Healthcare providers (HCPs) must stay up to date on the latest research, clinical trials, and innovative medications to deliver high-quality, safe patient care. The main challenge, however, is finding time for self-education.
On average, a physician sees 20 patients a day. Add electronic health records keeping, administrative tasks, and personal obligations, and the time crunch for learning becomes evident.
HCP portals were designed to address this issue. These platforms offer personalized summaries of the most critical findings in the field, freeing up time for professionals to focus on what matters most: their patients. In this blog post, the Viseven team will explore the benefits of HCP portals in healthcare and offer real-world examples of how they make a difference.
What Are HCP Portals?
HCP portals are digital solutions that allow healthcare professionals to stay abreast of current trends and news relevant to their specialty or area of interest. These tools often provide personalized online health information on clinical trial updates, medication releases, upcoming conferences, and networking events. Healthcare portals can also serve as platforms for communication with industry peers and have additional features such as patient data management and analytics.
Biggest challenges HCPs currently face
Today, HCPs face many challenges, from administrative burdens to a need for more informed decision-making. Let’s discuss them in more detail.
- Administrative burden: HCPs are overwhelmed with paperwork and bureaucratic tasks. According to the latest findings, professionals spend approximately 4.5 hours daily on electronic health records (EHRs). Unsurprisingly, this workload reduces their time for direct patient care and impacts the quality of healthcare services. Being unable to spend sufficient time with patients, they often experience a lack of fulfillment, chronic fatigue, and burnout.
- Staying up-to-date with the latest research: HCPs are drowning in to-do lists; unfortunately, continuing education often stays on the back burner. Instead of being exposed to targeted updates on what is relevant to them, they are bombarded with irrelevant studies, events, sales pitches, and invitations. The HCPs need relevant info on the latest discoveries in their fields, drug developments, and relevant patient-doctor cooperation techniques. Medical web portals have the potential to resolve this challenge for HCPs and help them improve the quality of medical services.
- Communication security: HCPs often share patient information with their peers to seek second opinions or offer their perspectives. However, this data is highly sensitive and vulnerable to hacker attacks. Providers face the challenge of finding compliant communication platforms that ensure fully secure communication.
- Lack of informed decisions: The sheer volume of data, like demographics, medical history, and treatment plans, makes it hard for HCPs to see their patients’ overall health status. Because they cannot easily spot patterns in the data, specialists may not arrive at the optimal evidence-based care for a patient.
Role of Advanced Portals in Modern Healthcare
We brought up all these challenges for a good reason. Now, we want to show you how advanced medical portals can mitigate them successfully:
Enhancing HCP productivity
An advanced health portal often streamlines HCPs’ workflows by automating routine tasks, like sending reminders or scheduling appointments. Integrations with billing platforms or EHR systems allow them to manage administrative tasks more accurately and efficiently. This means they no longer have to manually create invoices, track payments, or update patient health records. Automation enhances their productivity while lowering the error rate to almost zero.
Making self-education easy
Health portals provide centralized platforms with valuable content, such as clinical guidelines, articles, news, online courses, and references. By storing highly personalized information in one place, health professionals save time when conducting research.
Safeguarding health information exchange
Compliant HCP portals enable specialists to communicate without compromising patient confidentiality. Health care portals or employee health portals must comply with relevant regulatory legislations such as HIPAA or GDPR. That is why developing web portals in healthcare requires technical expertise and full compliance on the software vendor’s side. Professionals can message their senior peers to consult on complex cases or rare diseases and share lab results. At the same time, experienced and knowledgeable HCPs can offer expert advice when needed.
Supporting data-driven decision-making
A siloed patient care, where HCPs are unaware of medical histories or prior treatments, can lead to poor clinical outcomes. With HCP portals, all pieces of the puzzle come together, allowing healthcare professionals to view relevant patient data and take a holistic approach to therapy. This helps identify correlations and trends that might otherwise be overlooked, predict the course of the disease, and find the most effective treatment based on the patient’s unique needs.
Advanced portals may also offer data visualization features. A single dashboard or graph can convey more than a thousand figures and words. By simplifying complex information, HCPs can effectively communicate insights with industry peers.
Things to Consider When Developing an HCP Portal
To make your portal truly valuable to HCPs, it is essential to pay attention to the following aspects:
Data Security
Data security is pivotal, and the statistics prove it. Over 500 healthcare facilities suffered data breaches in the past year, affecting more than 112 million patients. On average, it takes 236 days to recover from a breach, not to mention the $500 cost per compromised health record.
Your HCP portal must comply with HIPAA or GDPR to prevent authorized access to sensitive patient data. In other words, you must implement robust security measures, like encryption and authentication, to ensure that only HCPs access private information. Access controls are important in controlling who accesses what information.
User Experience
Pharmaceutical businesses can alienate HCPs with designs that are cumbersome and difficult to navigate. User-unfriendly elements, such as poorly placed icons or verbose language, can overwhelm HCPs and drive them to abandon the portal.
As noted, HCPs are occupied with patient care and EHR-related tasks. They do not have time to learn how to use a complex portal. That is why it is essential to have intuitive navigation and concise language that mimics natural conversation. Besides, a user-friendly portal must be adaptable to HCPs’ unique accessibility needs, like adjustable fonts, high contrast settings, or multilingual support.
Relevant Content
Consumers tend to get annoyed when companies bombard them with marketing-centric content. This creates an impression that profits are the major motivator rather than customer satisfaction. A recent study reveals that 62% of HCPs believe pharmaceutical marketing materials consist solely of advertisements. This finding highlights the HCPs’ frustration and wish for more personalized information that brings value to their practice.
Data analytics and AI help life sciences brands craft engaging, tailored content for HCPs. AI algorithms shed light on complex data patterns and trends, letting them capitalize on HCP preferences for content type or format.
On top of that, the omnichannel approach to marketing helps businesses to liberate their content from the constraints of platforms and formats and focus on a hyper-personalized experience for the audiences. For instance, businesses can now publish purely informative content on healthcare platforms for HCPs and then supplement it with more marketing-oriented materials across other media. Such an approach is at the core of Viseven vision for the future of content marketing in Pharma.
Real Life Healthcare Portal Examples that Improve the HCP Experience
The Viseven team has spent more than a decade developing robust HCP portals, and now we want to share some of their success stories:
Medical Portal for Boosting HCP Loyalty
Our client, a global biopharmaceutical brand, approached us to help build an HCP portal showcasing its unique expertise. The portal had to feature valuable content on the latest research, training, and events. One key goal was strengthening the brand’s position as a trusted resource.
To achieve this ambitious goal, we had to ensure their content was safe and evidence-based. Our experts integrated the portal with one of the leading content management systems (CMS) for easy online access to Medical Legal Regulatory (MLR)- approved materials.
Additionally, we implemented Google Analytics to understand how HCPs engaged with the platform: how long they stayed on the page, what links they clicked, and which articles had high bounce rates. These insights helped us tailor content specifically to the HCPs’ areas of interest and needs.
As a result, the pharmaceutical company saw enhanced engagement among HCPs, who would value access to valuable scientific content over intrusive advertising. This way, the HCPs should come to trust the company more and become loyal customers over time.
Healthcare Portal to Drive Higher HCP Engagement
Our client, an international pharmaceutical company with a presence in over 140 countries, wanted to build a web portal to deliver engaging content for HCPs. They also needed consolidated storage where marketers could easily find materials that have already undergone the MLR process.
We created a secure portal that integrates with both a CRM system and a CMS, providing easy access to MLR-approved content. Additionally, we provided marketers with a custom analytics tool for deeper insights into HCP preferences. For local administrators, we ensured a user-friendly WordPress interface for adding podcasts, videos, articles, and even managing events.
The company saw significant improvements thanks to this approach to HCP portal development. Storing approved assets became much easier, saving both time and effort in creating quality content. Powerful analytics tools helped them not only increase engagement with HCPs but also build stronger, lasting relationships. It is no surprise that more than 20,000 HCPs became loyal portal users.
Build a Robust HCP Portal with Viseven
Today’s HCPs want easy access to relevant content without worrying about data security. Therefore, pharmaceutical companies that deliver secure, user-friendly HCP portals stand apart from competitors, position themselves as thought leaders, and foster strong customer relationships.
As a leading MarTech service provider with over 14 years of experience in life sciences and pharma, we have helped numerous clients launch robust HCP portals. Our dedication to client satisfaction is reflected in their consistent 95% positive feedback rate.
Viseven has assisted over 100 world-renowned brands in navigating marketing transformation, driving engagement, and enhancing brand recognition. If you also need help, feel free to reach out to us, and we will discuss the ways to empower your digital transformation.
