Richard Meyer Marketing to health care professionals

Only 34% of physicians feel that pharma websites are trustworthy

KEY TAKEAWAY: A survey by the Decision Resource Group reveals that only 34% of physicians feel that pharmaceutical websites are trustworthy. Even fewer (barely a quarter of the 2,784 doctors surveyed) see pharma websites as credible sources for professional information.

This should alarm every HCP pharma marketer; 86% of physicians use their smartphones to access digital resources for professional purposes, but 41% of them don’t visit pharma websites more often because it takes too much time to find the information they need.

According to KRC Research:

  1. Physicians consider a wide range of factors when making prescribing decisions. By far, they make decisions based on their clinical knowledge, experience, and each patient’s unique situation.
  2. To stay informed about medicines, physicians review and integrate information from many sources—particularly Continuing Medical Education courses and articles in peer-reviewed medical journals.
  3. Most physicians recognize and value contributions made by pharmaceutical and biotech companies, but they do not use this information in isolation. Most find information from these sources up-to-date, useful, and reliable.

In addition a lot of physicians are angry that pharma companies don’t give them access to all the clinical data on their drugs or share the information with other drug companies. “I just don’t have the time to scour the web to search for clinical data and when a drug company is not sharing that data it makes me feel they are hiding something” a physician said in recent research.

So where do physicians go for medical information? The number one website is still Medscape but Doximity is also finding an audience. Doximity is the largest professional medical network for U.S. healthcare professionals, with more than 70% of US doctors and 45% of all NPs and physician assistants as members.

What’s most important in selecting a platform to reach doctors? Measurement beyond numbers. You need to know how many HCP’s really read or viewed your material not just how many clicked on an integrated part of the site.

Any partner you you deal with should be able to give you a complete dashboard that tells if you if HCP’s are both reading your message and what they are doing after reading or viewing your message.