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Eighty percent of doctors still say the communications they get from pharma are generic. Only 28% of HCPs feel like a company is personalizing anything.
Research shows that almost 80% of respondents believe that omnichannel had little to no impact on HCP engagement. Executives cite the lack of coordination between internal teams as the major hindrance.
That challenge was the focus of a recent episode of the Pharma Talks podcast, where host Nataliya Andreychuk spoke with Michael Kirzhner, a commercial pharma veteran who, after more than 20 years in commercial, digital, consulting, and now patient services, shared why omnichannel often falls short and what organizations need to change to make it work.
Imagine you’re a company of one. You know your product, you know your customer, and if a conversation gets interrupted, you know exactly which channel to pick it back up on — a call, an email, or a specific page on your own website. There’s one brain running the whole relationship, so every touchpoint stays coherent by default.
That was roughly how pharma worked when the field rep was the primary channel. The rep held the context, made the calls, and adjusted messaging in real time based on what the doctor needed. Digital wasn’t a threat to that model yet and was just an occasional supporting channel.
The problem, as Kirzhner tells it, is that pharma companies then had to scale that same coherence across a growing number of departments, agencies, and channels without losing the “one brain” feeling. That turned out to be a much harder problem than building any individual channel.
It’s tempting to treat channel fragmentation as a tooling issue. Kirzhner argues fragmentation started earlier, at the organizational level: as pharma companies built out commercial, medical, clinical, and field functions, each team became genuinely excellent at solving its own slice of the customer problem. Digital marketing got good at digital marketing. Medical affairs got good at medical affairs. CRM teams got good at CRM.
The technology came after, and mostly to support those already-siloed functions. So, instead of causing fragmentation, technology mostly encoded it, locking each department’s version of the customer into its own systems and workflows. What accumulated was what Kirzhner calls technical debt from years of departments optimizing locally instead of the organization optimizing centrally.
Buying an orchestration platform doesn’t undo a decade of siloed decision-making. The platform can only coordinate what the organization has already agreed to coordinate.
Kirzhner offers a simple three-part structure for what a coherent customer experience requires:
Most pharma organizations, in his view, have made progress on the first two. Digital and data capabilities have matured; companies now have richer behavioral profiles that go beyond prescribing data into digital engagement.
What’s still missing is the third piece, which is genuine cross-functional coordination.
Right now, according to Kirzhner, that coordination work is happening informally, affected by individual functions rather than owned centrally. Ten departments hear the same strategy, take their own notes, and go build their own version of a coordination model.
Yet, none of them can do it at the scale an orchestration function would require, because coordinating everyone else was never their job, as they’re also still expected to run their own channel effectively.
Kirzhner points out that “not enough content” was, for years, a constraint, driven by MLR bottlenecks and compliance friction as much as by creative capacity.
Modular content approach, and now AI-assisted content generation, have substantially closed that gap. Pharma companies today generally have more message variation and more content throughput available to them than they did five years ago.
Yet, the industry’s bottleneck has shifted downstream, from content creation to content orchestration: making sure the right piece of already-approved content reaches the right channel at the right moment, tied to a shared understanding of the HCP, rather than each channel independently deciding what “good” looks like.
High-performing teams still need to produce more content to keep up with demand, but they also want to connect those assets using data about each individual HCP.
When the topic of omnichannel comes up, many people automatically assume the HCP is the customer, even in organizations that pride themselves on being customer-centric. As a result, pharma brands often design their omnichannel strategies as if the doctor were the only customer.
But that framing overlooks the people the industry ultimately exists to serve. Referring to patients as a “third party” obscures the fact that, sooner or later, everyone ends up on the patient side of the healthcare system, whether as a patient or as a caregiver.
And even when patients are brought into the conversation, the same fragmentation persists. Patient services are often split across nursing, hub, financial assistance, and field reimbursement teams. Each function performs its role well, but coordinating across them remains a challenge.
On the topic of influence, Kirzhner draws a distinction between key opinion leaders (KOLs) and digital opinion leaders (DOLs). He believes they aren’t fundamentally different categories of people. They’re the same kind of expert using a different set of tools.
What’s changed is that today’s KOLs have social and digital channels available to reach far larger audiences directly, on their own terms.
His recommendation for pharma is to support them as co-creators, helping with platform literacy, content development, and science communication, while keeping the relationship anchored in disease education and mechanism-of-action content rather than branded promotion.
Don’t hide your intentions. Be transparent about why you want to collaborate and why the partnership should matter to the DOL. According to Kirzhner, most DOLs aren’t motivated by loyalty to a pharmaceutical brand. They’re driven by a desire to educate patients and help them better understand their treatment options.
Brands become valuable partners when they enable DOLs to share relevant, compliant, and evidence-based content quickly enough to keep pace with today’s social media conversations.
Kirzhner is optimistic about AI in pharma. The technology facilitates personalization and decisioning that were previously too resource-intensive to solve manually. More specifically, it helps surface information across siloed internal systems and eventually functions as an active collaborator on tasks like MLR review and content variation testing.
He’s careful to separate different categories — general-purpose chat assistance, like ChatGPT or Claude, retrieval over an organization’s own information, and AI-driven agents doing actual work, like creating marketing assets or updating a CRM. Teams need to understand where each category fits to maximize efficiency while staying compliant.
Asked what he’d tell a fellow commercial marketer, Kirzhner’s answer was about keeping a clear mental model of the actual destination — a genuinely coordinated customer experience. This way, day-to-day work doesn’t drift into optimizing a single channel at the expense of the whole.
The coordination problem took years of well-intentioned, siloed excellence to create, and it will take deliberate, structural work to unwind. Omnichannel maturity will come from building on shared context, informed decision-making, and cross-functional coordination rather than expecting each team to shoulder that responsibility independently.
Whether you’re at the beginning of your omnichannel journey or looking to take it to the next level, we can help you put the principles discussed in this article into practice. Reach out to start the conversation.
