Web for Healthcare professionals

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The report is based on an independent study conducted in August 2018 with three global stakeholder groups – healthcare professionals (HCP), pharmaceutical companies (pharma) and third party service providers. In combination, their insights indicate that: 

For HCPs, websites are the most important and frequently used of communication channels in clinical practice, while pharma still places more value and budget with other channels including scientific meetings and company representatives. 

HCPs turn to pharma websites for brand awareness, however for disease awareness they prefer to use independent websites and expect industry to support the provision of these. Pharma however, prefers to use its own websites for both brand and disease awareness, and most companies have internal policies to favour investment in their own websites. 

Pharma’s primary objectives for digital activities are to provide real value, improve trust and grow audience reach. To do this, focus is on creating the types and formats of content that HCPs prefer. Creating this content is a major challenge that pharma largely outsources to overcome. The potential of this content to achieve pharma’s objectives is then limited by placing it on their own websites. 

While multichannel activity is a major area of focus and challenge for industry, the channels that pharma adopts to engage HCPs are not being effectively integrated with websites or successfully used to raise awareness of them. Likewise, data collection and use is a key area of focus but also a major challenge, with pharma struggling to extract meaningful insight or measure real-world impact currently. 

Pharma is collaborating with third party providers in the areas that it finds challenging internally due to perceived lack of expertise, but research indicates pharma preference would be to keep most digital activity internally driven and resourced (Más)