How to commercialize your patient-facing digital health solution to increase adoption and engagement

Digital health solutions are on the rise, and pharma companies aspire to make digital an integral part of the patient experience. Unfortunately, this is not as simple as it sounds. The challenge lies not only in solving pain points for patients and providers alike, but also in ensuring that your target end users are aware of your digital product. This is ultimately a sales and marketing issue, and the solution lies in go-to-market strategies.

In our latest white paper, we're exploring this topic and providing a variety of strategies to support patient adoption and engagement, healthcare provider engagement and commercial team activation. What’s important isn’t to employ every strategy in the white paper—rather, we're providing numerous options from which you can choose.

To achieve the best results, zoom out and look at your go-to-market strategy as a whole. A holistic approach is your best bet for reaching your target audience.

Patient adoption and engagement

Broadly speaking, there are three ingredients for maximizing patient engagement:

1. Designing a digital solution that will meet patient needs
2. Ensuring your target audience hears about your product
3. Educating and reinforcing that your solution will benefit your target audience

There are many ways to achieve these goals. BrightInsight's Market Research, Product Strategy and Marketing teams can help you conduct the necessary research and create a customized go-to-market strategy. This will often include outreach to patient advocacy groups and working with marketing agencies on specific direct-to-patient tactics.

Get started by:

• Clearly defining patient value propositions
• Inviting patients and advocates to join the design process
• Designing with the goal of meeting specific patient needs—both known and unknown

Healthcare provider adoption and engagement

We've already established that patients are your target audience, but don't make the mistake of discounting the importance of healthcare providers. Their endorsement is invaluable when it comes to building awareness and trust with patients. Providers often introduce their patients to digital solutions and, in doing so, validate their safety and clinical effectiveness.

Kick off provider engagement by:

• Defining the healthcare provider value proposition
• Ensuring your solution checks the boxes providers expect to secure their endorsement
• Creating education-focused marketing campaigns

Commercial team activation

In order to get your digital solutions adopted by your target audience, you may need to activate your commercial team to engage with providers. This is especially important for more clinical digital solutions, or solutions that are being rapidly deployed at scale, for which provider buy-in is critical to success. While field team promotion can be costly and time consuming, it often pays off.

Start your activation by:

• Educating field teams on the value of the digital product to patients and healthcare providers
• Formalizing commercial team commitment to the training plan
• Planning for post-launch activities

Want more details? Dive deeper and unlock additional steps for adoption and engagement by reading our white paper, Go-to-Market Strategies for Patient-Facing Digital Health Solutions.