The way we consume and engage with content is changing all the time. From smart devices to social media and many platforms in between, marketers truly have to be across multiple channels in order to devise and execute campaigns effectively.
For Chris Paquette, Founder and CEO of DeepIntent, fragmentation of the landscape represents the greatest issue facing the pharma marketing sector today. This is evident in several areas, especially the different consumption platforms and how this is impacting the presentation of health data, which Chris describes as often messy and not cohesive.
During this interview, Chris explores the issue of overcoming fragmentation, touching on topics such as tokenization, AI-powered analytics and, ultimately, how the better handling and use of data is enabling enhanced communications between providers and patients.
“We know that patients are really in need of having informative, relevant information at the times that they need it,” he tells us. “It’s imperative that pharma marketers think about their role in the context of how we can help deliver a better healthcare system by educating our patients and providers.”
Chris also introduces some real-world examples from his company’s new platform, Copilot. By embedding AI into the holistic campaign process, the solution is enabling marketers to make better sense of the mountains of data sat in front of them.
Michelle Benz:
Hi, my name's Michelle Benz, content director at Fierce Pharma. Today I'm joined by Chris Paquette of DeepIntent.
Chris Paquette:
Thank you so much for having me.
Michelle Benz:
Before we begin, would you like to tell me a little bit about yourself and your role?
Chris Paquette:
Sure. I'm the founder and CEO of DeepIntent. We're a healthcare DSP. We work with primarily, pharma and we do a lot of work with a few majority agency holding companies, really working on the full continuum of all the different needs that a marketer has. So whether it's campaign planning, campaign activation, measurements, and optimization, we have solutions for the whole gamut.
Michelle Benz:
What are the most exciting opportunities for enablement in pharma marketing today?
Chris Paquette:
I love the idea of connecting data and bringing data to the front of how we're powering strategies to better communicate with patients and providers. We know that patients are really in need of having informative, relevant information at the times that they need it. They're increasingly turning to their digital devices to find information about how they can treat their disease, even just learning about diseases, treatments, and cures. So it's really imperative that pharma marketers think about their role in the context of how we can help deliver a better healthcare system by educating our patients and providers. So bringing data to that discussion and then enabling it through technologies and solutions that we provide and other folks like us in the industry provide becomes really important to how we actually can connect with patients and ultimately help drive better outcomes.
Michelle Benz:
In what ways are digital capabilities enabling pharma companies to impact and personalize their customer experience?
Chris Paquette:
So what we saw with the HEP, with personalized and non-personalized promotion, was the ability to really have an informed conversation with that provider, with all the information that we know about the healthcare provider. What types of patients that they see, what types of drugs they typically prescribe? In general, what's the work and life balance that that provider has? What do they do in their free time? It allows us to really understand who that provider is to help inform and empower them to make better decisions and match make information that's custom and relevant for their patient population.I think what's exciting is that we're starting to see those same opportunities occur for the patient. The way that we're bringing data now, connecting and really helping to find the opportunities to connect the right message with the right patient at the right time, that golden holy grail, if you will, of being able to deliver personalized messaging, is now becoming more possible with things like artificial intelligence and data machine learning. So that's my background. That's how I've been. That's how I got started, just in the industry itself, and really bridging the connection between media and health data to help inform those conversations and better personalize the way that we engage.
Michelle Benz:
Given the pharma industry's regulations, how can healthcare marketers deploy more relevant content?
Chris Paquette:
So there's a couple of technologies that we use to help bridge that connection between health data and media. So the first one is tokenization, which basically strips PHI out of really rich data sets butt still allows us to find patterns and trends in that data. In other words, making it useful for how we connect, there's things like automated expert determination processes. People know that as HIPAA certifications, where basically it allows us to ensure that there's no risk of re-identification of individual patients. We look at health records. What that does is allows us to ask questions that interrogate data sets in ways that we can dynamically, more quickly, and proactively figure out what is actually happening with that patient's life and then how can we better support that patient's needs.
The last one is just the advent of clean rooms. Really, we're seeing that now become front, mostly center to how we actually build our solutions going forward, where we have a unified health data set that sits in the middle of all the different solutions and point solutions that has feedback loops that helps inform using the same dataset, the same unified representation of that patient. We now can help ask questions about planning, like, "How do I reach those patients and their providers most efficiently in terms of activation? How do I actually... What channels and partners should I use to reach them most effectively?" And then even just basic content information, like, what are the pieces of information that these patients and providers need to give them more context and better support their healthcare journey? So it's all about the data. It's about putting a center first and foremost, and the tools that I just mentioned that help us unlock that value for our clients, but also for the patients as well.
Michelle Benz:
What are the pitfalls of fragmentation?
Chris Paquette:
So fragmentation is the biggest problem that we face in our industry today. There's three ways, three main areas, I see that happening. The first one is in the health data itself. So every day, our healthcare system figures about 137 terabytes of data. That data is very messy. It's not well organized, it's not strung together, it's not cohesive. So to actually unlock the value in that information takes a lot of work at a time. To turn what's often unstructured data that is well labeled, categorized, and cataloged to actually build a holistic longitudinal view of that patient takes a lot of work, and really no one has the complete picture. So that fragmentation of health data is the first point where we see that problem.
The second point is identity itself. In the media space, a lot of publishers, platforms, walled gardens, don't like to share identity for obvious commercial reasons and privacy reasons as well. But what we're seeing now is there's some trends are helping to bring that together, bring and stitch these common identifiers, which has been great. I can talk more about that later. The last piece is just fragmentation is a way that we as consumers engage with media itself. So if you're on CNN, or, let's say, you're reading a CNN health article or engaging with that content, you can see the article on Facebook. You can see it through your social feeds, news feeds. You can access the same content through video, through Roku, your Roku Stick, Chrome Stick, your Apple Watch.
The different native modalities that patients are engaging and consumers are generally are engaging with content has become more and more fragments and more complex. So that really requires marketers to have a different set of increasingly different set of tools in order to activate those campaigns. So there's a lot of... When you put those three things together to actually build a campaign and build an engagement strategy that can really find the right patients at the right time in the right moments, it's increasingly harder to do. So you need to work with a technology solution provider who can help bridge those gaps.
Michelle Benz:
What is an intelligent DSP?
Chris Paquette:
So we recently launched, actually today here at DPE, a product called Copilot. What Copilot does is it brings... Actually embeds AI into the holistic campaign process. So from start to finish, how do we actually sift through the 137 terabytes of data per day that I mentioned to you before? How do we find a signal within that noise? There's a lot of data. How does a marketer reasonably supposed to make sense of that? So that's where we use AI. We deploy that, which helps answer the questions I initially proposed about the planning, how do I reach my patients, and how do I find the providers that are going to work best for my campaign goals. So Copilot itself is a form of connected intelligence. It's a form of an intelligent DSP. It allows basically a sidekick, if you will, which is your AI copilot, using an airplane analogy. Basically, that becomes the guiding part of the guide rails, so that if you need help immediate insights to get better performance or better scale your reach, your copilot is going to be there to help you make those decisions and surface actual insights too.
Michelle Benz:
How does connected data help improve patient outcomes?
Chris Paquette:
So at the end of the day, everything we do is about helping to improve patient outcomes. How do you know whether you're actually driving those outcomes? You need data, you need facts, and you need information that helps, and you have to be able to connect that back to your campaign. So the ability to connect data throughout the longitudinal journey of your campaign, but also the patient's journey as well, becomes of paramount importance. You have to have that data right front and center in order to reference how well your systems are working, how your AI is able to obviously identify new trends. But at the end of it, you need to have... Everybody knows that AI and any sort of analytics requires a lot of data. So having connected data allows us to bridge all those data together and then fuel things like modern AI and other solutions that help us connect with those patients and providers more meaningfully.
Michelle Benz:
What is an example of AI's ability to improve healthcare marketing?
Chris Paquette:
So a good example, we had a campaign that was running on our platform using Copilot, and our AI was able to detect that, for this specific campaign, Hispanic Spanish-speaking audiences were performing 30% better than the campaign baseline. Being able to connect all that data, going back to the question about connected data, we're able to identify that and then provide an actionable recommendation to the marketer to shift budget and actually invest more in Hispanic language audiences and publishers like Univision. So that's a good example, in my opinion, of the types of deep insights you could get and then ultimately make them actionable so that we can change the behavior of how we're actually marketing to those patients.
Michelle Benz:
Thank you so much for taking the time, Chris. I really appreciate hearing your insights.
Chris Paquette:
It's my pleasure. Happy to do it anytime.