What if you knew an HCP was seeing a brand-qualified patient in the next 30 days? That was the conversation I had with over 100 HCP marketers in the past 12 months. The overwhelming response was how that ability to understand when to reach the HCP was missing.
Phreesia has spent two decades solving the patient side of that problem: the right patient, the right message, right before the visit. When I led our launch into HCP marketing, I saw an opportunity to apply the same approach to helping HCPs prepare for a visit. Brands invest heavily in segmenting HCPs to make messaging more relevant, but the inputs are historical: claims, articles read, congresses attended, rep visits. Each describes what a clinician did, not what a clinician is about to do.
That gap in reaching the HCP at the wrong time is expensive. Reach the right HCP in the days before a relevant appointment and media works harder, the clinician is more receptive and they arrive better prepared to discuss options with the patient. Reach them at the wrong time, and your impact drops significantly.
My conversations with clients revealed two big challenges.
Large, multi-indication brands have hundreds of thousands of HCPs they want to reach with messaging, but the current segmentation tools only take them so far. They aren’t sure how to scale their messaging efficiently across their HCP audience. Appointment timing helps solve this. You’re reaching HCPs only when they have a brand-qualified patient on their schedule. So, delivering messaging in large segments like primary care and advanced practice practitioners becomes significantly more efficient and effective since HCPs can apply that messaging to an upcoming visit with a patient.
Another challenge is missing NPIs from their list that could benefit from brand messaging. Over half of marketers say their NPI lists miss relevant or newly active HCPs. This impacts rare disease, oncology and launch brands, especially where historical data may be thin or extrapolated to try to identify the right HCPs. Lists simply cannot keep up because almost every input is backward-looking. Predictive models try to infer the future but rely on past behavior, “dynamic” targeting refreshes on lagging indicators, and claims data—the industry's default proxy—runs four to six weeks behind a current appointment. So, brands that pay to keep an accurate list are still, necessarily and at scale, spending to reach clinicians who may not be near a prescribing decision. Almost 3 in 4 growth-stage brands say lists include many non-priority or low-value HCPs.
The issue with focusing only on which NPIs are on a list is that it tells a team nothing about when those HCPs are most meaningfully reached. Which of those clinicians has a relevant patient on the schedule next week, and which will not see one for months?
Much of the market has turned to a newer class of tools that aim to meet the need: real-time clinical reference and clinical-AI platforms that reach physicians inside their workflow, the moment they look something up. These tools are useful, but they have not solved the timing problem. They reach a clinician once a question is already in front of them, which is late in terms of informing decisions. By the time a patient sits down, the clinician has usually formed a default from training, familiarity and habit. Clinical inertia, the tendency to keep doing what has worked, is one of medicine's most documented patterns. These new tools can confirm a hunch or help clarify a dosing schedule, but they are not designed as well to shape discovery. In a survey on the physician perspective, fielded on Sermo’s platform, half of physicians said their EHR and clinical-AI reference tools (e.g., OpenEvidence) are more helpful for confirming a treatment decision than for evaluating options.
The market knows timing is the next frontier: 52% percent of HCP marketers said reaching clinicians at the right time is their single biggest challenge. The window to shape health outcomes is not during the visit but in the days before, while the clinician reviews the schedule. We know through years of experience that patient education before an appointment works. Patients come more prepared, and now Phreesia is excited to help HCPs prepare for visits with those patients. Reaching HCPs before those visits allows them to consider new treatment options instead of confirming a decision already made.
We’re already seeing this impact play out. Early results from our HCP-facing campaigns in a matched est versus Control study have shown a 5% incremental lift in new-brand prescriptions and over 1,000 new patient starts.
The industry has been optimizing against who the best HCP was to reach last quarter, hoping that was enough. After hearing the challenges in reaching HCPs, I find the most encouraging development a simple one: the tools to invest in the right moment, not just the right name, finally exists.
To learn more about Phreesia’s ProviderConnect solution and how forward-looking engagement can strengthen your provider marketing strategy, request a demo today.
The editorial staff had no role in this post's creation.