6 Best Practices for AI in Pharma Marketing

By Jason Bernstein, Head of Medical Communications Strategy at epocrates

With the increased number of channels available to reach healthcare professionals alongside dramatically fewer in-person opportunities due to institutional restrictions, pharma marketers are facing more challenges than ever before to break through the noise. The traditional sales pitches and mass emails are a thing of the past with the growing need to create a personalized digital strategy to reach healthcare providers.

The future revolves around hypertargeting with artificial intelligence (AI) to create a new level of precision – and an omnichannel “echo chamber” that travels across multi-screen platforms. However, there is a growing trend within the pharma industry to let AI “make” all the marketing decisions that is creating undue reliance on its algorithms. While AI in pharma is still in its infancy, the industry can take a page out of the traditional marketing book to create a successful implementation using these six best practices:

  1. Gather the best data possible. As the saying goes, “you are what you eat” – a phrase that’s true in this instance as well. AI is only as good as the data that the algorithms consume, so any successful implementation must include clean and rationalized data ready for analysis. This means that some companies may need to upgrade their legacy infrastructure to a more modern commercial data warehouse with an industry-specific data model and unified sources.
  2. Partner with experts. The use of AI in pharma marketing is a challenging domain, considering the nuances of the unique landscape of healthcare and the complexities of technology that is still up-and-coming. Until marketers can get a grip on AI technology and its use cases, they should consider partnering with experts who understand AI in-depth, as well as the many intricacies that make up the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries.
  3. Utilize within the appropriate context. Applications of AI are often industry-specific, and pharma marketers should ensure that they utilize technology that is specifically built with pharma and healthcare in mind – and, ultimately, HCP needs. In many cases, it should be tailored even further to the strategic imperatives and respective therapeutic areas relevant for each brand.
  4. Verify optimal utilization. AI should be a tool to automate certain time-consuming and manual processes and obtain real-time insights from the ever-increasing inflow of data. However, given some of its limitations, it can only be used to augment human workflow, and unlikely to entirely replace it.
  5. Establish appropriate use cases. AI is not an answer to all marketing complications. Rather than thinking of AI as a panacea, marketers should identify use cases that illustrate how the implementation of their brand’s AI solution will solve specific problems or assist human beings when performing a specialized task within their organization.
  6. Ensure logical integration. The best use of AI is as a tool to generate marketing insights that can be fed into pharma marketing strategies to make informed decisions – not dictating the entire plan. When used together, the proven strategies of personalization and targeting can be further improved with the insights generated from AI.

There’s no longer any doubt that the early adopters of this powerful tool are set to reap the benefits and enjoy a significant advantage. But those looking to harness this technology must know that its use in healthcare is different from the traditional consumer space. AI isn’t an off-the-shelf solution that can be easily rolled out – it takes time, experience, and access to diverse, high-quality, relevant data sets.

Jason Bernstein

When used correctly though, it has the potential to revolutionize the commercial pharma landscape by helping marketers predict prescribing patterns and the impact of marketing channels and messaging strategies. Doing so won’t just provide more personalized access to healthcare professionals struggling to cope with the whirlwind of information available today, but also allow brands to provide the information they need, wherever they need it, and in real-time.