.
Chris Hayden:
And interestingly, one of the biggest challenges for brands today, simply just reaching the right prescribers, right? So, how does PrescriberPoint help brands engage with high-value HCPs in a way that helps drive action and not just simple awareness?
Dan Cornwell:
One of the unique things about our platform is we refer to ourselves as a common platform or as a third-party channel. So we're not a white label solution. We're not trying to operate behind the brand's infrastructure, like, say, a hub service, or what have you. We're a destination site, so prescriberpoint.com. Healthcare providers come and use our tools and capabilities. We serve about a half a million healthcare providers a month across a variety of different therapeutic areas, and what we do is to stimulate additional usage from healthcare providers.
We have a very sophisticated omnichannel marketing capability. We call it our Activate platform. And essentially, what it is is it's the composite of all of our sponsoring brands' target lists, and so we reach out to healthcare providers under the halo or banner of our brand, PrescriberPoint. So, we're perceived by healthcare providers as a source of authority site focused on service and support use cases, so really not trying to be a promotional platform. We're really dedicated to helping healthcare providers with service and support use cases. And because we go out with this umbrella brand of PrescriberPoint, albeit targeting some of the HCPs of interest to our sponsoring brands, we tend to get much higher conversions and engagement from healthcare providers as a consequence of that.
So, typically, at that Activate layer, reaching out to healthcare providers, we can reach 70% to 90% of healthcare providers on brand target lists. We're either serving them already because another brand that's working with us in the same class has already given us a target list that we've reached out to. So these HCPs are getting to know us over time, and so there's a compounding effect as we load each new incremental brand into our Activate platform within the same therapeutic area.
Chris Hayden:
Like we said a little earlier here, engagement alone, as we all know, doesn't guarantee prescribing, right? So, how does PrescriberPoint help translate that engagement into real prescribing behavior in script lift?
Dan Cornwell:
That outer layer, which is our Activate platform, it's what allows us to go find and pull HCPs into our ecosystem. We bring them into what we call our Activate... or sorry, our Access platform. So this is the core secret sauce of what we're doing. There's a web platform, so you can find it at prescriberpoint.com. What it is is it's a marketplace platform with drug pages for every marketed drug in the United States, and then we also support a series of prescribing tools. And so, we're bringing healthcare providers into our ecosystem. We're landing them in very highly optimized landing experiences, depending on what the message is promising in our outreach. So we might say something like, "Find prescribing support for drug X," and we'll land them on a drug page, or we might say, "Find coverage support for drug Y," and we might land them on our coverage tool.
And so, we're bringing them into this Activate platform... or sorry, the Access platform, and the outer layer of the Access platform, prescriberpoint.com is the web platform full of drug pages and prescribing tools, and then we then pull HCPs deeper into our ecosystem. So, within the logged-in, authenticated experience, we have some very sophisticated medication access capabilities. So we're also an intake pharmacy, and so we can educate healthcare providers to write scripts to the PrescriberPoint pharmacy inside their e-prescribing system. That allows us then to capture and stage the script within our ecosystem. We have integrations into EMRs, and we're using AI to auto-populate prior auth forms that we're pulling from the payers, leveraging the patient medical data, the clinical question sets from the payers, and then AI to auto-populate those PA forms, and then submit to the payers and get approvals. So that's the deep capability within the logged-in, authenticated experience.
We also have a sample ordering platform in there so that we can support HCPs in ordering samples. So think of it as a series of layers within this Access platform. There's the web layer, where the prescribing tools and drug pages exist, and then the Access layer inside.
Chris Hayden:
Moving on from that, measurement, right? Measurement, it's long been a weak spot in digital pharma efforts. So how does PrescriberPoint help brands understand what's working, what's not working, and continuously improve performance moving forward?
Dan Cornwell:
So the third part of our capability... So we have the Activate to go find the HCPs and pull them into our ecosystem, we have the Access platform, which is where they actually do the work of unlocking prescribing behavior, and then the third part of it is what we call Optimize. That's our measurement platform. That's bolted onto claims data, and so what we're doing is we're taking all of that activity that we're driving with healthcare providers and measuring it against what really matters, which is the underlying claims data. So it's all of that activity that we're driving with healthcare providers on our sponsoring brands' target list, is it adding up to a hill of beans? Is it leading to changes in scripts? And so, that's where we're measuring the script lift, and there's a lot of really interesting and exciting capabilities within that Optimize measurement platform.
As I mentioned, it's bolted into claims data, and so we can see deep into the patient level information as well. So, we can see where patients exist against specific diagnosis codes, the HCPs that sit on top of them. And so, we're not just measuring the impact of what we're doing in the first instance, but we're using it as an optimization tool to say, "Hey, there are some improvement opportunities that we can recommend to our clients on the targeting front to go find HCPs where prescribing behavior is lagging or they're having difficulty." And so, it's really a continuous improvement feedback loop that we're getting at here with these three components in our platform.
Chris Hayden:
Excellent. And when brands take this end-to-end approach, reaching the right HCPs, driving prescribing behavior, measuring results, what kind of impact are you seeing? And how should pharma teams think about ROI beyond just clicks and impressions?
Dan Cornwell:
Our experience is the quality of the conversation on this topic, Chris, is really poor. I don't think there are great solutions out there that understand the importance of all of the different kinds of activities that we can drive and their relationship with script lift. So we're building an algorithm, we call it our Script Equivalent Algorithm, where we take the 125 or so different events, engagement types that we can support on our platform, and we're regressing it against the claims data to say, "Hey, what is the impact of," for example, "a sample order on script lift? What is the impact of a copay card download on script lift? What is the impact of writing a script to our intake pharmacy on script lift?"
So we're building this algorithm, the Script Equivalent Algorithm, and we're using it both as a forecasting tool, so we say, "Hey, we think, for a certain budget, we can drive this number of engagements of these kinds of types, and so we think it's going to add up to this amount of script lift," and we're also using it as a retrospective tool to say, "All of that activity that we've measured in our platform, here's what we think it adds up to in terms of script lift."
Chris Hayden:
Dan, we'll get our crystal balls out here. Looking ahead, where do you see the biggest opportunity for innovation in the digital prescribing support over the next few years? Where do you see this headed?
Dan Cornwell:
Well, I'm not going to surprise you by using the phrase, AI, right?
Chris Hayden:
No.
Dan Cornwell:
We're using AI in a lot of very exciting ways. And again, we see AI as playing a role on both sides of our marketplace. So, on the one hand, the intersection between pharma companies and healthcare providers, but then also the intersection between healthcare providers and other stakeholders in this ecosystem that we're serving, including insurance companies, pharmacies, manufacturers, et cetera. And so, we debuted a series of agentic AIs on the pharma to HCP side of things. So we've innovated agentic AIs that can make outbound phone calls, service inbound phone calls, or operate as chat experiences that essentially do the work of, say, a rep, or an MSL, or an FRM. So it's an agentic field that we can deploy in support of some of our programs.
We're also leveraging these capabilities, on the other side of our ecosystem, helping healthcare providers call into insurance companies when they have to make lots of annoying phone calls for things like medical benefits approvals. So, in the world of prior authorizations, there's basically two kinds. There's pharmacy benefits, which is more programmatic. You can use a system to call an insurance company and get an adjudication. But in the world of medical benefits, it's a much more bespoke situation. And so, healthcare providers spend a lot of time on phones talking to insurance companies. So, we're using AI in the Jobs-to-be-Done capacity to solve some really hard problems.
Chris Hayden:
Excellent. Well, always excited to hear what you guys are up to over there. Sounds great.
Dan Cornwell:
Thank you.
Chris Hayden:
Yeah, thank you. And just, Dan, thanks so much for joining us today. I really appreciate your time.
Dan Cornwell:
Thanks, Chris. Appreciate your time.