The digital age and the advance of AI – pushing communications to new heights

The digital age and the advance of AI have created a temptation to push communications to the furthest realms of personalisation, but that quest could also lure campaigns to the dark side of the moon where messaging passes into shadow.

Products promising stratospheric results on the back of space-age connectivity with healthcare professionals (HCPs) and patients are being counted down seemingly every day, but a launch pad pause may be advisable to ensure the enterprise does not stray from an achievable orbit.

R&D breakthroughs are reaching unprecedented treatment trajectories but the need to stay in tune, and dialogue, with mission control is more essential than ever. Pressing the digital button is not a passport to new worlds and research has shown that 65% of senior clinicians in the UK, Europe and the US have stopped engaging with pharma companies because of poor digital delivery.1

The Value Gap research by Graphite report concluded that ‘the path forward is not more digital – it is more meaningful digital’.

Florian Schnappauf, Veeva Systems Vice President of Commercial Strategy for Veeva AI in Europe, firmly believes the accent should be on quality rather than quantity. He says: “It is important to keep the fundamentals in clear view at all times, but particularly now there are so many new pathways and distractions.

“Pharma companies ultimately need to provide the best possible medicines to the patients who need them as quickly as possible. To do that effectively, they need to communicate with the people closest to those patients – the clinicians prescribing their treatments. Communications excellence, and therefore commercial excellence, comes down to the quality of those engagements.

“We’ve never had more insights or data about what HCPs want to hear and how they want to hear it. The real question is whether we’re using that information wisely and providing them with the content they need. The focus has to be on quality, not overwhelming people just because new tools and channels are available.”

Veeva’s Pulse Field Trends report found that 77% of content generated by organisations is rarely or ever used, indicating that the drive to create data for the sake of it is deflecting from delivery and leaking economic value.

“The industry spends around $20bn per year on producing content, yet a significant portion of that never reaches HCPs. This is not just an issue of relevance, but also a return on investment challenge,” adds Florian. “From that perspective, understanding what interests a doctor becomes even more important.”

He sees huge value in developing feedback loops with HCPs and feeding their insights into every aspect of product development, launch and post-launch, so that content can be more sharply and efficiently targeted. The rise of digital native HCPs and their growing capacity to interrogate and converse with AI in real time are the game changers here, Florian observes.

“There is a growing potential to strengthen relationships with HCPs,” he says.  “Historically, much of the industry relied on a push model from companies broadcasting messages and trying to sell. It was one-way. What we’re increasingly seeing now is HCPs actively signalling what they want to hear from industry, creating a pull dynamic. This allows insights to flow across marketing and field teams, and enables organisations to provide doctors with information that is genuinely relevant to them, cutting out unnecessary content.

“AI is playing an increasingly important role here. Veeva launched its first AI agents last year. Among them is Voice Agent and Free Text Agent, which allow field teams to interact with their CRM system through natural language to capture insights quickly and easily. Over time, this will enable pharma companies to gather richer insights, because teams can capture greater nuance from their discussions with HCPs. This has the potential to create a real shift in how engagement happens, while still meeting strict compliance requirements.”

The tech giants are flooding their platforms with healthcare innovations that appeal to the public and clinicians, with ChatGPT claiming it fields 230 million health and well-being queries every week, while a report revealed that 29% of GPs in the UK have used generative AI tools for admin back-up and 25% have consulted tools for diagnostic information.

“This has created another dimension of communications excellence, where messaging needs to be relevant not only to HCPs but also to the AI models that surface and interpret information. This emerging category of AI model optimisation means companies will have to think carefully about how information is structured, so it can be understood by humans but also interpreted effectively by machines,” comments Florian. “It increases the pressure to ensure information is clear, structured, and easy to retrieve.

“Across the industry, we are seeing a lot of strong pilots and the challenge now is scaling them across the enterprise, across different geographies, teams and compliance environments,” he says. “That’s where we are working with customers to deliver industry-level capabilities, and there is a lot of excitement about what can be achieved.”

Julie, who has been at the leading edge of digital and AI development over the last decade, believes that GenAI has to be used transparently, with sharp attention to trust factors that are visible to patients and HCPs and the ‘extra audience’ of LLMs that aggregate and share content.

“You almost have to create a new Venn diagram of your channels and content; where it resonates with humans through social media and traditional media and also the channels that the machines like and look at, which demands a dual strategy,” she adds. “Making the best of GenAI is more about the fundamentals of understanding your audience and thinking about content and channel strategy than it is really about anything technical.

“My excitement is inspired by the depth of insight we can obtain from data and how that will help patients being heard. Whether you are an HCP or a patient, if we are really helping people feel heard and really answering their questions, which is core to AI visibility, then we will increase trust and reputation in the industry and belief in AI’s potential.

“Google gave patients greater access to information but GenAI is now the next level in terms of patients’ ability to have access to relevant information and enable the personalisation and consumerisation of healthcare. We are almost entering a new era in terms of the informed patient and that can only help improve patient outcomes. The challenges for industry and HCPs is to make sure that we’re rising to the occasion in terms of delivering better content and making sure it’s discovered by the humans and the machines.”

Nick Hall, Senior Consultant at Sprout Health Solutions, also has a sharp focus on how technology can truly place patients at the heart of technological advances. “One huge opportunity that exists with AI is the democratisation of data, with patients being able to directly access data and information about their conditions. This is particularly important for people with rare diseases, where information can be very limited and hard to source. The flip side is that the data has to be accurate and trustworthy, so AI’s huge potential has to be weighed against its current limitations.

“Another core opportunity for AI is accelerating the drug development process, because for many conditions it can take a long time for the drug to come to market and be accessible for patients, and for some it is too late. We need oversight and regulation of AI processes, but anything that speeds up the journey is welcome. It could make huge differences to patients’ quality of life and their survival.”

Most pharma companies have taken steps to deploy AI and deploy it across departments to liberate their data and create corporate harmony while also staying within compliance and regulatory guide rails. 9Labs has developed an AI-enabled system – Polarix.io – that aims to enable that ambition to function and prosper across turbulent internal operating systems.
“The industry is highly regulated and it is challenging to open the doors and fully embrace AI,” says Daniel. “With Polarix.io, we have created a ring-fenced AI-enabled system trained solely on the contents of an organisation’s strategy, references and resources. It is an ecosystem with no outside input that minimises the impact of hallucinations and means it is something you can really trust.
“It helps deliver a scientific strategy through control of approved messaging and providing an immutable audit trail so you can track which messages are used in the creation of novel assets around the world – this is inevitably the direction of travel in strategic healthcare communications. This focus on the individual message is very successful in the FMCG sector and the way forward for global health comms is less about the vehicle that delivers the message but more about refining the message over time through positive feedback loops. We still need to work on that and develop sentiment analysis as well as product performance metrics.”

He adds: “The aim of comms excellence is to create a receptive environment for the introduction of a novel therapeutic with minimal delays getting it adopted and available to the patient. We can harness AI to positive effect but must be careful that we are not pushing it too far; to the point where messaging becomes confused and misunderstandings develop because that has a huge economic impact.

“I am confident we are on the right path and that by innovating without losing sight of the core values, we can enter a new era of comms excellence.”

Inizio’s HCP Interact – an AI-powered training product – takes that intention further by empowering MSL teams to communicate more effectively by practising on avatars modelled on real clinical profiles. Kelly says: “The avatars are trained to act as a persona that they would encounter in the field; it could be somebody that is less knowledgeable about a product or time-poor or whatever real-life scenario an MSL might encounter. It helps maximise scientific understanding at HCP level while using their feedback about knowledge gaps to help scientific communications teams refine information and messaging.”

Kelly echoes the need for data harmonisation. “Silos are never created on purpose,” she adds. “A lot of the companies that we’re working with are realising that they are paying for the same data sets multiple times across different departments. AI helps them identify duplication and to also bring large data sets together, interrogate them and drive insights that are relevant across R&D, medical and commercial.”
Embedding GenAI in workflows and cross-departmental function does not sound as alluring as headline advances proclaimed by fresh digital landmarks, but this is where the real treasure is mined, she observes.

“The amplification of what humans can derive from huge data sets is the fundamental benefit of this technology,” she says. “There’s no need to be afraid of the technology because there are guard rails that we can put into place to make it more trustworthy and the outputs more reliable. So, it is a question of using it to enhance systems that are already in place to help humans do what humans do best, which is adding the creative and the strategic element and making sure objectives are achieved.
“It is not going to take jobs. It will make jobs more interesting and more effective. GenAI has already shifted from content generation to being a consultative partner and a lot of organisations are working out how to use it well rather than an ‘all or nothing’ approach.

“If you adopt GenAI and do a little bit well then people will get to understand how it works and how it is grounded and you also increase trust. I’ve always loved technology and it now feels like GenAI is coming of age. It will keep developing and it will keep innovating and the prospects are exciting.”

Adam Boucher, Head of Innovation at STEM Healthcare, sees speed as the billboard attraction of GenAI, but with that comes a need for companies to gear up their processes to keep pace.

“There’s a huge appetite across the industry and most companies are moving to a phase of exploration and experimentation of the huge number of potential use cases right across the product life cycle, some of which will really transform the way in which pharmaceutical companies commercialise their assets,” he says.

“Get it right and you achieve an ability to leverage GenAI to speed up processes and become more agile, which can give you a significant edge. But in order to maximise this, organisations do need to transform. You can have all this data coming in at lightning speed, but it’s equally important that you remove any barriers, such as legacy systems and processes, that might inhibit your ability to harness that intelligence quickly and put it into practice.

“It is still early days in GenAI’s life cycle, so there is a need to embrace an almost experimental approach where you don’t necessarily know if things are going to work but you can try different things, learn quickly, refine where needed and continuously iterate, but also walk away from things that aren’t delivering value.
“There’s obviously a lot of change management that needs to happen to ensure organisations can expedite decision-making and sign-offs. But it’s definitely going in the right direction and I think that our clients see the potential, so are trying to move fast.”

STEM Healthcare, an Inizio Ignite company, is a global leader in strategic brand alignment deploying industry experts and 17 years of benchmarked data to analyse and optimise the critical phase of HCP engagement.

Adam identifies the potential to supercharge traditional market research and create agile projects that can flex across the diverse landscapes of therapeutic areas and reach down to tailored sectors and respond to market changes.

“Historically, market research has been more reliant on small focus groups to provide feedback, which was used to test a campaign narrative and messages. Once the campaign was then developed and rolled out, it was a big lift to change course,” he says. “With GenAI, we have the capacity to harness a plethora of interaction types to generate a wealth of data and insights revealing what is resonating with doctors and HCPs in real time, and that allows you as a leader to be far nimbler in refining your strategy based on that feedback.

Danny Buckland is a freelance journalist specialising in the pharmaceutical industry