Achieving communications excellence with the healthcare workforce of the future

According to WHO data, by 2025, around 75% of the workforce will be millennials. Born digital natives, this generational group has its own attitudes and preferences when it comes to how millennials communicate as professionals and how they interact with promotional messaging. If you want to generate an effective omnichannel strategy and communication campaigns that truly resonate, these particular behaviours need to be deeply understood.

At Research Partnership, our own research has revealed that millennial doctors, in a struggle to balance conflicting personal and professional goals, desire easily digestible, flexible and bite-sized formats and look for content integration that has already been filtered and synthesised by trusted sources. One such source that has emerged in recent years is the ‘key online influencer (KOI) – physicians with significant social media presence who have the power to generate conversations and share information with a wide online medical community. These individuals enjoy large audiences across multiple platforms, giving them considerable influence in a given therapy area. Therefore, it is important to understand their role and level of influence.

We have an approach that can identify and profile these ever-evolving influencer types. Combining social media analytics with in-depth qualitative and ethnographic research, we can help identify where the balance of influence lies between more traditional KOLs and KOIs across different areas of medicine and profile the most important macro- and micro-influencers.

And to truly understand how millennial healthcare professional (HCP) audiences are likely to respond to branded campaigns, we believe you need to do more than ask. So we employ a range of AI-powered techniques and implicit response questioning in order to gauge both the implicit and explicit response to a campaign. We call this our RATER framework and it builds on more traditional approaches based on rational responses by using AI to predict where people will subconsciously look for information and employing implicit techniques to get a truer understanding of instinctive and emotional responses.

In a few years, millennial doctors will become the healthcare workforce of today. Can you afford not to align your communications strategy with the needs of a new, digital-first generation?

Research Partnership is a custom and syndicated global insights partner for health and life sciences companies. Find out more at researchpartnership.com