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As social media’s influence in healthcare grows, life sciences brands can’t rely on key opinion leaders (KOLs) alone to share medical knowledge. Their reach is mostly professional, the pace is slow, and there’s little room for two-way conversation with the audience.
People trust people they recognize, even if that relationship exists only online. When pharma brands partner with digital opinion leaders (DOLs), they tap into audiences that are already paying attention. The message quickly arrives in an engaging format, reinforced by social proof.
In this post, we’ll show you how to find DOLs and keep them engaged. But first, let’s take a quick look at who a DOL is and when collaborating with one makes sense.
Digital Opinion Leaders (DOLs) are the new generation of healthcare influencers. They use social media, newsletters, and podcasts to build thought leadership and shape how their audiences think.
DOLs are tech-savvy experts. They understand how algorithms work, track analytics, create engaging content, and explain complex topics in simple, digestible ways.
Life sciences brands collaborate with DOLs to reach chronically online audiences who trust the voices they follow. These people actively engage through comments, likes, and shares, amplifying the DOL’s reach and helping brands extend their visibility beyond traditional channels.
DOLs evolved from traditional key opinion leaders (KOLs). While KOLs influence a niche audience hungry for academic, formal knowledge delivered by highly credentialed experts, DOLs show their expertise by creating educational content for a broader reach. For example, a KOL might publish a PubMed article on the benefits of beetroot juice for cardiac function. A DOL would turn the same topic into a TikTok where they choose the healthiest vegetable for cardiovascular health from two options and explain why in 30 seconds.
As Sebastian Sorsaburu, Vice-President, Global Medical Affairs at Amgen puts it:
A DOL today may not be a Key Opinion Leader (KOL) by classic standards in the pre-digital era, but has become so due to their mastery of digital communication. Perhaps these DOLs do not do a lot of research on their own, yet can stay up-to-date with all the research being done and package it so the general audiences can understand. They can edit it compellingly, being true to the facts and credible.
Yet, this doesn’t necessarily mean that DOLs, unlike KOLs, lack academic credentials. For example, Dr. Eric Topol, a practicing cardiologist, scientist, and professor of molecular medicine, often appears in YouTube shows and has more than 700,000 followers on X.
Life sciences companies rely on partnership with DOLs in the following key areas.
It’s not uncommon for DOLs to use social media platforms to raise awareness about chronic or rare diseases, encourage early diagnosis, and even help destigmatize these conditions.
Hannah Witton is a London-based influencer who speaks openly about living with ulcerative colitis. She shares her experience of having a stoma and works to remove the stigma around this surgery. She often posts photos where her stoma bag is visible, encouraging people to accept, appreciate, and feel confident in their bodies, no matter what they have been through.
Partnering with influencers like this helps life sciences companies reduce fear around diagnosis and treatment, while giving patients encouragement to adhere to their therapies.
Pharma companies use DOLs to translate clinical trial results for a broader HCP audience in a format HCPs would eagerly consume. Instead of waiting months for a journal publication, they work with influencers to share insights in near real time.
Take Kelly Young, for example, a patient living with rheumatoid arthritis who created the blog RAWarrior.com to share what it’s like to live with this chronic condition. Over time, she built a large community of patients going through similar experiences. Visitors can access therapies to consider possible ways to manage their disease.
DOLs can be especially powerful in rare diseases. They reach wide audiences and can help surface and engage the small, dispersed patient populations these therapies are built for.
As Wierenga and Lans note in Handbook of Marketing Decision Models, more research is needed to understand how the role of DOLs changes depending on factors like treatment effectiveness, side effects, and product life cycle stage.
Pharmaceutical companies must wait for MLR approval to ensure that every claim is accurate and safe. This process can take months. Meanwhile, misinformation spreads online at lightning speed, and people often fall for the “first thing you hear” fallacy.
For pharma brands, the goal is to deliver evidence-based, reliable information as quickly as possible. DOLs, with their trusted audiences, are critical partners in debunking medical myths. A recent viral controversy involved claims that Tylenol use during pregnancy causes autism.
Dr. Rachel Barr, a neuroscientist with over a million followers who also has autism, debunked the myth:
Your autistic child is not a product of Tylenol. They are a product of you. Autism is largely genetic.
By collaborating with DOLs to combat misinformation, life sciences companies can improve patient outcomes, ensuring better pain management during pregnancy and more informed healthcare decisions.
While it’s common to engage KOL for gathering feedback, it is also a smart move to get DOLs involved to receive more diverse opinions. They know what HCPs and patients are saying online about the topic, your brand, or your competitors, so both positive and negative feedback can help you improve your digital engagement and product.
Besides, DOLs are tech-savvy leaders who are no strangers to experimenting with new solutions, channels, or approaches. This often pushes pharma brands to explore new digital engagement avenues.
Also, consider creating a compliant portal where your DOLs can share their experiences, best practices, and lessons learned. This allows you to engage with them long-term without requiring constant investment on your part.
Once your goal for collaborating with DOLs is clear, the next step is deciding whether you need HCP DOLs or patient DOLs. Keep in mind that direct communication with patient DOLs may be restricted in some countries, so always double-check your target markets. From there, your medical affairs teams can start searching for the right DOLs to partner with.
To find a DOL among HCPs, you may want to:
To find a DOL among patients, you need to:
When searching for DOLs across both HCPs and patients, AI can help you spot rising voices before they become widely known. By analyzing engagement patterns, collaboration networks, and citation signals, you can form early partnerships that build credibility from the start.
Once you’ve found relevant candidates, ask yourself these questions before DMing them:
Beyond discovering DOLs, engaging them effectively remains a challenge for medical affairs professionals. Here are a few ways we, as pharma marketing experts, recommend getting started.
Before reaching out to a DOL, be clear on how you would answer their “so what?” question. Melissa Fellner, Global Marketing Director at AstraZeneca, believes the most effective engagement is about delivering value:
It is less about the story that you want to tell and more about understanding your customer and their needs and how you can provide value to them, in the right way.
Help your DOLs identify their knowledge gaps and feel more confident sharing their insights with their followers. Choose a format that is convenient for them and make sure it’s easy to repurpose.
Traditional MLR processes were built around static assets such as emails and eDetailers. But what happens when the format is dynamic, like a DOL interview or a YouTube video?
Instead of trying to script every word, your task is to:
Then, give DOLs the creative freedom to shape the delivery in their own authentic voice. For live events, preparation is critical.
Pre-approve:
Many MLR teams are not ready to approve standalone modules. That means your priority is to get the full asset approved on the first submission. Once the complete asset passes review, you can reasonably assume that the individual modules within it are safe to reuse in similar contexts, as long as claims, audience, and usage remain aligned with the original approval.
To increase your chances of first-time approval, you can use eWizard’s AI pre-approval engine. It evaluates the likelihood of approval, flags potential compliance risks, and suggests improvements to strengthen claims and wording before the content reaches MLR.
Consider using eVa, an AI agent built inside eWizard. eVa is designed specifically for life sciences and connected directly to your DAM and internal knowledge base. That means it generates content grounded in your approved claims, brand rules, and reference materials, eliminating the risk of hallucinations. Use its MLR-ready outputs to quickly assemble content packages for DOLs.
Global-to-local is where most DOL programs hit a stone wall. While it’s crucial to define core safety requirements, you also need to adapt to local laws and regulations. If you’re planning to use AI to check your content against MLR rules, make sure your provider offers a fine-tuning option. For example, our team fine-tunes eWizard’s pre-approval engine to spot misalignment with local regulations.
At the global level, you can create a playbook of pre-approved modules and fragments with clear business rules. Locally, you need to manage relationships with DOLs to ensure they stay within the compliance boundaries set by the global team.
Medical representatives (MedReps) build strong relationships with HCPs. They understand individual preferences and can reach out with messages that matter most. AI tools can also help them prepare for these conversations.
For example, recently, we launched Kheiron, an AI-powered sales training platform that prepares field teams for addressing HCP objections and concerns. You can build a doctor simulation modeled on a real HCP persona. The rep interacts with a virtual physician who asks realistic questions, raises objections, challenges data, or shows low engagement.
This allows reps to practice navigating unexpected situations in a safe environment and build confidence before the actual meeting. After each session, the rep receives a performance score with structured feedback.
The system highlights:
Teams can identify weak messaging before it reaches HCPs and understand which slides or arguments resonate the most.
When deciding to engage with DOLs, it’s important to meet them where they are, on the platforms where they have an influence. And as you add new channels, pay close attention to consistency across them.
Pavlo Klymenko, Head of Omnichannel at Viseven, says that gathering data about each DOL, rather than focusing on the channel, is key to creating true omnichannel experiences. This approach helps you personalize the journey for each DOL and avoid sounding repetitive, off-brand, or salesy.
In some cases, you might need to help DOLs add new social media channels, which are more relevant for their therapy areas.
Organize a digital conference to encourage influencers to raise awareness about your products or the diseases you focus on. Consider live streaming to engage not only your DOLs but also the patient community in the conversation.
If you prefer a safer option, pre-record an interview to introduce your brand to the DOL’s followers. Or collaborate with a DOL to create Q&A stories, polls, or interactive posts.
Arranging digital events helps you not only raise awareness among your audience but also strengthen relationships with your brand advocates, your DOLs. Don’t forget to ask for their feedback regularly to stay aligned and improve over time.
If it is an HCP DOL, you may want to track prescribing trends, adoption of new treatment procedures or medical devices, and sample dispensing in the DOL’s region, where legally and ethically permitted. You can also look at shifts in treatment protocols or regional uptake of new indications over time.
If you are cooperating with a patient DOL, measuring success can be more complex, since they are not prescribing to your audience. In this case, focus on engagement depth, shifts in disease awareness if education is the goal, increased traffic to approved resources, and enrollment in patient support programs. These indicators better reflect influence within compliant boundaries.
DOLs are a major trend in life sciences. Rapid digital transformation demands more presence, so brands need to think of how to engage authentically and respond to feedback. This is a marathon where consistent, meaningful effort beats one-off connections before a new study goes live.
Viseven helps life sciences brands build solid, long-term relationships with DOLs:
Contact us to build you a strategy on engaging and maintaing strong relationships with pharma digital opinion leaders.
Traditional KOLs typically influence clinical and academic audiences through journals, conferences, and formal publications. Digital Opinion Leaders build influence online through social media, newsletters, podcasts, and other digital channels. While KOL communication is often slower and more formal, DOLs translate medical knowledge into accessible formats that encourage discussion, engagement, and rapid dissemination.
Yes, but the approach must respect local regulations and compliance requirements. In many markets, direct promotional communication with patient influencers is restricted. Pharmaceutical companies often collaborate on disease awareness initiatives, educational content, or community engagement while ensuring that all communication remains transparent and compliant.
Digital Opinion Leaders are active across platforms such as X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, YouTube, podcasts, newsletters, and increasingly short-form video platforms. The choice of channel often depends on the audience. For example, healthcare professionals frequently engage on LinkedIn and X, while patient communities may be more active on YouTube, Instagram, or TikTok.
Unlike traditional promotional materials, DOL collaborations often involve dynamic formats such as interviews, videos, or live discussions. Pharma teams must therefore focus on approving core claims, defining communication guardrails, and preparing compliant responses to potential audience questions. Establishing clear guidelines helps maintain regulatory compliance while allowing the DOL to communicate in their authentic voice.
Success metrics depend on the type of DOL involved. With healthcare professional influencers, companies may monitor indicators such as adoption of treatment approaches, prescribing trends, or engagement within professional communities. With patient influencers, meaningful indicators often include audience engagement, improved disease awareness, traffic to educational resources, and participation in patient support programs.
