A new era of drugmaker influence: How the pandemic inspired pharma marketers to target doctors in novel ways

When another boutique ad agency that works with pharma brands tested Doceree’s programmatic ad system earlier this year, the goal was to target a few hundred specific glaucoma surgeons with ads promoting a new medical device expected to be approved by the FDA soon thereafter. “Warming up the market is important,” said an exec at the agency, who wanted to reach “key leaders” to test the product. The exec declined to reveal details of the results of the test or whether the agency will try the system again.

Ogilvy Health is using the Doceree service in conjunction with its own data and targeting capabilities that might determine whether a doctor is at a particular hospital at a given moment, or whether they often refer patients to certain specialists. “We take a lot of the other pieces and put them together,” said Patel.

Measuring ‘script lift’

To detect when a doctor has just used a health platform to prescribe a particular drug, Doceree uses web crawlers that review information including the national drug code associated with the prescription. “When the doctor writes that code and moves to the next row, it is sort of a page refresh,” said Harshit Jain, a medical physician and founder and CEO of Doceree. When the page refreshes, an ad for a competitor’s drug can be triggered, for example.

But another part of the draw for drug makers is the ability to measure not only whether their ads inspired doctors to prescribe, but whether people actually filled those prescriptions. Doceree also has partnerships with data suppliers including Komodo Health and Symphony Health. Those data suppliers provide information from insurance and medicare claims and pharmacy purchase data to show how ad campaigns affect so-called “script lift” — measuring the number of new prescriptions or gauging the number of doctors who are new prescribers.  

Doceree competitor DeepIntent earlier this month announced it has been awarded a patent for its DSP’s ability to connect real-world clinical data with ad impression data to measure and optimize live campaigns and measure impact on prescription performance metrics.

Risks beyond patient privacy

Of course, healthcare data and targeting almost automatically raise privacy questions. “We never touch any patient data,” said Jain, who said the Doceree ad targeting system and data use is HIPAA-compliant. For instance, he said if ads are targeted when a doctor writes a prescription, the patient information is not visible to the system at the time the ad is targeted. He added, “The majority of our [electronic health platform] partners are logged-in platforms and we only communicate to logged-in physicians on opt-in platforms.”

Because Doceree has relationships with several electronic health record platforms, it is unclear what terms and conditions those systems require patients or their doctors to agree to. One platform partner, Office Ally, allows Doceree to target ads to physicians using its practice management and prescribing tools as well as to patients based on patient diagnosis codes when they’re checking in using digital tablets before a doctor visit. When patients agree to receive a voucher for a drug purchase based on their diagnosis code, “they’re consenting to being advertised to; there’s also potential for a clinical trial if there’s a rare disease,” said Brian O’Neill, CEO and founder of Office Ally.

Targeting physicians in digital point-of-care environments raises serious privacy concerns, said Pam Dixon, executive director of World Privacy Forum, a nonprofit research organization that centers much of its work on health privacy issues including medical identity theft.

While Dixon said the specific privacy implications of the Doceree and Ogilvy Health partnership and capabilities were unclear, there is potential for violation of HIPAA regulations if a patients’ insurance code or other data associated with their electronic health record is exposed to an entity such as an ad firm, or if payment information such as credit card data is associated with a patient’s medical condition, she noted.

“We have to get everything we do approved by medical, legal and regulatory at our pharma clients before we can execute any of our programs,” wrote Patel in an email to Digiday. “Our programs have been through many privacy reviews at our pharma clients and we are very careful and diligent in ensuring we do not violate any of the rules that protect patients rights and privacy.”

But there are other implications that go beyond privacy, according to Dixon. “One of the very significant considerations here is: What does advertising directly within an EHR system do to the cost of healthcare?” she said. “If doctors get ads for a drug that’s 15 or 30 times the price of a generic, what does that do to the cost of healthcare? That’s a question we really need to answer.”