Articles
5 Ways to Improve Field Alerts for Life Sciences
Physicians have an average of 9 touchpoints a day from biopharma sales teams, with only 50% of providers being fully accessible to the field.1 Effective field alerts and suggestions can help teams break through by acting on current market changes and opportunities to deliver relevant communications to HCPs being inundated with information.
As digital capabilities improved over the last decade, biopharmas widely shifted to Next Best Action (NBA). However, these suggestions lacked context at times, leading field representatives to either distrust or ignore the alerts completely, putting top-line revenue at risk. To improve the effectiveness of field alerts, many biopharmas are switching to a data-driven model. Here are the top five reasons why:1. Better information with more context
NBAs or alerts require the rep to take action based on patterns and predicted outcomes. If the alert doesn’t have context as to the “why” or explain what necessitated it, the rep is likely to ignore the information. The alert has to be convincing enough to make the rep change their call plans for the day and take immediate action, which is often difficult given busy schedules. A typical NBA might be “Schedule a lunch-and-learn meeting to present clinical trial data about the new medication to Dr. Smith.” While this suggestion may be data-driven, the rationale behind it is not always clear.
In an increasingly complex healthcare environment, data-driven suggestions incorporate rich data sources and simplify things for the field team, increasing the chances that the rep will view the information as valuable and act on it. For example, “Dr. Smith recently diagnosed a breast cancer patient, and the IHC results came back HER2+. Share the latest real-world outcomes for your new therapy during your next visit.” This approach offers actionable insights tied directly to relevant data, ensuring reps can engage confidently and effectively.
2. Easy integration with CRM
NBA requires integration with third-party tools. This creates a fragmented experience for reps as they switch between multiple applications on different platforms to access alerts. Imagine a busy rep calling on priority HCPs and entering key information into your organization's CRM. In the meantime, they are receiving a high volume of alerts in an entirely different tool unrelated to their day-to-day CRM activity. They have to log out of your CRM, log in to another tool, read the alert, and then decide if it’s important.
Data-driven suggestions, on the other hand, allow you to centralize multiple data sources directly within your CRM. Since representatives already spend a significant amount of time here, this increases the likelihood of them seeing and acting on the alert. With connection to the CRM, the operations team also has deeper telemetry insights into alert analytics and adoption.
3. Flexible and customizable to sales representatives’ goals
NBA conforms to a one-size-fits-all approach that provides insights with limited context via a black box algorithm that erodes the field team’s trust in the suggestions since they don’t truly understand why or how the system is making these recommendations. Actions and suggestions are more effective when they are flexible and customizable to the therapy or specific region and territory. Suggestions should also be able to be tailored to a therapy’s product life cycle stage. For example, the goals for a launch phase offering, where the focus might be on awareness and adoption, will differ significantly from those in a mature phase, where the emphasis may shift to loyalty and deeper engagement. The ability to account for these customizations increases the likelihood of the alerts to be adopted and acted on.
4. Adaptable based on feedback from the field
Are alerts and suggestions adding value to the field team, such as improving time to engagement, creating new patient starts, and increasing the effectiveness of the engagement? Is the field team bombarded with hundreds of alerts each week? Are they able to provide feedback, and is that feedback being implemented?
To trust alerts and increase adoption, the field team needs to know that the data is accurate and the feedback they provide is being incorporated by the operations team. If not, the alerts go unused. Additionally, data doesn’t always capture everything that occurs in the field and the nuanced conversations that are happening. Field feedback refines alerts and makes them more accurate for everyone.
Data-driven suggestions can combine multiple data sources to generate more accurate insights. If the field team trusts the alerts they receive, they are more likely to act on them. But, don’t just set the alerts and forget them. Actively reaching out to the field team for feedback and taking it into consideration is key to improving overall program adoption.
5. Utilize common data architecture
The value of data-driven suggestions can be amplified by operations and analytics teams when there is a direct connection between data sources that can link HCP reference data, industry activity, and patient Mx and Rx claims to deliver well-rounded alerts quickly. NBA lacks a solid foundation or a common data architecture to execute fast alerts with products that connect data and software.
Veeva’s Common Data Architecture (CDA) for Life Sciences™ is a free and open data standard designed to enhance efficiency and system interoperability for life sciences. It is a simple set of data standards that makes it easier to connect systems and data. These standards include definitions for entities, attributes, and picklist items, all organized into kernels to create a standard reference data model for the industry.
CDA can help deliver alerts and counteract common barriers to adoption. Representatives will be more receptive to timely alerts with ample context tailored to their current business goals. CDA can also aid in scalability across brands and therapeutic areas within an organization.
Watch this video to learn how biopharmas are successfully implementing patient alerts and data-driven suggestions.
1 ‘Unbundling’ the pharma sales rep for the personalization era, ZS, October 2023