How to Create a User-Friendly Design for a Medical Website? Posted on December 9, 2019February 4, 2025 by Andrii Nikulin “You never get a second chance to make a first impression” is a buzz phrase in the business world. One of the main things to do as a smart manager is to try to draw attention to your company. The best-designed medical websites are going to help to attract clients and ensure that people know exactly what your company is all about. So, how do life science companies attract more visitors to their website? In this article, we will discuss some sleek tricks that have been tried and proved by successful website makers, which can give your platform the attention it merits. The Best Medical Website Design 2023 Becoming a Black Sheep Although it has been said that web developers, designers, content managers, etc. are always in the shadows, in fact, these people present core messages of your company to the world. What makes a doctor’s website better? Consistency is the key to the success of the entire project. Every stage of creating the best life science website design is meticulous work every developer from the web studio team is responsible for. Creating a website includes not only design development and programming, but also a detailed analysis of the project, dialogue with the customer, and the search for solutions to achieve the goals of the project. However, even precise adherence to all stages of development does not guarantee that your website will stand out from the others. A distinctive style can pick you out of a crowd of competitors, but designers have to give it all to ensure that it grabs users’ attention. There is no single solution to craft the best hcp pharma website; but there are different life science web design tricks and techniques that you can use to increase your chances of being noticed on the Internet. Keep it Simple Did you ever go to a website that shouted: “Made by a day-fly designer”? Likely. We mean tons of redundant graphics, images, animations, and a rather strange choice of a color palette. Overloaded design not to be the answer if you want to provide the constant flow of visitors (and a general positive impression) to your website. Complex design is hard to read and understand. Keep gimmicks to a minimum. The best pharma website design should be clean, simple, and straightforward. Simplicity will keep visitors on your site for a long time. Web page design for life science should not be too complicated: websites that are overloaded with content will have a long load time. That will cause a bounce rate to increase. We’ve found proof with statistics that will confirm you. Surprise, Surprise When we see something unpredictable, the pleasure centers in our brain are turning on. We subconsciously choose something new and non-trivial because it captures our attention much faster than something we already know and possibly even like. This can be applied both to the design and content of the website. When it comes to the content of the pharmaceutical website landing page, the headlines should be catchy and arresting since they go through the graphics and take on the role of guide for the users on your designs. It is worth paying attention to these lines if you want to grab a visitor’s attention with your visuals. These may be headers with the element of surprise; otherwise, your content will blend in with the internet noise. Headlines containing questions are an excellent idea to strike a spark out of visitors. This is due to the fact they notice a gap in their knowledge and subconsciously strive to fill it. Another way to whet readers’ appetite is to give a small portion of the information at the beginning. This one will play into your hands because it will build up the reader’s information hunger and make them want to know more to feel better. Usage of superlatives (biggest, best, greatest) and negatives (worst) works flawlessly on landing pages headlines. Moreover, statistics also attract the attention of readers. It is hard to say if these tricks will 100% ensure a constant flow of visitors, but according to surveys, more than half 51% respondents prefer the intrigue-based approach to headlines with the usage of superlatives. Promote Wisely Is there any chance that there can be too much promotional push on the pharma website? Yep. Nothing annoys the web site visitor more than an overabundance of advertising popping up out of the woodwork. Moreover, it can sometimes deflect attention away from where the true customer engagement happens. 82% of people report that they have closed a web site because of the abundance of advertising. So how many ads/calls to action should be contained on a webpage? Investigate the interest of your target visitor. The first step to establishing the right balance in this equation is to start monitoring the effectiveness of the advertising campaign, as well as constantly testing it for continuous improvement. This means that you will advertise to a much more appropriate audience. Caring for visitors of your site should be your postulate, and this is what will help you find the best website design for medical and life science services. Leave Some Space Whitespaces is a tool to make a website readable, easy to perceive, and easy to like. Let us clarify that this is the untouched space between text, graphics, images, columns and other components. The best example to illustrate the unsuccessful use of Whitespaces is the websites with an abundance of ads instead of blank spaces. We say it is unsuccessful since it looks and distracts attention from the main content. Whitespaces is another trick to make a smooth transition between the content and the background of the website. It is extremely important for designers to create a stylish look for a website and to be clear with their layouts. Whitespaces is the helper in highlighting or drawing attention to some elements of design. In other words, this is the very tool that gives simplicity and elegance to a website. Don’t be Plastic People are starving for interactivity. According to the survey conducted by Harris Poll, 36% of millennials ages 18 to 34, who use “visual expressions” such as emojis, GIFs and stickers say that those images better communicate their thoughts and feelings than words do. This is another successful trick which is widely used on the best life science websites to add some life and dynamic to your design. It is very convenient since these days GIFs are available for use on each social media platform. Besides, GIFs are a popular trend that will give extra attention to your pharma website. You may use animated logos in the website’s header, animated icons, and graphic elements to mobilize the website look. Be Music to the Eyes If we had to single out the main trick of the above, it would be a successful use of visualization. The visual concept is the first thing a site visitor pays attention to. Well-chosen colors and smooth color transitions are probably the best tricks to grab the attention of the visitor. Moreover, elegant contrasts in terms of color, shapes, and lines will help to stand out from the rest effortlessly. It is equally important to observe the visual hierarchy to avoid visual chaos and make your pharmaceutical website design visually catchy. Hierarchy describes order in which the human eye will perceive the elements on a website. Use it to emphasize what the visitor should see first and clearly manifest your ideas. Be Mobile-Friendly Nowadays, people are more than ever addicted to their mobile devices. We turn to our phones when we are bored, tired, in sickness and in health until “death do us part”. In 2018, 58% of site visits were from mobile devices. However, in 2019, the time average adult spends on smartphones increased by 9 minutes. Multichannel mobile traffic has increased by 68%. Additionally, multichannel mobile revenue has increased by 49%. That’s why we recommend developing a mobile-friendly website in the first place. By mobile-friendly website, we mean one that can recognize whenever it is viewed from a smartphone or tablet and change its layout accordingly. If your website is not adapted for the mobile view, has inconvenient navigation or unreadable text, in the end, it will play a trick on the number of visitors to your healthcare website. A website design for life science companies should be available and easy to use across all platforms. Otherwise, you will simply lose some users even before they look at what you have to offer. New visitors go on a medical website to learn something new, so it is important to think of your site as a dialog between you and the customer. Content is the main ingredient of a good website, however, according to the psychology of human attention, the visitor is instantly guided by the first impression. This implies that design is the first thing a website visitor will judge it by. Moreover, this impression will largely depend on whether the visitor continues to study your website further; or closes it to being confused by the poorly selected color-scheme or extremely puzzling navigation. We hope that our tricks will strike a blow for you. If you are looking for a life science website design company that would help you with creating your website, our team of website experts is always happy to share with you our experience in creating a spectacular pharmaceutical website; and to provide even more tricks on how to turn it into an exciting story.
Adobe Experience Manager integration with eWizard Platform for new-gen pharma content management Posted on July 30, 2019March 4, 2025 by Andrii Nikulin In another move to create a world of truly interconnected digital ecosystems for life sciences, Viseven Group is happy to introduce the integration of eWizard Platform with Adobe Experience Manager! This powerful solution, already claimed to be in use by 7643 companies, presents new opportunities to cater to pharma marketing’s long standing needs. Here, we will dive into the whats and hows of these changes. We will look at how you can connect your existing systems, including Veeva, with AEM using eWizard, craft and reuse websites that fit AEM, while tracking their performance in Veeva/Salesforce, as well as how content approval processes and data integrity can be improved. Data Integrity and the need for integrated pharma content solutions The current business landscape is infused and intersected with data… Wait, it consists of data. With the most recent concerns about its quality, no wonder that the entire pharma industry is searching for ways to get things as neat as possible. Over the course of the last several years, FDA has had to issue quite a number of 483 warning letters concerning data integrity deficits in life sciences industry. For the most part, these have to do with regulations, electronic signatures, etc. Now, pharma marketing is, in turn, affected. After all, brand reputation is part of the goal in the movement for data integrity, not just the regulatory confidence. If we look close enough at the so-called ALCOA principles of data quality, we can see why: Attributable – If you see materials in your DAM that you could and would possible reuse, it will surely help to see who uploaded them, when and why – and maybe how they performed. Legible – it goes without saying that no marketer will ever reuse content that fails to interest them; unintelligibility is a putoff. Contemporaneous – “just a file” is not an asset, but simply an object. How long since it was last used? Besides that, documenting the performance of content in real-time is something that begged for automation – and now has been automated. Original – no one would like to get globally approved templates for, say, an ad, website or email in a version that has already been localized several times, with Gujarati text over a picture clearly destined for Russian market. Accurate – all about context and metadata, which implies proper tagging and linking of all digital assets per key message, market, campaign, etc. Digital Asset Management and Content Approval Software – life sciences perspective Of all industries, pharma arguably has the most complicated and branching content lifecycle. The layers of responsibility imposed on various stages, starting from agency and up to MLR, make the workflows mudded at times, especially so if different systems and transfer formats (PDF, documents, PPT, etc.) are used. In general, we can usually distinguish between three such layers. Asset Management per se, done by agencies, can be put to order as a short-term objective. Typically what’s needed here is a single workspace with sufficient integrations, a pack of content authoring functionalities and a way to report on the outcomes. Next is the marketing review and approval workflow, which requires not only a unified platform to work on the content (e.g. comment on the assets), but also some formal mechanism of approval endorsed by tech. Finally, the compliance layer – medical, legal, regulatory – also requires a single “source of truth”, but with even more meta tagging, taxonomy and context, as well as more formal approval chain. The needs that are more or less in common across all these levels are as follows: clear approval nomenclature (think Zinc, which is already in use by many an entrerprise) possibility to share content across affiliates and agencies to ensure compliance and cost-efficiency (content reuse is the best way to achieve this) metadata and tagging for the available assets permission control and customizable user roles possibility to somehow plug all of this together with CRM to track the approved key message performance bonus point – ability to think in terms of key messages and not content items separately. This is the new approach to multichannel that Viseven has been especially pioneering recently with the modular Connected Content. Sewing together Veeva Vault PromoMats and AEM integration with eWizard At the moment, these different needs are solved by means of multiple systems in place, each serving its own stretch of the content lifecycle. For example, Veeva Vault PromoMats serves for storage, meta connectivity, and review. Content authoring and distribution is done via channel-specific solutions: email platforms, development environments, CRM/CLM, and so forth. The first step in achieving digital excellence is, of course, instilling digital culture and getting proficient in each of these systems. The logical next stage is creating clear workflows that transcend the systems and unify the processes. With the advent of Adobe Experience Manager, be it primarily as a powerful means of managing websites, we see this tendency in its mature stage, with attention to workflows built into the very concept. In turn, eWizard Platform, too, transcends its original role of multichannel content authoring solution and can now connect Veeva systems and AEM into a single whole, building bridges wherever necessary for the corporate needs. The platform allows to take approved/validated digital assets from Veeva Vault (seamless integration, nothing except credentials at one point is needed), arrange them in a channel-specific template (eDetailer, email template, in case with AEM, as website), and then publish it to the target system. Everything that can be automated is automated, leaving no manual work to the user. At the same time, the performance of the website published in Adobe can be tracked further, with the data available in Veeva via CDN. Alongside this improvement, eWizard offers to use the new Modular Content approach, where content exists beyond channels in the form of flexible modules that can fit different types of channel-specific templates. A single module with key message can be inserted into a template for website or email, or eDetailer presentation, with further adaptation if necessary – all inside eWizard. Adobe Experience Manager examples in practice Suppose you have an environment in Adobe Experience Manager where you want to place your company’s new website. At the same time, you want to be able to use assets from Veeva Vault to create a channel-specific content item (website) to be published in AEM. You can edit your microsite as necessary, using the modules available. Since eWIzard has an extensibe capacity for metatagging, only the modules approved for use with the content under construction appear, as per business rules. Maybe you are required to update the patient profile on the website, and you already have the recommended assets in Vault. After that, you can export the modified version of the website back into Vault as a PDF for validation and review, if your company’s workflows require it. After validation, you can use the same built-in automated publishing functionality to get your brand new website across to AEM. In this way, you combine the benefits of both systems and enhance them further with the innovative possibilities offered by eWizard, making content workflows easier, faster and more efficient. It is time to integrate all the efforts and chances of your marketing campaign to create focused interactions and build funnels and customer experiences that win the day! Try and see how it feels to have complete control over your digital assets – and you will be surprised at how, one day in 2019, so many things were resolved at once, leading to smart pharma marketing at the service of your brand. Our dedicated experts are several clicks away, ready to help you learn more about the new possibilities you have.
Landing page design trends for pharmaceutical marketing Posted on February 20, 2019March 4, 2025 by Andrii Nikulin Well, here are 2 options for pharmaceutical marketers: to win trust, credibility and drive more loyalty by embracing upcoming trends in landing page design; OR to fail by not paying attention to what users are looking for. In today’s increasingly digital world, it comes as no surprise that Internet-savvy customers might hesitate what sources to rely on and whom to trust. It takes visitors about a few seconds to determine the usefulness and quality of a webpage. If it’s not functional or consistent enough to generate their interest, they’ll abandon the page even before clicking on the product or service section. In a few words, a landing page is a tightly focused web page that a user arrives on (after clicking a link in an email, for example). A powerful landing page is a powerful pharma marketing tool with clickable CTA buttons. Thus, its optimization and design should be of high importance. Landing pages are here to help visitors to figure out whether your website is worth spending time on. Let’s call it 24/7 support for pharma managers that is working tirelessly on making the brand appealing, consistent and memorable. Thus, paying attention to the slightest details of your landing page design is a vital task. NB! “The devil is in the details” – it is as simple as that… According to Kevin Mcspaddenas, the average human attention span decreased from 10 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds in 2015. In those 8 seconds, the landing page should tell your visitors why they need to stay on your site and shouldn’t go to a website of your competitors. When it comes to creating a perfect landing page for your pharma marketing campaign, there’re lots of important details to consider: beginning with the design (fonts, colors, etc.), user experience and finishing with the content and how it’s structured. Here’s a brief overview of the latest trends for forward-looking, tech-conscious pharma marketers who are ready to fully embrace new tendencies: 1. Single-pointed concentration …this is the first thing to point out. Mess and digital “clutter” are what should be taken away not only from our day-to-day routine but from the web landscape as well. In the midst of a wide array of data, images, and graphics, customers are willing to see only what they need most at the very moment of the search. We are living in the era in which time and energy of every individual are valued the most. This is why we refer to a single purpose of your landing page design – make it as focused as possible. 2. Personalization – choice or necessity? Guess: what’s the main difference between a company that thrives and the one that lags behind? The first one is able to meet the needs of its customers much better and on a more personal level. Landing page message should be tightly linked to the unique value your company offers and be an answer to whatever customers might be willing to know. Is there a better way to use your landing page if not to “communicate” with your target audience through your brand? Beyond doubt, that’s the main point… 3. Clarity and Minimalism The design and structure of your landing page should be chosen based on the main website layout. Minimalistic footer, precise headline, clear CTA buttons, a few images or just one – they shouldn’t distract customers, but vice versa, urge to go further on investigating a website (the same goes for social accounts). Entice users with easy site navigation using maximum 1-2 CTA buttons and hyperlinks that allow them to escape back to other pages if needed. 4. Solid color palette Colors subconsciously affect our feelings, emotions, and attitudes much more than we can imagine. No doubts content is king here (in all its various forms), BUT non-verbal communication (unlike verbal tools) can help patients to better understand what your products or services are about. The colors you choose might do both: drive interest or withdraw from further investigation: each tone causes specific associations, encourages taking immediate actions or simply uplifts user experience. 5. Video to experiment How about incorporating different multimedia elements on your landing page? The best way to stand out in a competitive market is to add something unique that has not been used that much so far. Do not get this confused, it shouldn’t be a video-only landing page, but by adding it you can increase your conversion rate dramatically. Obviously, a video should come after the headline where users can see it and choose to play. 6. Fonts What is new out there for pharma marketers in terms of fonts and typography? Pharma landing pages need to be highly appealing due to not only the images but clear typography as well. The year 2019 will be a year of digital diversities and experiments; fonts are changing along with other elements. Their foremost purpose is to carry your message out to the audience. Thus, it’s essential to figure out what fonts have been most influential recently and keep pace with that trend. For example, sans-serif fonts are easier to read, especially on mobile devices. Regardless of future trends, simplicity in typography won’t be out of the game. Especially it concerns pharma, as its wording needs to be clearly defined and easy to read. NB! Font size and weight matters. That is always good practice to stick to one type of font. Good if they are fresh, far worse if they look fancy. 7. CTA Call-To-Action buttons are still most crucial in terms of improving conversion rate and driving traffic to your website. They need to be effective and action-oriented, yet simple and user-friendly. Not to mention that visual CTAs always work much better. Based on those above-mentioned trends, here we have gathered some practical recommendations that should be counted if you want to elevate your landing page efficiency and tighten up its design: Maintain Brand consistency Any differentiation in your brand name might seem confusing and unprofessional, especially for new users. For example, if you choose caps, be consistent and stick with it (the same goes for the number of words – there shouldn’t be overflows). Optimize images for Mobile Don’t neglect the logo! Sometimes the logo images might appear a bit more blurry on the mobile screen if they’re not properly optimized (by the way, which is not good). You’ll benefit much better when your logo is easily displayed on a mobile device like in its natural dimensions on any other screen. Add more space Sometimes the slightest details make the biggest difference. Matching and mixing all those small details can help to create a cohesive design. Don’t bundle everything together! Small, simple bullets (instead of long paragraphs), a catchy headline, relevant images and convenient contact form with just a few fields to fill out can help to maintain a solid focus and increase concentration on needed content. Get More with Fewer images: At times, having one good image is enough to completely change customers’ perception about pharma brand. Once you choose an image, ask yourself how it represents your brand and whether it compliments it or not. If it doesn’t, find the one which captures the audience’s attention. Images are like visual CTAs that subconsciously encourage us to take immediate actions or learn more. Keep the same spacing It’s always good practice to maintain consistent spacing and font sizing. For example, all section padding is 60 px, while all CTA buttons or other small spaces are 15 px. Forget about diversity in fonts Believe it or not, too many fonts might look messy and deconcentrate users’ attention. Try to combine them wisely or stick to no more than 2 or 3 font families. It’s worth experimenting with color palettes Dilute pure colors or add gradients in order to make a text hierarchy more subtle and soft. NB! A quality color scheme is the “promise” of pharma brand innovativeness. Highlight the CTA buttons Ideally, CTA buttons should be contrasted enough against the background. For example, a prominent orange button with an overall blue color scheme. They are the reminders on what pharma marketers want their users to do while scrolling down the page. Make those CTA buttons consistently worded and properly colored. Well, we need to get right to the point in our landing page design – to achieve a positive, long-lasting impression. Yet before going to design itself – content first is the only right way. However, how about flexible, reusable content that fits any channel, system or device? Moreover, Viseven has a needed expertise in creating engaging microsites for global companies in pharma landscape. If you want to launch a perfect landing page – contact us and our highly experienced professionals will gladly help you to create the state of the art landing page, meeting all the specific requirements and deadlines. Subscribe to our newsletter and discover more about our whole new approach in multichannel pharma marketing.
Pharma Marketing Tools for Powerful Multichannel Strategy Posted on February 11, 2019November 21, 2024 by Andrii Nikulin How to stay on top of the competitive pharmaceutical market? Regardless of whether the goal is to promote newly launched product or improve brand perception and loyalty, the main point is in differentiating your brand among a plenty of other ones’. In 2019, digitalization is predicted to become the mainstream for each and every marketing strategy in pharma. In order to keep ahead of the continuous race, data quality should be an undoubted part yet patient-centricity remains on top. Today’s major pharma marketing task is to gain a deeper understanding on how customers interpret and respond to key messages. To help you stay ahead of the competitive game, we prepared a list of the most popular pharma marketing tools for productive and efficient brands promotion. Statistics show: 9 out of 10 large pharma companies spend more on marketing than they do on R&D. According to several studies the administrative tasks take 1-2 hours per day to complete. In this regard, the digital environment is an excellent promoter, which facilitates direct answers. A platform for content creation It goes without saying, in order to keep brand identity as well as maintain recognition on both global and local levels localization is a must. Yet here comes a major question for any brand manager: how to localize without compromising key messages and brand consistency? Let’s take an email to show by example: adding just a few features to your existing email might become a tough task that requires more coding operations than you could imagine (not to mention wasting your budget on even tiny changes) – not very comparable to what we call “excellent” pharma marketing, right? If your marketing campaign isn’t supposed to be an average one, you will need a solution that covers all stages of an email campaign, from the beginning to the end. As revealed by the latest statistics, almost 68% of physicians prefer to receive information from pharma reps via email. Email marketing automation powered by eWizard and Salesforce Marketing Cloud integration helps to drive much more success at scale. It was created especially for pharma marketers and helps to create all types of content, such as emails, edetailers, websites, etc in a truly multichannel way. Project management applications Wondering – how to deliver your projects 2 or even 3 times faster? With the view to lead digital transformation successfully and simplify its processes project management applications should become a constant presence in pharma marketers’ toolkit. These apps enable to create and deliver a limitless amount of high-quality projects supporting smooth collaboration in teams. With a huge set of different functionalities to offer and scalable interfaces, they aim to handle the most challenging aspects of pharma marketing lifecycle: quick access to files, increased visibility, simplified workload, and much more. There are plenty of management apps to choose, such as Trello, Wrike, Asana, etc. These project organizers with visual boards are helping pharma marketers to eliminate time-consuming tasks, collaborate effectively with internal and external stakeholders and deliver flawless marketing campaigns. SEO SEO (search engine optimization) metrics provide a comprehensive view of your keyword domain linking Google Analytics with Search Console. Managing SEO processes of a marketing campaign might become a tough part of pharma marketer’s day-to-day work. Yet if you aim to intensify competitive research, SEMRush is a great all-in-one marketing suite for those companies who want to be ahead of their competitors. It offers tremendous benefits, such as Traffic analysis tool “Google analytics for competitors” (all data from customers’ browsing history). It’s always good practice to keep track on competitor’s websites effectiveness and a cherry on top – watch the efficiency of each page of your own website and constantly double its traffic. In a nutshell, SEMRush will grant you with a helicopter view on your website efficiency progress. Marketing automation system Each day pharma marketers are facing an immense amount of repetitive tasks: social media, SEO, follow up emails or other website activities. Thus, to skyrocket the success of your marketing campaigns, automation is vital. Inbound marketing strategies are all about maintaining long-term customer engagement and building valuable experiences. By creating relevant and helpful content, you become a real expert and advisor so there is no need to “reattract” customers again and again as you’ve already earned a lot of trust and credibility. Instead of using multiple applications and wasting money on each integration separately, it’s worth to manage all your marketing workflows within a single suite. This will give you a full view of each customer interaction and a much higher return on investments. HubSpot is an all-in-one digital solution to boost your brand growth – almost everything you need for an effective marketing campaign just in one place. This is exceptionally helpful when you need to track a website efficiency or check the productivity of your email campaign. The platform provides software, services and 24/7 support for executing marketing flow all in one place round the clock. HubSpot makes your SEO optimization easy. While creating your content, you can get keyword suggestions or SEO advice in order to stand out. Localization? Easy! The pharmaceutical industry is grasping the opportunity to expand its impact on emerging markets. Global pharma giants have already recognized that the only way to connect their brand to a new market is through smart localization. However, the question remains, how can pharma approach local areas in the exact same manner as it approaches all other countries? Localization requires much more effort than just translation from one language to another; just imagine the amount of time and efforts wasted on adjusting the content from your eDetailing, landing pages, social media posts or emails to any local requirements. Thus, to allocate resources, reduce costs on localizing activities and attain bigger market access, pharma stakeholders need to tighten their focus on a long-term perspective towards the whole localization process. In order to reduce all that complexity, consider using the eWizard platform: localize effortlessly and efficiently on time and within budget. With eWizard you can easily build real multichannel communication with 100% content reuse and localizing presentations in HTML5 format. Data visualization CRM Why CRM and how does it serve pharma marketers? First and foremost, with CRM system (Customer relationship management) you’ve got a 360 degree view on all your customer data with options to analyze, store, track and access data. All information could be easily filed and organized in perfect pipelines within CRM system. Great news: there is an array of different pharmaceutical CRM software to choose (IQVIA, bpm’online, Kapture, PharmaCode, Veeva CRM, to name just a few). All you need is to select the one, which fits your specific needs. Veeva CRM is a leading digital solution for field and sales forces to optimize customer experience. With advanced functionalities pharma marketers could stay engaged with their customers via a the channel of their choice. Thanks to automatic content publishing from eWizard platform to Veeva Vault PromoMats, CRM or CLM they are in a full control of the whole spectrum of digital assets. Comprehensive analytics and cloud solutions According to the McKinsey Global Institute, with the help of Big Data strategies nearly USD 100 billion can be generated annually across the USA health care system. Big Data, the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud-based computing and mobile technologies are the major drivers for raising the efficiency of the pharma marketing lifecycle. Due to increased demand for better and more comprehensive analytics, pharma marketers can be better prepared to predict any behavioral patterns of their audience. Analytical services are the only solutions that empower in-depth expertise. Moreover, they allow forecasting market demand and designing agile strategies. Data capture, ML, AI, virtual technologies, statistics, modeling… they all have been adopted to a high-speed healthcare space. As shown by Deloitte research, by 2020 most of the healthcare industry, including pharma and biotech companies, will be harnessing either a public, a private or a hybrid cloud. Digital communication What is the first thing to come to mind when we think about virtual care? Beyond question it’s convenience. Waiting in front of the HCP’s cabinet might become a futile business, so thanks to latest technical solutions and remote tools pharmа reps are able to reach the audience without taking away their time while focusing on the main concerns. Physicians are more perceptive when they are in control of their schedule. Pharma marketers have a great opportunity to guide their audience through key points interactively. After a remote session, a follow-up email with previously discussed data can be sent directly to a customer mailbox. Benefits? You can ensure the highest quality of all remote sessions as they are recorded, stored and revived with regards to future optimization or filling the gaps in the areas where any updates could be required. Grasp even more options with Viseven Remote Detailer, powered by eWizard platform, which allows both to conduct remote sessions and work with content to show. According to research, physicians are more likely to recall their interaction later after remote sessions. Furthermore, 59% of HCPs are willing to ask their managers follow up questions. Messengers How do patients “talk” to pharma brands of their preference no matter the location? It’s a well-known fact that lots of customers use online platforms or social media networks to approach pharma&physicians’ communities directly. Messengers and mobile apps became a huge part of today’s healthcare world both for patients to consume information and physicians to demonstrate empathy with no in-person interaction. However, among the huge array of benefits, let’s name a few: An easy way to get to know what’s going on in a medicine space Digital participation with physicians’ community from all over the world Great customer service, 24/7 help tab and immediate medical assistance (hotline) … a win-win service to be offered, isn’t it what patients appreciate the most? According to a survey, patients declared that they prefer to take into account online prescription, than going to a doctor. The attitude of respondents regarding the development of the digital pharmacy was Extremely Good (30%) which confirms the growing importance of the online environment for patients today. Digital era has significantly changed the way people consume healthcare related information: they are more competent, technical-savvy and precise. An increasing access to data throughout the world makes pharma marketers and brand managers always take one step further while implementing innovations rapidly or… remain left behind. Let’s call it a new pharma marketer’s mindset: a systematic, channel-centric thinking towards agility in marketing, great CX, scalability time to market and personalized approach. If you are willing to deepen your expertise and fuel your workflow, feel free to sign up to our newsletter or contact our team of experts.
Salesforce Email Marketing Automation with eWizard Integration Posted on January 3, 2019November 22, 2024 by Andrii Nikulin A while ago, we announced the strategic partnership with Salesforce.com, featuring a highly anticipated integration of eWizard platform and Salesforce eMarketing Cloud. The email marketing Salesforce integration covers all stages of an email campaign: from email creation to its distribution and analysis, offering a solid groundwork for mailing campaign optimization. And now we’d like to highlight key prerequisites and main outcomes this integration brings for digital pharma marketing. Benefits of Email Marketing Integration with Salesforce Let’s overview the key benefits of the integration and how it might be helpful for all pharma marketers across the industry: Salesforce Email Analytics. Integration enables tracking recipient behavior and using it to create better Salesforce email campaigns. You can see which emails were opened, which links were clicked, and which content was the most engaging. Salesforce email marketing automation. The email campaign integration with Salesforce Marketing Cloud reduces the risk of errors and time spent on many manual tasks, such as publishing and creating emails. Salesforce email automation streamlines various email-related processes, while also maintaining a high level of email personalization. Efficient email marketing Salesforce campaigns. With Salesforce email marketing integration, you don’t have to jump from one application to another to craft and send an email. You can just do it in a couple of clicks, making it easier to create high-quality engaging campaigns that don’t require a lot of time to kick off. Email marketing automation with Salesforce responsibilities streamlines various tasks that used to require manual input. Now, you can easily get them done in just a couple of clicks. What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud? Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a platform marketers can use for a myriad of tasks and goals. And thanks to email automation with Salesforce integration, it becomes easier to create emails with a personalized touch. Here is what you can do with SFMC: Create and manage content; Send and monitor messages; Find your target audience; Design customer journeys; Deliver personalized content based on user behavior; Bring multiple channels together; Centralize customer data; Create 360-view of your customers; Divide your customer base into segments. With these features powered by the best email marketing integration with Salesforce, you can amplify your marketing campaigns and create them faster and of higher quality. Moreover, email integration can solve a few other problems, examples of which we’re about to discuss. What are the Challenges the Integration and Content Experience Platform will help Overcome? When it comes to localizing email campaigns, all marketers are confronted with a challenge –balancing between ensuring diversity and compliance. How do you diversify while remaining within branding requirements? How do you resonate with local needs while maintaining an easily recognizable brand identity? And it might not be even worth all that hustle and expenses: today, 260 bln emails/day toll a bell in mailboxes around the world, they’ve got something to tell the recipients. But open rates tell us a whole different story, ranging from 15% to 28%. In other words, across industries, only every 5th to 3rd email is opened. A big part of those messages doesn’t even have a chance to appear in the inbox, as they go straight to the spam bin marked as “irrelevant info” by half of the email recipients. However, these stats do not change the fact that email remains the main channel used to reach physicians. Many HCPs still prefer receiving personalized messages from pharma companies. But the problem is that personalized emails require lots of coding. Making a few tweaks would often mean hiring a trusted digital agency and investing significant time and financial resources. And let’s not forget about time-consuming approval procedures in pharma. So, pharma marketers are facing a tough choice: either make an average email that has a high chance of being dumped as spam or make a great, localized one, but waste the monthly budget of a tiny country. Luckily, with our content experience platform, eWizard, they no longer have to choose between these two options. Oksana Matviienko from Viseven admits: “Capitalizing on a decade of working experience alongside global pharma actors, we developed a truly comprehensive solution that’s automating email campaign workflows at every stage of the email production process. Equipped with the eWizard platform, pharma marketers and sales reps have a powerful mix-and-match tool for creating and reusing approved email templates, which all have the same look and feel no matter the brand or market”. Contrary to your average email template that’s rigid and inflexible, eWizard Email Templating Service contains a number of pre-designed content modules to mix and match for all that creative jazz. This model allows users to make an engaging email in minutes and eliminates the need to address an agency for localization or editing. With the adaptive templating approach that lies at the heart of eWizard-created emails and marketing email automation flows, marketers have creative freedom while adhering to budget constraints and branding guidelines. Here are Some Benefits of eWizard Email Templates: The solution saves tons of time and budget resources by allowing users to endlessly reusing master templates that are created and pre-approved on a global level; A template serves as the branding framework; all that’s left to do is to fill it up with localized content! Create a new unique email in no time by placing ready-made content fragments modules (footer, text with image, graph, etc.); Forget manual or hired publishing! You can publish your email to Veeva Vault automatically as well as review, approve, export, and distribute to Salesforce Marketing Cloud. If you’re an ambitious marketer aiming for a seamless Salesforce email marketing campaign workflow that delivers personalized emails, do not hesitate to contact our team of certified experts for details on the Salesforce integration with email marketing. You can also subscribe to our newsletter for the latest updates in digital pharmaceutical content marketing.
Engaging gastroenterology presentations: 7 tips to drive engagement Posted on November 30, 2018March 4, 2025 by Andrii Nikulin Many a brand manager working in pharma marketing will admit that promoting a product to HCPs of certain specialties is quite different from working with the GP audience. Each area has its own peculiarities, and they deserve being analyzed. Some talented marketers who have previously worked with GPs may even experience a sort of “culture shock” when encountering a different therapeutic area. Attitudes and preferences can be unexpected. Here, we will look at one of the specialties where pharma-to-doctor relationships have been noticeably digitalized: gastroenterology. It is a moderately difficult specialty in terms of the marketing effort needed but requires an insider understanding. For example, according to statistics, about 49% gastroenterologists restrict access to pharma reps. This is less than some other areas but still considerable – and definitely the picture is not as optimistic. Let’s look at what needs to be done to push that number down – and how this is solved with eDetailing. We will first analyze why and how gastroenterologists form a special group – and what value they are more likely to appreciate. This is followed by a list of seven observations about GI eDetailing presentations themselves. These recommendations are based on real projects throughout a period of roughly 9 years. Our professionals took time to analyze which findings were accidental and which recurring, so you can use these 7 points as a good orienting sign in the therapeutic area. 3 important things to realize about gastroenterologists 1. They are quite open to digital It is a common practice in pharmas that undergo digital transformation to run pilot projects (like remote eDetailing or apps) exactly in the context of GI campaigns. Why? Gastro specialists are generally younger than many other groups of HCPs (this, of course, varies by region) and are frequent users of digital devices and resources. For example, about 75% in the age group 31-40 are social media users (the proportion is 50% in the 61+ group). Similar trends can be detected when it comes to the level of confidence in online resources and gadgets. This means that eDetailing is going to meet warm reception – but also high expectations to UX and overall quality. 2. They are overloaded and typically stressed. In a survey of 700+ GI specialists on their working routine, HCPs reported that they direct patient care was already 8 hours of their day. Paperwork (3 hours) and more work at home (2 hours on average) added, this is considered one of the causes for much-discussed “epidemic” of burnout. When asked to grade their stress levels from 1 to 5 (in another survey), about 20% evaluated them at 4 or 5. Lack of time is a common concern here. So convenience and immediate illustration of any key point are important, as well. 3. Visuals! This becomes self-evident when you finally think about it: gastroenterology is the field with the largest amount of things that can (and should) be represented visually. GI specialists are dealing with relatively large organs and formations of recognizable shape; things like absorption and peristalsis are inherently material for images and animations, not speeches. Unsurprisingly, professional video influences decision making for 61% of gastroenterologists. Good to know that these things can be easily incorporated into eDetailing these days. Practical tips on perfect GI presentations 1 Use video / 3D animations This is the immediate conclusion from what was discussed above – and is confirmed by many digital content professionals within our team and partners. Gastro presentations perform best when they incorporate video. This is most appropriately used to demonstrate the product’s mechanism of action – but also to illustrate pathological processes dynamically. 2 Make patient profiles realistic Although patient profiles in gastroenterology presentations are rarely too varied in terms of age, they can vary greatly even when you look at the photo of the profile (think complexion, etc.). As a result, visualized, interactive patient profiles that illustrate relevant clinical cases add to informational value of the presentation. 3 Use creative comparisons Due to some reason or another, it works well when “technical” and “scientific” notions and processes are explained using the language of comparison. The key point here is “creative” – of course, just comparing the duodenum to a boomerang won’t work, but once you have found a reasonable comparison, you can pretty much have the whole presentation storyboard built around it. 4 No text overload (it’s not a journal) It is a common mistake when designing an eDetailing presentation – looking at the slides on the large desktop screen, one cannot resist the temptation to add more text, another key message, or more numbers – after all there’s so much space! However, in reality, the presentation will most likely be viewed on a portable tablet, so too much text in one place is a putoff. If you want more text, consider popup windows or accordions. 5 Practical info straight away: dosage, formulations and such As gastroenterologists are among the typically overworked HCP groups, they prefer to see practical information easily available at the fingertips. Okay, the product is great, so what does the package look like? What is the dosage? As a bonus: additional related patient-oriented materials will be a plus. 6 Incorporate KOL Whenever possible, try to incorporate citations of key opinion leaders in the field. GI specialists respect their medical communities. 7 Link to website or follow up with email We are living in an environment infused with multichannel communications. Thinking that a CLM presentation might have a lasting impact on prescriptions all on its own is no longer realistic. As we have seen, gastroenterologists are quite okay with the Internet – so why not make the presentation contain a link to the product website or landing page (which, of course, contains social media widgets)? Another option would be to follow up on presentation with a specially designed email (template-based) – either way, the presentation cannot stay isolated in an informational bubble. Interested in creating pharma content that works? Contact our team for a combination of experience, innovation and carefully analyzed insights.
Viseven certified for IQVIA’s Orchestrated Customer Engagement platform Posted on November 16, 2018November 22, 2024 by Andrii Nikulin TALLINN, Estonia, November 16th, 2018 – Viseven has been certified to have obtained a necessary level of expertise to navigate IQVIA’s revolutionary Orchestrated Customer Engagement Platform as well as to create platform-compliant content. Ever since its launch in March 2018, IQVIA’s Orchestrated Customer Engagement solution (OCE) has been already adopted by more than a dozen of leading pharma and healthcare companies. Merck, Pierre Fabre, Roche are among those, who already agreed to streamline digital experiences for both themselves and their customers. Viseven is thrilled to be among the first agencies to join the right side of innovation by having been certified for this cause. Integrating data capabilities is the business logic we, as a company of 10 years of experience working with Life Sciences, can closely relate to. That is why being a part of the IQVIA’s OCE partnership program is an extensive lesson on innovation in Life Sciences we were more than happy to learn. Nataliya Andreychuk, CEO, Viseven A quick recap of the “platform of platforms” – OCE is one of the most innovative cloud-based customer relationship management solutions currently available. Its mission is to break the internal silos of pharma companies by seamlessly connecting IT, sales, marketing, operations and other departments through accurate data sharing and reporting. This integration is generating 360-degree customer insights, laying the groundwork for meaningful engagement and interactions, and empowering for making informed commercial decisions. A fusion of multichannel marketing, sales force efficiency and closed-loop marketing enables different stakeholders to see and contribute to creating a unified experience across multiple channels. Okay, enough of the big talk. The Suite’s business concept is backed by powerful technology – such ”unheard-of” tech as Salesforce.com, Mulesoft, Amazon Web Services, Heroku and Box. On the other hand, there are IQVIA’s very own, Lexi, Ada and Appolo apps to finish up the solution with an interconnected narrative. Lexi reduces the disparities between the platform and non-OCE datasets and systems. It is the engine connecting all applications and data, giving each employee a unique, but actionable view of the customer. In its turn, Ada, the AI-based solution, provides those employees with immediate recommendations for next-best actions, customized for every role and subsequent impact. Ada is the way to swim in a pool of data, get the best out of it thus making it actionable. The cherry on top – Appolo, an intuitive, elegant and human-centered UI to offer a multiangular view on customers’ needs to multiple personas, be it a product manager, sales and marketing representative or an executive. With such a solid technical groundwork, the content compliance requirements for OCE must be very demanding. Yes, they are. That’s why Viseven has been trained and certified specifically to adhere to those technical guidelines to be able to develop and deploy assets on IQVIA’s platforms. By completing an onboarding process on OCE Sales, Viseven has gained an even deeper understanding of how innovative data management like OCE is helping pharma companies at the forefront of innovation to build a truly end-to-end solution. With the help of our content production accelerator eWizard, as well as skills mastered and expertise gained during the Agency Enablement Program, Viseven is now equipped to create any kind of content that would accommodate to the extensive OCE network. Do not hesitate to drop us a line if you are interested in any of the OCE-compliant content creation capabilities mentioned above.
How to create an interactive multichannel presentation (from that PDF file you have) Posted on July 17, 2018March 4, 2025 by Andrii Nikulin So you want a full-function interactive presentation – one that is clickable, tablet-tappable, swipeable, and ideal for reps to use – but what you’ve got at the moment is a static PDF file? Maybe the file came from the agency, or was sent from the global office as a guideline – and now your department is facing the perspective of hiring a whole digital content team to create a multichannel wonder based on this. Maybe it is also upsetting that the project is nearly a from-scratch one, what with the whole HTML+CSS things to think of – so how challenging will it be for the budget? Have you wondered whether there is a shortcut from PDF to interactive format? In that case, you’re not alone – and yes, that’s an excellent idea! HTML presentations, eDetailing, interactive visual aids (IVAs) – whatever they are called in your organization, they are THE content in many cases, especially when it comes to rep interactions. Besides, once you have the presentation, it can (after just a little tinkering perhaps) be used in a variety of channels, including remote conferencing. At the same time, just having everything delivered by IT team is, well, not as cost-efficient as using the file the designers have carefully styled through. That is why Viseven team has created a PDF-to-HTML converter as part of the eWizard platform – a response to the many requests that (mainly) life sciences brand managers and marketers had. In this brief guide, you’ll see how this works and what can be achieved with the possibility. [in case you are curious] When best to use the PDF converter There are these moments is pharma communications where the responsible executive just needs more content. Preferably with minimum investment, of course. Since the “digital transformation” gained its full speed several years ago, the marketing budgets have grown slowly but steadily – a sign that the global offices started taking digital content very seriously but are reluctant to “overfinance” it. Out of the marketing directions considered in statistics, it is precisely the HCP audience that gains the steadiest attention, with about 50% pharma endorsing the effort to that end. A lion share of that content is presentations, of course. Yet, it’s not secret budgeting is also careful – about 1.5-2 years ago, only 30% of enterprises could track digital spending fully, mostly the more digitally savvy ones, according to McKinsey. As more pharma has been digitalized, the question has become more pressing, and regional affiliates are often left with a product/campaign launch in a new (emerging) market – and with restraints to comply with. At the same time, no one wants to sacrifice time-to-market (in fact, the #1 area of opportunity, as attested by 67% of companies). This is where the possibility to convert comes in handy. In general, it’s up to the organization to decide when to use a PDF converter to get an interactive aid – and when to go old-school and develop from scratch. Here are the three situations in which conversion becomes indispensable: Launching a new multichannel campaign that needs to be filled out with content really fast – and there are preexisting static assets. Budget restraints and focus on content reuse – but that content needs to get a “new life”. More and more content is required for field force efficiency – and a general strategy to foster in-house talent. Now, the converter itself. In fact, the procedure of creating an IVA is very simple, and only spans 3 steps. Ready? Step #1. Open the PDF converter in eWizard In your eWizard account, go to your eDetailers gallery – the place where you can see all the presentations you are (or have been) working on. In the corner, there is the +ADD NEW button, which presents you with several options. The last of these is Convert. Once you select it, you will see the popup that asks to upload the original file. The default method is simply to drag&drop the PDF from a folder on your PC. If your company is using Veeva Vault PromoMats, the left sidebar of the popup presents an option to load a file from Vault. Step #2. Find the PDF file you want to convert Rather self-explanatory, in fact. You can either drag&drop the file or click anywhere inside the popup to open the file manager. Your PDF file will most likely contain text on top of the background (so that it’s selectable with the mouse). Such text will be recognized by the system during the conversion so that you will later be able to edit it in the resulting HTML (the background will be, of course, preserved). All pages in the PDF will become separate slides. As soon as you select the file, a conversion starts, taking a few seconds before the magic begins… Step #3. Edit and add interactive components (events, actions) As soon as the conversion finishes, you will see the new presentation right there in the gallery. If already have some experience working with eWizard, you know what to do next: click the Edit icon (“pen”) and voilà – you can tinker with your new presentation, changing whatever needs to be changed. You can even add new elements and whole new slides, expanding the presentation. Quite simple, isn’t it? If you have followed along, you can already consider yourself to be at quite an advanced level in content management. And, of course, if you are completely new to eWizard and have not yet got an account, don’t hesitate to request a demo to try out what you have read. Get creative with your digital initiatives – because multichannel excellence relies on your freedom of action. Now is a perfect time to start!
How is Virtual Reality used in Healthcare and Pharma Industries? Posted on June 7, 2018February 4, 2025 by Andrii Nikulin The future is unpredictable on every occasion. It significantly influences our daily lives with more technologies that we couldn’t even imagine back in the day. From social networks and media to touchphones and complex applications, digitalization changed our way of perception of things. Even more, it has changed a lot of business approaches and industries. As for the pharma and life science industry, the digitalization and use of modern technologies became a like a breath of fresh air, forever impacting the most vital thing for healthcare in common — communication. Modern-day pharma faces the enormous challenge of shifting to more efficient ways of engaging doctors with the recent explosion of VR and AR technologies. What does it mean? Imagine presenting your clinical data simultaneously, using any suitable device instead of manually sorting out and laying huge rows of useless documentation on the table. The wide range of scientific resources and data usually contained from a bunch of digitals and charts can be presented in a visual form, hands-free, and portable whenever and wherever it is most in demand. “The pattern of activity in a brain region involved in spatial learning in the virtual world is completely different than when it processes activity in the real world,” said Mayank Mehta, a UCLA professor of physics, neurology, and neurobiology at UCLA College and the study’s senior author. Let’s see how virtual technology helps to build strong patient engagement. What is Virtual Reality in Medicine? Let’s start with what VR is. Usually, this is something associated with video gaming: users can watch some virtual objects superimposed on the display and sometimes even interact with them. Since 2012, technology production has become massive with a huge explosion of Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Gear VR, and Google Cardboard. Since that, it has become a massive hit at medical conventions, conferences, and live events. Denise Strauss, former VP of cardiovascular marketing at Boehringer, now VP, and head of marketing at Sunovion Pharmaceuticals, notes: “For sales reps, rather than walking into a physician’s office with print material, the Google Cardboard VR experience immediately catches their attention.” At this point, virtual reality technology in healthcare can be easily confused with augmented reality (AR), as they share the idea of bringing virtual objects to the user’s perception. Yet VR and AR are significantly different. While VR devices are aimed to detach a person from real-life entirely, augmented content is a consequent response towards delivering information directly into users’ eyesight without losing touch with the real world. With AR, you stay in a physical world with added virtual elements. Hence, it might bring a better understanding of users’ real-world experiences. Still, we are going to focus more on virtual reality in healthcare. So what does it offer? 4 Production Modes are offered by Virtual Engagement: Theater mode 360-world video’s combination of content and images presented on a simulated theater screen can drive deeper engagement with your brand among its potential audience. For physicians, if it’s for training or educational purposes, VR solutions such as simulation can help get an inside view of patients’ inner processes and conditions, which are usually hidden. For example, how it feels to “experience” Parkinson’s disease or migraine, what symptoms may occur, or to view the whole migraine aura. 360-degree video The most widely used VR tool. Despite being unable to change the user’s position while watching, it remains a significant virtual immersive experience and education provider. With the help of VR equipment, patients may observe how the prescribed drugs and medicines work in 3D just before their eyes. Another example is LOROS hospice in Leicester, which created a VR film of a walk in a park to provide respite to terminally ill patients. Simulated 3D Environments Designing, implementing, and integrating 3D objects into the VR world with a particular software such as Cinema 4D or Maya allows users to determine their position. For example, the audience can interact with your drugs at the molecular level and integrate the data in a 3D world. Gesture-based Interactivity This activity has its peculiarity — the ability to recognize human gestures while interacting with VR objects. It works perfectly for patients with movement disorders. Implementation of Virtual Reality in Healthcare In modern healthcare, the use of VR is adopted to help patients and doctors achieve better results in treatments, including surgery, physical and cognitive rehabilitation, pain issues, mental health, and others. Medical Education and Training Modern medical universities like George Washington University are implementing VR into learning and medical training for real neurosurgery and thoracic surgery. VR allows for creating and exploring an operating room with a model of a patient’s brain and body before performing a procedure. It significantly improves the awareness of doctors doing surgery, patients lying under surgical blades, and even their families, who can better understand procedures ahead of time. Another good example is that the company that produces stents for cardiology or angioplasty can use VR to provide doctors with a safe experience. Instead of providing clinicians with reading materials and presentations, VR training creates an immersive space to describe a production process, explain usage, and educate about correct device implementation. Pain Management Did you know that your brain doesn’t differentiate between real and fake? We must look for additional triggers and questions to identify whether something is true. Meanwhile, our brain always lives “between worlds,” easily mixing the real world with imaginary stuff and not caring to discover what is what. Does it sound unpleasant to you? Either way, it works perfectly for such medical purposes as pain management. Thomas Caruso, MD, a pediatric anesthesiologist at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford, states, “pain is a perception that’s coupled to your attention, mood, and emotions.” It means that if a patient’s mindset can be less focused on the surgery moment or other unpleasant nuances of medication, they will more likely feel less pain and struggle — significantly influencing the therapy. A good example is patients being busy with medical VR games and barely feeling the stick of a needle or an IV going in. Also, using VR helps patients to deal with the fear of dental care – or even losing it all — because of decreased pain. Physical Therapy and Rehabilitation At this point, using VR gives many healthcare possibilities. First, it allows clinicians or medicine developers to feel what the patient with Parkinson’s disease feels regarding movement. This experience will enable doctors to step into patients’ shoes and create a more accurate treatment approach based on practical knowledge. Second, it gives a proper rehabilitation space to help patients suffering from movement disorders and diseases. In the medical VR environment, the patient interacts with objects doing necessary exercises. The overall gamification of the procedure makes people forget about the pain and different psychological factors that may distract and interfere with rehabilitation. For example, children with complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS) experience pain in one or more limbs almost all the time. Medical VR games like squashing watermelons help them to focus more on the movements and the game rather than pain and stress. As a result, children’s confidence is increasing, and treatment improves. Virtual Reality in Pharmaceutical Sales Using VR tools gives enough space for unique promotion ideas for pharmaceutical companies. As marketing and sales communications are often a question of content and delivery, we all know upfront that PowerPoint presentations and PDF brochures with walls of text and strange infographics will bore healthcare professionals to death. As a result, you get the interruption of communication. Not quite an outcome you expect from your revenue teams, right? Your target audience will likely be impressed with what VR offers. This is where the “customer journey” term becomes literal: you can take the HCP through the prepared virtual project demonstrating the medication and how it works. Users can be presented with an analog of the human body and see how its health is affected by the medicine you present. VR in pharma marketing convinces people much stronger than any possible wording on your next sales slide. Pros and Cons of Virtual Reality in Healthcare VR technology isn’t for everyone. Unfortunately, it is not a cure-all for every disease, and its possibilities are limited. The implementation of VR may be costly and take some time. The VR hardware glasses range from 60$ (Google Daydream View) to $1,500 (HTC Vive Pro Eye Full Kit). Also, these kits are fragile and need to be maintained regularly. You may need additional software that fulfills your business needs. At this point, there’s a need to find an appropriate team of developers who can create a unique application for healthcare based on virtual engines like Unity or Unreal Engine. Some people may feel nausea, similar to motion sickness, as their vestibular apparatus did not adapt to the new environment. Getting used to VR may take some time or several sessions. The main problem is that VR is a young technology, and its use standards and policies are still being determined. It is getting less severe with every technology update — the better software and hardware, the fewer people feel the discomfort. Despite VR providing the best immersive experience, it is still not a panacea for education. A virtual environment works perfectly for describing information or engaging in new activities. However, it can not provide 100% immersion as it does not give a user proper hand control. For example, it can simulate surgery and let you go through every aspect of the operation. Still, it cannot give the feeling of a scalpel in hand, living tissue, and other nuances that are possible only in the real world. Nevertheless, the benefits of virtual reality in healthcare are much more significant and valuable to those whom it helps to stop struggling. As we listed above, from educational and training purposes to unique therapeutic experiences and rehabilitation, the future of virtual reality in healthcare is quite promising. See and feel for yourself: once you get your headset, there are thousands of medical applications of virtual reality which do not require a doctor’s prescription. Instead, these applications promise better health and wellness for specific conditions. For example, Embodied Labs, a company specializing in immersive educational technology, created an educational app for caretakers. This app holds several training sessions that address the issues of hearing loss, eyesight, and dementia. The healthcare market is growing, and the pharmaceutical sector will be constantly updated with new VR ideas and solutions, improving medical education and patients’ procedures of treatment. If you still have any questions about VR technology or want pharmaceuticalexpertise, do not hesitate to contact us. Our experts will provide you with full consultation.
Medical Science Liaison in Pharma: Meaning, Role & KPIs Posted on September 12, 2017November 22, 2024 by Andrii Nikulin It’s hard to deny that the most vital part of success in communication is to be on the same level of acknowledgment and engagement with an interlocutor. The same rule works perfectly for business messages. Suppose the brand targets all the awareness levels of its audience. In that case, the chance of getting better conversion increases with each interaction. Customers need to feel qualified in their choices, which is especially important for such complex industries as Pharma. Historically, pharmaceutical companies primarily relied on sales representatives to promote their products to healthcare professionals. However, as medicine advanced and treatments became more specialized, a need arose for individuals who could provide in-depth scientific knowledge and engage in meaningful scientific exchange with physicians and researchers, who are called MSLs. So, what does MSL stand for in Pharma? MSL is an abbreviation for Medical Science Liaisons, and their role is crucial within the industry. What is MSL in medical terms, and what do they do? Learn more from our guide. What Is MSL in Pharma? An MSL, or a Pharmaceutical Medical Science Liaison, is an individual whose job is to maintain clear communication and relationships with the medical community. They provide healthcare professionals with valuable insights and essential information on the proper use of certain products and services when treating patients. While MSLs do work on behalf of different pharmaceutical companies, their job is not to promote but to educate and assist providers. Every pharmacy MSL is a highly educated expert, most likely with a postgraduate degree. In most companies, it is a requirement for all professionals applying for this position to hold at least a master’s degree, PhD, or its equivalent. A deep understanding of the pharmaceutical industry and hands-on experience enable MSLs to stay updated on the latest changes and advancements in their chosen field, making communication with key opinion leaders and doctors much more efficient. An MSL is a field worker, so most of their daily routine is external communication with KOLs and physicians. Being more research-oriented and science-savvy, they are perfect conversationalists for those who, for some reason, refuse to build a dialog with sales reps. The scientific background of MSLs allows one to discuss more complex cases and facilitate the exchange of scientific knowledge and insights. HCPs can provide more meaningful and in-depth feedback on local disease states, clinical experiences, and treatment challenges they face. This feedback is vital for pharmaceutical research and development efforts and the design of clinical trials, as it ultimately leads to the development of more effective and relevant therapies. By establishing themselves as trusted sources of objective competence and scientific expertise, MSLs can effectively address the needs and preferences of KOLs and physicians. Physicians, in particular, value in-depth conversations about disease states with company representatives who possess equal scientific competence and interests. They seek interactions with MSLs who are not focused on product promotion but are research-oriented and provide educational insights. Through collaborative discussions, MSLs can communicate their company’s position while providing objective competence on discussed scientific issues. This approach aligns with the expectations of KOLs and physicians who strive for unbiased scientific information and trusted connections with pharmaceutical companies. By nurturing these collaborative relationships, MSLs can establish themselves as invaluable intermediaries, fostering a mutual understanding and trust between the medical community and the pharmaceutical industry. How to Measure MSL Performance? As the primary goal of an MSL is not sales but to raise awareness, it may take a lot of work to define the necessary KPI. Pharmaceutical companies and organizations may have different priorities and focus areas, leading to various performance indicators. For example, an organization that aims to increase the adoption of a specific drug in the market may prioritize KPIs related to KOL engagement and thought leader development. They would want their MSLs to establish strong relationships with influential KOLs, engage them in scientific discussions, and support their growth as thought leaders who can advocate for using the organization’s drug. On the other hand, an organization focused on scientific education and dissemination of information may emphasize KPIs related to scientific communication and education. They would want their MSLs to deliver impactful scientific presentations, provide educational materials to healthcare professionals, and conduct training sessions to enhance their therapeutic area’s understanding. Nevertheless, a few criteria would fit most of the pharmaceutical MSL cases. Medical Science Liaison: Key Performance Indicators KOL Interactions While the frequency and duration of calls demonstrate activity, longer meetings provide more time to discuss important topics. However, the accurate measure of success lies in the quality of the interaction. This can be evaluated by assessing how well your predefined insights were addressed during your meetings with KOLs. Medical Projects Key performance indicators for medical projects include the number of publications clinical studies to target, investigator-initiated studies executed within a specific timeframe, the number and quality of insights gathered from round table meetings, etc. MSL-KOL Satisfaction Conduct a simple survey for KOLs to gain feedback to gauge interaction satisfaction. Ask them to rate the MSL in areas such as the quality of the interaction, effective use of time, knowledge level of the MSL, and follow-up on discussed topics. Also, providing an optional field for comments or suggestions allows one to get a straight response. MSL-Internal Stakeholders’ Satisfaction It is also great to conduct surveys among internal stakeholders. Conducting surveys following specific medical activities like sales rep training or completing medical education is expected. Utilizing a simple survey with a few questions and a scoring scale of 1-5 (not great to excellent), you can calculate the percentage of individuals scoring a 4 or 5. A suggested KPI could be to achieve a score of over 80% in the 4-5 range. What Are the Challenges of Implementing KPIs for Medical Service Liaisons? The main challenge in implementing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for MSLs is identifying the correct indicators that accurately demonstrate professionals’ efforts. This challenge arises because MSLs often assume different roles; while some may actively participate in clinical trials, others may concentrate on more personal interactions with key opinion leaders. KPIs for each Medical Science Liaison should differ, allowing progress tracking with individual obstacles and achievements in mind. MSL objectives should be realistic and tailored to the specific context of the area in which they operate. Another challenge is to find the best tool for KPI tracking. There is a lot of software to choose from. Still, the right one should offer a range of features that allow proper customization and personalization while guaranteeing data accuracy, safety, and opportunities for additional evaluation of MSLs. The main task of KPIs is to focus not so much on the MSL’s actions but on the results that professionals have achieved through their work. Companies can accomplish this by combining qualitative and quantitative metrics and using them to evaluate how well a medical service liaison performed during a set period. Medical Science Liaisons vs. Medical Representatives To better understand MSL’s role, let’s compare it with medical representatives’ routine. A Medical Representative, also known as a Sales Representative, is responsible for directly promoting and selling pharmaceutical products to healthcare professionals. They typically work in a sales-driven environment, and their main goal is to increase conversion by convincing healthcare professionals to prescribe or recommend certain medications. They provide information about the features, benefits, and potential uses of the products they represent. A pharma MSL, on the other hand, is a scientific and medical expert who acts as a bridge between pharmaceutical companies and the medical community. MSLs do not have a sales target. Their primary responsibility is establishing relationships with key opinion leaders (KOLs), such as doctors, researchers, and academic institutions. MSLs provide scientific and clinical information about their company’s products, present research findings, answer medical inquiries, and collaborate on clinical trials and studies. Medical Service Liaisons as Communicational Solution MSLs are an essential field force for bridging the gap between pharmaceutical companies and the medical community. Their role as scientific and medical experts allows them to engage in meaningful scientific exchange, gather valuable insights, and collaborate on clinical studies. By measuring their performance through KPIs such as quality of KOL interactions and project achievements, organizations can ensure their MSLs deliver objective expertise and foster trust between the medical community and the pharmaceutical industry. Want to learn more about MSL’s role in the pharmaceutical business? Fill out the form below and our experts will reach you.
