From Credentials to Connection: How Combining Clinical & Behavioral Data Is Redefining HCP Engagement
Despite billions spent on HCP engagement, pharma is still struggling to connect. Traditional strategies lean too heavily on credentials and prescribing history ignoring how providers actually think, learn, engage and treat their patients. The result? 97% of digital outreach goes unanswered. And while 82% of pharma executives believe their efforts are effective, only 28% of HCPs agree. The gap is widening, costing brands relevance, access, and impact.
Why Legacy Strategies Have Lost Their Edge
For decades, sales and marketing relied on NPI targeting built on:
- Retrospective billing codes
- Specialty segmentation
- Market-basket prescribing history
- In-person field visits
- Qualitative research
Once effective, these “credential based” approaches built on billing codes, specialities, prescribing history, field visits and qualitative research now lack the precision and real time patient context needed for engagement in today’s AI driven, multi modal world. Credentials alone don’t reveal which patient's providers are treating for what current condition or how those providers prefer to learn and connect.
Clinical Intelligence: Understanding Who HCPs Treat
Real-world diagnostic and treatment data now shows which conditions providers manage from disease stage down to specific gene mutations critical to targeted therapies. This shifts targeting beyond static claims to high value clinical insights, such as:
- Lab data revealing ongoing patient testing and monitoring for disease progression and patient outcomes
- Cohort specificity within conditions, i.e. uncontrolled, stage, test result levels
- Biomarker positive populations (HER2+, EGFR+, PDL1+) and mutations
Why it matters: clinical intelligence ensures you’re not just targeting providers you’re targeting providers actively treating your patients.
Behavioral Intelligence: Understanding Providers as People
Behavioral and attitudinal data reveal how HCPs prefer to engage:
- Demographics: age, gender, ethnicity, bilingual ability
- Channel preferences: CTV, podcasts, social, email, other
- Mindset: early adopters, tech-forward, open to innovation
- Influence: ability to shape adoption decisions within organizations
Why it matters: behavioral intelligence humanizes targeting and aligns outreach with how providers actually learn, communicate, and decide.
Clinical + Behavioral Intelligence: A New Era of Precision Engagement
On their own, clinical and behavioral insights add value. Together, they redefine targeting. Brands can now connect with the right provider, at the right moment, in the way they prefer. This isn’t theory it’s live in market. Through our partnership, AnalyticsIQ and Diaceutics have built over 100 first of their kind HCP audiences that blend lab signals with behavioral insight, now available for activation via Deepintent and Doceree.
Examples of AnalyticsIQ and Diaceutics blended audiences include:
- Early adopter cardiologists treating patients with LDL > 100
- Bilingual rheumatologists managing CCP/ESR-positive patients
- Podcast-listening oncologists treating HER2+ breast cancer patients
Putting It Into Practice
Blended audiences deliver:
- Reach with relevance: engage HCPs aligned to therapy opportunity and engagement style
- Higher conversion: personalize outreach by channel, language, or adoption mindset
- Omnichannel optimization: activate across CTV, podcast, social, and endemic platforms
- Better outcomes: align testing with treatment, drive faster adoption, improve patient matching
A Smarter Path Forward
The future of HCP engagement will be defined by precision, combining clinical relevance with human understanding. Together, AnalyticsIQ and Diaceutics give pharma marketers a new lens to reimagine HCP engagement rooted in real world behavior and diagnostic insight.
In our next blog, we’ll uncover why the future of HCP engagement won’t be won with more noise, but with precision personalization at the point of decision. where clinical, behavioural and even nonclinical factors like SDOH come together to shape the moment that matters.
