Do omnichannel approaches have a role in market access and payer discussions?
March 28, 2024 | CRM, Market Access, medical omnichannel, omnichannel, payer discussions
By Frank Fisher and Claire Woon
Omnichannel as a strategy is expanding across the pharmaceutical industry. ‘Omnichannel’ can be broadly defined as the use of multiple communication channels, directed to a single purpose and connected via a customer database, with a record for each individual. This allows for personalized and targeted communications aimed at that individual customer and helps us learn from the target’s responses. Once purely a marketing technique, omnichannel concepts and technologies are now making solid inroads into medical communications. The ability to present personalized materials that are consistently deployed across multiple channels to healthcare professionals (HCPs) as individuals, and to continually gather and analyse their responses to those materials is, arguably, of even more use to medical teams than it is to their commercial colleagues.
For us at AMICULUM, medical omnichannel is an area where we see a significant number of client requests. So, it’s hardly surprising if some of our market access clients are now wondering, what can omnichannel offer us? The answer is ‘quite a lot’, but perhaps not in the areas you might expect.
Omnichannel activities for the payer audience
The first thing to note is that, just like medical affairs, market access has its own culture, and there are certain expectations and limitations among the payer and administrator audiences that differ from other pharmaceutical customers. For example, payers won’t expect to be at the focus of a whole raft of coordinated omnichannel communications, and that may never be desirable. Their expectations regarding communications may focus on personal, face-to-face visits, rather than electronic communications. One immediate consequence of the traditional face-to-face approach is that many payers may not be in the same digital communications infrastructure as your other customers. In other words, they may not be entered into your Customer Relationship Management database (the CRM – more on this below). However, assuming targeted payers are within your database already, what are the advantages?
With payers in your CRM, you can start to deploy all your Global market access content, such as value stories or budget impact models, through personalized platforms tailored to local needs. Many of our clients use the Veeva suite for this, which usually sees final point-of-contact conversations supported by an iPad app. The immediate advantage of this approach is that all payer touchpoints are tracked. Those face-to-face conversations between local access teams and individual payers become transparent to Global overview, with slide-by-slide sentiment tracking available as a default option. For Global clients, the ability to get direct vertical insights into local market access activities is a step forwards in itself, but the tracking offers so much more. Imagine a payer value deck, transformed into a Veeva-enabled presentation that includes treatment option routes and budget impact calculators, with the underlying PowerPoint® content augmented with omnichannel tracking analytics. You now have the prospect of a feedback conduit showing not only what material has been put in front of individual payers across all markets, but also how they respond to your value story in granular detail, and what questions they ask about it. Powerful stuff.
Note that this barely scratches the surface. The wide spectrum of channels for coordinated communications, and the ability to segment and contextualize content on the fly (all these features that make omnichannel so powerful for marketing and medical communications) may not even be necessary to make it a winner for market access. Simply, that vertical feedback loop, offering the ability to see gaps and rapidly respond to them, may be a sufficient return on investment.
Think of where that feedback loop might be most valuable – pre-launch, for instance? Imagine markets using that Veeva-enabled value tool, not only to present to payers, but also to allow payers to instantly guide you on what’s important to them, and what they perceive as their greatest need or problem. All this valuable data streams into one central database to help refine your stories.
Segmentation, tailoring and efficiency
Once adopted, the ability to refine and segment audiences becomes valuable. The data will tell you what kind of spectrum of opinions and perspectives you face – data that Global team leads may never have had access to before. Omnichannel approaches also support tailoring content to specific audience categories and provide the ability to map on to any segmentation strategy. A single presentation deck could switch between different payer needs instantly, bringing alternate data, budget calculators or illustrations into the value story. Whether automated or field force-led, the ability to adapt story flows quickly and consistently to the individual needs and interests of the audience is a core omnichannel principle. This is surely of use in today’s competitive landscape, in which payer choices may rest on conveying subtle benefits in treatment, broader costs versus benefits, reduced adverse events and drug–drug interaction, and patient quality of life.
Practicality is beneficial, too – just as with HCPs, payers are under increased time pressure, and face-to-face access time can be limited. Omnichannel tools can be used to condense value stories into 5-minute ‘corridor conversations’, and for the provision of personalized QR codes to let payers download a pack or presentation to their own phone for later consideration. The same technologies enable remote presentations, often with far more impact and slickness than a simple Teams or Zoom call. Whichever omnichannel communication route is used, the same captured analytics will be directed back to CRM to judge reach and effectiveness.
Adopting a CRM may be simpler than you think!
Of course, the big disadvantage to adopting omnichannel for payer discussions is… it’s new! We know that, for some of our clients, simply adopting a database for managing your payer communications might seem like a barrier. However, storing all your payer contacts in a CRM marks the first step of that omnichannel approach that really can’t be overlooked. It is important to remember that this isn’t a technical hurdle and that your commercial and medical colleagues will already have their contacts within a CRM. Most of our client companies will have experienced supporting teams to manage this process. In those circumstances, migrating access teams towards omnichannel might be a lot less painful than you imagine!
At AMICULUM, we can help to identify at what stage you are in your omnichannel journey and devise a plan of action for your programmes.
To learn more about our omnichannel expertise please get in touch with Frank Fisher at frank.fisher@amiculum.biz. For more insights, visit the AMICULUM blog site.
This content was provided by AMICULUM
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