Go-to-market strategies for patient-facing digital health solutions

Pharma companies have made huge strides with companion apps and other digital health products that accompany their drugs in recent years, but there’s a long way to go before the promise of digital as an integral part of the patient experience is met. For both the healthcare provider and patient audiences, the adoption and scaling of digital health remains a significant challenge.

Having the right digital solution to solve patient or provider pain points is only the beginning. For the true value of digital to be realized, it must be made available to, and utilized by, as many target users as possible.

In this white paper, we’ll offer a range of tested and trusted go-to-market strategies that can boost the likelihood of adoption and scaling of companion digital health products. We’ve broken up the strategies into three core audience areas: patients, healthcare providers and commercial activation teams.

Success in your go-to-market plan doesn’t rely on employing each and every strategy we outline in this white paper, but rather focusing on the few that are the most relevant to your drug type, your audience and your goals. Then incorporate these strategies and tactics into your broader marketing plan for the drug, rather than developing a separate GTM plan for your digital products.

Clearly define patient value propositions

It’s of the utmost importance to answer the patient question, “What’s in it for me?” Take the time to fully determine how your solution meets patients’ specific needs—it must go beyond the vague benefits of having yet another app. Your digital solution must improve disease or treatment management in meaningful ways. It must improve quality of life and be an enjoyable experience that makes patients want to keep using it.

Invite patients and advocates to join the design process

Rather than designing your digital solution in a vacuum, invite patients and advocates to help. By bringing key opinion leaders in on the ground floor, you ensure patient needs are incorporated from the very beginning. It also establishes a foundational relationship between your brand and the patient community that will be invaluable once your solution launches. We’ve seen patient advocates be crucial voices for feature prioritization in app development—their experience is priceless.

Design to meet specific patient needs—known and unknown

During the design process, take a patient-centric approach, crafting an experience that meets the needs of your specific patient population. Also, acknowledge that upfront user research doesn’t catch everything and that real-world use of the solution will uncover new patient needs and pain points. Build in a way that captures the invaluable patient data that can inform future product improvements.

Always consider accessibility and usability

When designing, keep in mind the specific challenges of your patient population. Are they older with potentially lower digital literacy? Do they have vision impairment or neurological challenges? Simply put, don’t assume smartphone fluency and keep the user interface as simple and straightforward as possible.

Make onboarding easy

Patients won’t adopt your digital solution if they can’t easily find it, understand it and start using it. Think about the current patient journey and how the solution can best help the patient progress and connect the different stakeholders with a clear value proposition and call to action. Strategies to ensure seamless onboarding include patient-facing landing pages, QR codes posted in pharmacies and doctors’ offices and availability on consumer app stores. Keep the actual onboarding process simple, with no more than two to three steps. Offer comprehensive FAQs and customer support.

Define the HCP value proposition

Nothing increases adoption more than the recommendation of a trusted healthcare provider. To earn that recommendation, design a solution that solves HCP pain points. Just as you would for a patient population, it’s important to take the time to really think through what’s in it for the healthcare provider audience. Does your solution save them time? Enhance patient/provider conversations with real-world data? Improve clinical outcomes? Some combination of both? At the very least, your solution shouldn’t increase their administrative burden.

Ensure your solution checks the boxes providers expect to secure their endorsement

As a baseline, HCPs need to know that the digital product exists. Beyond that, they need to have an understanding of what benefits the solution provides their patients, as well as any ancillary benefits to the healthcare provider. Formal evidence of the product’s benefits, like case studies or data points, can increase your odds of garnering an endorsement. You’ll also want to provide ample information about clinical safety, data security and technical support.

Create education-focused marketing campaigns

Craft campaigns that include both product education and tools to equip HCPs to share information about your digital solution with patients. Include details about any clinical support resources, such as tailored educational materials and nurse support.

Plug into key opinion leaders

The more clinically complex your digital product, the more important advocacy and word of mouth is within the clinician community. Engaging key opinion leaders as early as the design stage is paramount to success. Consider reaching out to academic medical centers, foundations and partner institutions.

Educate field teams on the value of the digital product to patients and healthcare providers

While field sales, medical and market access team members may be well equipped to talk about the merits of the drug itself, they may be less familiar with the benefits of the companion digital solution. It’s important to train your team with the basic value proposition from your product. Preparing talking points, training materials and collateral for field teams is worthwhile. They are a powerful resource and should also be able to communicate the value proposition and answer basic FAQs with different stakeholders as needed.

Formalize commercial team commitment to the training plan

At the end of the day, the field team will talk about the digital health solution if they truly understand the positive impact it can have. But there are logistical considerations too. Give your commercial team clear guidance on when they should talk about digital health solutions, and how much time it should take. Arm them with well organized and compelling talking points. Bottom line: if digital is important to leadership, it will be important to the commercial team.

Create a solid feedback loop

Whether they like it or not, your commercial team will end up fielding a wide range of questions and troubleshooting requests from patients and HCPs. Give them the backup they need by making sure a solid customer support team is in place. Commercial teams should be able to hand off complaints, tech issues and other challenges to skilled customer service representatives, freeing them up to focus on the task at hand.