Precision Marketing for Precision Medicine: A New Era (Part 2)

🔬 Welcome to the OUTCOMES Podcast, where marketing meets healthcare and biopharma. Part 2 of this episode, "Precision Marketing for Precision Medicine: A New Era," is an in-depth conversation with David Hubbell, Director of Strategy at emagineHealth. Our focus is on the paradigm shift happening in the healthcare and biopharma sectors—personalized medicine. And trust us, it's not just about science but also how we market it. 🎯

🌐 Topics Discussed:

- The role of Healthcare Providers (HCPs) in personalized medicine and its multi-faceted therapies

- Strategies for micro-targeting different healthcare personas, from primary care physicians to specialists

- Data privacy concerns surrounding patient information in cell & gene therapy

- The importance of Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) in educating HCPs and patients

💡 Insights You'll Gain:

- How to align HCP journeys with personalized therapies and the intricacies of medical marketing

- A nuanced understanding of data privacy issues, particularly concerning the 'chain of custody' in cell & gene therapies

- How to differentiate marketing content for HCPs, KOLs, and patients effectively

🎧 Listen in as we dissect the patient journey, discuss the key differences between primary care and procedural physicians, and delve into how personalized medicine is revolutionizing the marketing playbook for healthcare and biopharma companies.

📊 Who Should Listen?

Healthcare Marketers
Pharma & Biotech Professionals
Data Analysts in Healthcare
Privacy Advocates
HCPs interested in the future of personalized medicine

Thank you for listening to OUTCOMES. Please find more healthcare and biopharma marketing thought leadership in the Insights section of our website and follow us on LinkedIn!

Transcript

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Welcome to Outcomes, the healthcare and biopharma marketing podcast, where marketing leaders discuss the most effective strategies for the health sectors, coming from a digital first, AI powered perspective. You spend a lot of time doing research for our clients and speaking to patients and speaking to HCPs. Mapping out their journeys and I think one of the, one of the things that we know and what we've seen working with so many various sciences and medicines is that the physicians are brilliant people, but they still need to be educated on a lot of these more complex. And newer trends, they don't know everything. They're spending their days in the exam rooms or in the operating rooms. And there's a lot of outreach and a lot of different types of tactics for that outreach. And again, we as marketers aligned with HCPs. a lot when it comes to these newer types of therapies. So I'd like for you to just, you know, turn this over now to HCPs and your thoughts there. Yeah. And so, you know, some of the stuff I found, it's really eye opening. Um, you know, not while doctors are alike. Now we know about specialties, but probably the biggest delineation between doctors is primary care versus procedure. And both may come into play here with the personalized therapies. And what really blew me away was the average physician's salary. This is how diverse these two groups are. Salary is 405, 000 a year. All right. Um, but primary care physicians. Make about half of that. Yeah. Okay. So $200,000 a year, and the top 1% makes $1.3 million a year. Mm-hmm., well, that top 1% and 10% are the people doing procedures. Mm-hmm.. So they're thinking in two totally different worlds. Right. And I think that, you know, then you're looking at the different specialties and everything. So you can't just put up an H C P portal. And and expect that everybody's going to learn the same thing because somebody in that state, you know, the delivery of your therapy or whatever, maybe procedures versus the primary care and and all things in between. So that's one thing. So, you know, you really have to start to micro target. And I said this before. I think you've got to understand what is the patient journey, um, for receiving this therapy procedure, and then align the different HCPs that will be along that journey and use that. So you could still have a, an HCP site for all HCPs, but. It's really got to be, um, along the journey. So they see where they show up and then can go into the content that's going to be most important. And what's going to be really important in the HCP portal is a, you have to educate the doctor. All right, and you don't know how much the doctor knows and doesn't know and, and yet that has to happen and KOLs can play a part in that too. But then the other side is you've got to give the tools to now turn around and educate the patients and tell them what the journey is going to be, right? So I think that that's a huge difference, right? And if there ever really was a reason to have. Um, a well functioning HCP site, it's now because it's, it's really, and you know, let's always remember patients go to the site because what's it ask you, are you a, you know, medical professional? Oh, wow. They're going to tell me something good here. I better go look and the patient goes. So you, you gotta be really cognizant of that. One other thing while I'm on it is that. Not only do you want to be focused around the therapy, um, that you're delivering into the market and educating the HCPs, the bigger perspective, some of these HCPs may not even understand this whole field. Quite honestly, and they're going to start to see patients walking through the door that can benefit. I don't know if there's a specialty called personalized medicine and they're referred to that. I don't think so. Right. And so one thing I did find was it's a website called gene possibilities, HCP, and it was developed by vertex pharmaceuticals, and it's designed to educate HCPs on the industry. And what's happening in different types of therapies. So it has like a gene therapy overview, which has, you know, about gene therapy, the research behind it, the history of the market treatment journey, and then approaches, um, in specific to them is gene addition, editing, and CRISPR. So they talk about those things because they're experts and then it's a whole library full of knowledge. So here's this site that isn't give this to your patient. Here's some things you need to know. It's actually educating the HCPs and that's a fundamental change because we haven't done one of those ourselves. I mean, we haven't seen that yet. So, um, No, and even just to go back on what you said a few minutes ago, when you think of the complexity again of doing this right, even on just the HCP side, like you said, if you start with the patient journey, and you think about the myriad of Physicians that they're going to have to interact with through this journey. Those again, I realized not everyone's going to do it this granularly, but done right, you have certain content for a primary. You've got certain content for an oncologist. You've got certain content for a surgeon and there might be a couple more that I missed in, in that little journey, but that alone, those are, those are different personas. So, You know, you can really do this in a very nuanced way. Yeah. And it's not only the HCPs, it's all of the other places and people that a patient might meet. So take for instance, an autologous stem cell. Transplant. Okay. That means that they're going to take cells from you and give you your own cells back that have been re engineered to fight something. Okay. There are six steps to that. Those are major steps, right? Taking medications to increase the production of stem cells in your blood so that they can harvest them. Filtering these stem cells from your blood. Sending them out for processing while maintaining. The chain of identity and the chain of custody. That was one of those companies we worked with that they tracked all this stuff. Because if you get somebody else's cells, you literally can die, you know? Um, and so, you know, who were those people? And we got to figure that out. Right. And then perhaps, you know. undergoing high doses of cancer treatment. So you said oncologist, so that might be part of it, right? And then ultimately receiving an infusion of these engineered cells, right? And then all the post procedure testing, monitoring, and then maybe you're back to your Primary care physician, you know, and so, so you've got to really think about that journey and, and through the patient's eyes, because it's an arduous journey for some of these therapies. Um, it's got a bright ending to it, but it could be a lot of steps and knowing all those audiences and their journeys and the content that they need along those. I mean, that's the stuff we do every day, and I think it's really going to be important. The content they need in the formats they prefer, which is going to be a mix of everything from long form, like for, for an HCP, you're going to have webinars, you're going to have eBooks, white papers, you're going to have clinical trial data for patients. You might have videos, um, shorter form content, uh, social media, obviously. And one of the things, and a lot of this is educating. Obviously, uh, these are new concepts, these are scientific concepts we need to simplify, but another part of it that we need to do at every single step of the way to both the patient and the HCP, as well as all the ancillary audiences like caregivers and everybody else is we have to build trust in this science as well, because it is like Google, for instance, Google still considers this to be experimental medicine. Um, because in a way it is because every single instance is unique and new. So it might always be considered experimental because, because it's so specific to each patient and we have certain limitations or restrictions in how we can even advertise for anything selling, we're going to do an upcoming podcast on that with our paid media team, but it's considered experimental by Google. So again, a big part of what we need to do in addition to educating is we have to establish. Trust in this, that this, that, that this is actually something you can feel comfortable trying. And this is better than that one size fits all pill that you might've been given for something in the past. So, you know, we, we've been talking about all these audiences and everything and And, and we're coming back to the same three audiences time and again, right? It's HCPs and patients, and I believe KOLs because, you know, they're the people who are out there that are more educated, that can impart knowledge to the HCPs who then, you know, advise the patients and so forth. But I, I really think that personalized medicine is so different that we really need to rethink how we engage with these audiences. I think that's the key point. And what we expect of them. And how we message with them. Those three things, you know, how we engage, what we expect them to do, and how we message. And if you look at these three core audiences, again, HCPs, KOLs, and patients, you know, here's what I think changes. HCPs are going to need to move from prescribing behavior. That's been the term for years. Get them to prescribe the medicine to advising. Okay, so from prescribing to advising. And it's not as simple as a prescription. It's going to require educating the patients, offering additional insight, what to expect. It's so much more sharing education and resources and so forth. The KOLs. You know, they, they vary, but what I really think has to happen in personalized medicine is they need to move to advocating. Okay. They're going to be the people that can see it from the level where they can be advocates, right? You know, advocates for the overall science, the technology approaches, benefits, that kind of thing. Also for therapies in promoting like a two way discussion out to the HCPs and to the medical community, right? But inward to the biopharma companies, right? So they have a dual role to be that intermediary. Um, and you know, the pharmaceutical companies would be well advised to use these people to do that. And they're doing that to explain things now, but I think with cell and gene, it's just so much more. And then finally, the patients, I think they have to move to accepting, uh, some of these are really aggressive conditions. Treatments are fundamentally different, you know, endured over a long period of time, personal investment, all this kind of stuff. And in some cases it might be a lifetime of monitoring and treatment, you know? Um, so being so different, you know, they'll want to know what the process is, what to expect, the side effects and so forth, and in the end, accept it all. Because that's their journey. And I think that that's really the key thing there. KOLs. There's a whole strategy there in the, because there's not going to be an abundance of, of candidates to be your KOL for these, for these types of therapies. It's still fairly new. Um, and you know, you all, you always want KOLs who are going to bring real integrity. In that their peers trust them, perhaps they've published peer reviewed articles on this, um, they're not just bringing the most number of, you know, followers on social media or something. You're ultimately paying six figures for a testimonial. Um, you need to make sure that that person, first of all, obviously knows what they're talking about with this, but is also trusted by their peers. Well, and it's a luminary that's advocating for the advancement of these things, you know.