Health Outcomes: Physicians Interactive acquires Univadis, rebrands as Aptus Health
The digital HCP engagement provider Physicians Interactive announced two major strategic moves in the past two months, acquiring the HCP content platform Univadis from Merck in October and then rebranding itself as Aptus Health in November.
Univadis, previously a wholly owned subsidiary of Merck, has an active membership of more than 3 million HCPs in more than 20 languages, across 63 specialties and in more than 90 countries. Univadis provides a comprehensive suite of clinically relevant resources for HCPs, including medical news, conference reports, references, textbooks, and online education modules.
The Univadis platform will now operate as part of Aptus Health, also a wholly owned subsidiary of Merck operating independently from branded pharmaceutical and vaccine operations, aligning with the company’s suite of HCP-facing properties to deliver a seamless engagement experience both for HCP members seeking credible medical content and for the life sciences companies, payors, and providers who use these digital properties to drive education and awareness of new medical and digital innovations aimed at improving health outcomes.
“Adding Univadis to the (Aptus) brand underscores our mission to advance health engagement across the entire spectrum, as well as across the globe,” says Donato Tramuto, chairman and CEO of Aptus. “There is a transformation under way in healthcare, one that requires a fresh, integrated approach grounded in proven digital strategies. With the expanded reach and rich medical content this acquisition offers, we are even better positioned to provide the end-to-end solutions our commercial partners need to deeply engage healthcare professionals – resulting in greater awareness and better health outcomes.”
This acquisition, company leaders say, will position Aptus as a global digital partner for clients looking to further engage health care professionals through digital channels – offering centrally managed, multinational campaigns featuring localized content. Today these international markets include France, Spain, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States; continued expansion into dozens of markets around the world is planned over the next three years.
A month later, the former Physicians Interactive announced that it had become Aptus Health, reflecting its mission of advancing health engagement and its role as a global digital health engagement partner for life sciences companies, payers, employers, and health systems.
The change, Aptus leaders say, comes as the company extends into new markets and expands its offerings to address a growing need for integrated digital health engagement strategies aimed at both healthcare professionals and consumers.
“Over the years, we’ve evolved our capabilities to help our clients achieve a wide range of digital health engagement goals across a wide range of populations – the name Physicians Interactive no longer tells the whole story,” says Joseph Caso, CEO at Aptus Health. “Our industry is facing increasing complexity, with commercial models, payment models, and care delivery models all experiencing a transformation. These changes demand that companies re-evaluate how they engage their target healthcare professionals and consumers to achieve their respective business objectives. With the international talent and expertise we’ve developed in-house, Aptus Health is the partner to guide them.”
According to Aptus executives, the company offers an end-to-end solution from strategy to execution for engaging both healthcare professionals and consumers in personalized, relevant digital content. Its clients have access to the world’s largest healthcare professional community, Univadis, as well as to leading healthcare consumer communities and mobile apps through its MedHelp division. The company’s analytics capabilities bring a data-driven understanding of how to optimize digital and mobile channels to engage targets and drive change.
“Aptus Health is not just a new name – it’s a new way of supporting our clients with the depth of knowledge, breadth of vision, and proven solutions needed to transform current models and take health engagement forward,” says Brian Robinson, chief marketing and strategy officer at Aptus Health. “With our decades of collective intelligence in health engagement and our digital and mobile channel expertise, we are uniquely positioned to serve as a global partner to our clients – offering insight-driven design, development, and deployment of innovative digital solutions that empower people to make better decisions and drive our clients’ business results.”
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Med Ad News spoke with Aptus Health Chief Product Officer Martin Dubuc about the thinking behind its recent acquisition of Univadis.
Med Ad News: From the outside looking in, this might look like an internal reshuffling, since Univadis is moving from being a subsidiary of Merck to a subsidiary of another subsidiary. What is the real functional significance of the move?
Martin Dubuc: Univadis used to be an asset of Merck Human Health that didn’t include any form of advertising or any way for life science companies to take advantage of the platform to reach physicians. With this acquisition, Univadis is now owned and operated by [Aptus Health], which is a wholly owned sub of Merck but operates independently. [Aptus] is operating as a digital partner to life science companies. We help life science companies design, develop, and deliver integrated multichannel campaigns and find ways to engage and drive behavior change of consumers and physicians. This change will open up Univadis as an engagement platform for life science companies at large. For [Aptus], it will offer the capability to become a global digital partner of pharma companies as they build their digital strategies.
Med Ad News: So previously, Univadis was this content producer in the midst of Merck that wasn’t marketed? How was that content getting to physicians if the service wasn’t marketed?
Martin Dubuc: It was a service strategy inside Merck in the past. It was part of the Merck co-business of pharma digital strategy overall. It came to be as a way to provide relevant clinical services to physicians. Over the last eight to nine years, it became the largest physician portal in the world, with 3 million physicians on it and 80-plus markets with localized versions. At some point, it became so good and so recognized by HCPs that the acquisition by [Aptus] and the integration into a pure player of digital healthcare really helps get Univadis to the next stage as part of [Aptus’] strategy and again, opening it up in the marketplace.
Med Ad News: Let’s say I’m a brand manager for a product. What is your pitch to me? What do you offer me that wasn’t available to me before?
Martin Dubuc: Our core offering is to be able to become a global digital partner for you as a brand manager. In the past, we were operating only in the U.S. market. Now we can operate campaigns globally. Also, we have about 3 million healthcare professionals on Univadis, out of which a million engage with the platform on a quarterly basis or so. There are many options, from display advertising campaigns to building a sales-directed, detailed campaign, to having an integrated multichannel campaign. There is a full suite of options that can be used to reach your goals and objectives in an integrated fashion.
Med Ad News: Since Univadis is already in the business of producing content for physicians, can you also produce content on behalf of clients’ brands?
Martin Dubuc: Yes. In some cases, our clients have their own content, whether it’s paper content or visual content that we integrate in the campaigns. In some cases, we create the content from scratch for them. We take advantage of our expertise in digital HCP engagement, in content production, in core plans, in analytics, in building campaigns and activities that have an impact.
Med Ad News: Given that Univadis has 3 million physician users, there’s an extraordinary amount of data pouring out of that site about physician behavior and how they respond to different kinds of content. Is that data available now to the brand managers of the world?
Martin Dubuc: In the U.S. market, a significant portion of our business is what we call a gain share product where we work with clients on an outcome-based program. We design a campaign that is linked to the result to generate for the clients. Advanced analytics is a core competency of the company based on channel behavior, channel responsiveness, impact modeling. We have been doing all of those things in the U.S. market for a long time. Indeed, we have a tremendous amount of information on physician behavior, what they consume. Which are the online-savvy physicians? Which are not? How and when do they open emails? We take advantage of that knowledge in the way we design campaigns, to reach an audience with the right message on the right channel at the right time. We do not sell data, but we use data to tie the outcome and the impact of what we do for life science companies and payers.
Med Ad News: What is the next step for Aptus as a company?
Martin Dubuc: We’re accelerating our activities on a few fronts. One is our international expansion. We currently operate commercially in the large markets of Europe, and we will expand to eight or nine additional markets in Europe and Canada in 2016. Then we will go to Asia, South America, and other markets. Two, we are accelerating on product innovation, on the value proposition we provide to HCPs and the advanced data-driven solution or engagement that we provide to our clients. The last point of what’s ahead of us is to make sure that we continue to build up a full suite of capabilities to be relevant – to be the leading global digital partner for all of our clients, whether life science companies or payers, because the transformation of the healthcare models and commercial models really call for digital innovation at scale. What we see more and more in the market is there is a need to scale up and look at digital topics more strategically, more than just buying media. We also have a lot of product launches and activities in the mobile space for physicians and for consumers where we’re making good progress in becoming a leading mobile player in digital healthcare for the consumer and healthcare professionals.
Med Ad News: What is Aptus doing in the consumer space?
Martin Dubuc: We have a consumer division that is leveraging a platform called MedHelp. MedHelp is the largest online community for patients in the U.S. market with more than 60 million patients a month. MedHelp also produces mobile apps for consumers and patients. We’re close to 20 million downloads by now. We also have a mobile advertising network for consumers in the healthcare space that’s called Tomorrow Networks. We have a very strong focus on user-generated content and self-powered health. As we build up those two healthcare engagement platforms, our long term vision is going to be, how do we bridge and connect those two worlds to help improve health outcomes at the end of the day? How we connect them for better health at the end of the day and for changing behavior to improve outcomes is really our long-term strategy to have a broader appeal in the overall healthcare system, in players and health systems and delivery systems and ACOs and so on.
