Thanks to the exponential growth of the internet and the rapid take-up of technological devices, digital information about health conditions, as well as the therapies used to treat them, is in huge demand. This is evident across multiple digital channels, including social media, and originates from healthcare providers and payers, as well as patients themselves.
Demand for information has been further boosted in recent times by the COVID-19 pandemic, as people sought to learn more about the virus and how to treat it. Research shows that consumers have high awareness of different vaccine brands. All of this means that consumers are taking charge of their decision-making when it comes to their health, and they seek out information across multiple platforms to reach a decision.
Rise of Omnichannel Strategies
Marketers at life sciences companies are responding to this hunger for digital information, as well as other trends such as consumers’ desire for a more customized brand experience. They are moving away from a siloed, multichannel approach to marketing using different messaging for different channels. Instead, they are focusing on omnichannel marketing, using consistent, integrated, and personalized messaging across all channels, platforms, and devices.
Omnichannel strategies don’t just enable life sciences companies to deliver a superior experience to patient consumers. These marketing strategies allow them to reuse content across different channels and regions, and to promote internal collaboration within geographies, business units, and therapeutic areas since all functions have access to the same array of online and offline promotional materials.
Such efficiencies are vital given the sheer cost involved to produce promotional material. In the U.S. alone, the advertising spend on healthcare and pharma digital ads is expected to reach U.S.$11 billion in 2021, an increase of 18% year on year. At the same time, a large chunk of promotional spend is often wasted, reportedly up to 30%.
Barriers to Success
While omnichannel marketing strategies potentially open up huge opportunities to pharma and medtech companies, they also present a major challenge—to create high-quality product marketing materials, in both online and physical formats, that are compliant across local and global markets. What’s more, these need to be created at the speed that the digital era requires, and in the way modern consumers have come to expect.
Current medical, legal, and regulatory (MLR) review processes are renowned for being painfully slow and inconsistent, squandering professional expertise. Talented subject experts—who should be focused on reviewing complex messages that need specialist knowledge—are devoting large amounts of time to checking basic grammar in straightforward materials. Frustration among those experts can quickly reach a boiling point. This becomes an especially timely and important piece to recognize, as global labor shortages force a smaller number of employees to take on significantly more work. To further compound the problem, greater demand for digital content has led to a shortage of reviewers with appropriate medical-legal expertise, creating a compliance bottleneck.
This situation brings with it huge reputational and regulatory consequences. Review criteria risk can start becoming inconsistent, decisions may not be fully documented, and review quality could tumble. This ultimately means errors increase, and accountability becomes diluted.
As the process slows down, costs may go up. It could even reach a point when a life sciences company can’t release new drugs and devices because marketing materials haven’t been approved, or it has to dial down the marketing of existing products because materials haven’t been updated fast enough.
In the event that a life sciences company fails to comply with regulations, it may incur millions of dollars in regulatory fines. Or it may be delayed from actively promoting essential new therapies in the market. Fines and delays are not only detrimental to life sciences companies, but they also have a trickle-down effect that will eventually limit product choice and affordability for the consumer.
The Right Remedy
Fortunately, the challenge can be overcome. New technologies are creating better and faster ways for life sciences companies to communicate with the patients and clinicians they serve. These technologies—including artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and natural language processing (NLP)—can accelerate and optimize the industry’s approach to promotional materials review, making the process more efficient, more reliable, and more intelligent throughout.
AI can assess each piece of material that goes through the review lifecycle, verifying information for accuracy, cross-checking references, correcting language errors, scanning for potential problems, and prioritizing actions. What’s more, thanks to ML, the AI engine that powers the review process is continually learning and improving from what it reviews, meaning it becomes smarter and more effective over time. Finally, NLP facilitates the rapid translation of text from one language to another and enables large volumes to be summarized rapidly, in real time.
Solutions that capitalize on advanced technologies, including AI, ML, and NLP, will enable life sciences companies to produce promotional materials faster and more cost effectively. It will also help them to get essential medicines to market, faster than their competitors. Routine review activities are automated and medical-legal professionals are able to focus their efforts on the highest value, most complex questions where their deep experience and judgment is best used. The automation creates the capacity that teams need to handle the dramatically increasing volume of content at the pace which patients—and the market—demand.
The speed at which the COVID-19 vaccines have been developed has transformed societal expectations around how quickly new therapies can be launched. Patients, as well as healthcare payers and providers, will increasingly expect therapies to come to market quicker. This will require life sciences companies to rapidly create and approve associated marketing content. Only by embracing the transformative power of technology and innovative solutions will the industry be able to deliver on these expectations.
The views reflected in this article are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the global EY organization or its member firms.
