Support Tools for HCPs: Building Trust Beyond the Brand
Written by: Barnaby Portsmouth
When you meet healthcare professionals where they are, offering tools that address their immediate challenges, you create authentic engagement, build trust, and foster long-term loyalty that no product-focused campaign can match.
In Pharma marketing, it’s easy to lose sight of what really matters to HPCs. While the goal may be to showcase your product, the real opportunity lies in creating support tools that make a genuine difference in daily practice and position your brand as a supportive partner rather than a ‘pushy’ seller.
Support Tools can take many forms, from apps that help HCPs explain conditions or treatments to dosing calculators, guideline checklists, and treatment algorithms. What unites them is a shared focus on tackling HCP pain points and improving the patient experience.
Why a support tool can have more impact than digital content
When medical students are training, they don’t just study theory; they gain valuable, hands-on experience through practice and education using dummies and cadavers to build contextual experience that will support them in the clinic. Later, their lectures are complemented by clinical attachments to give them real-world patient experience.
In Pharma, we tend to focus on only sharing the information that we believe is most important; the science of our products and supporting data. But this is a bit like training doctors only through textbooks: it conveys knowledge but misses the wider context of the day-to-day challenges they face in practice.
We need to offer HCPs opportunities to discover information on their own terms by using ‘learn by play’ experiences, and this can be achieved through ‘Support Tools’ that mirror how they are trained.
Providing decision-making support tools is especially important when we expect HCPs to navigate:
- Complex clinical guidelines with many pages of criteria
- Intricate treatment pathways with multiple steps spanning weeks, months and sometimes years
- New and innovative therapies such as Cell and Gene therapies, where guidelines are unfamiliar and require the HCP to review additional fragmented information from multiple sources
If we, as Pharma Marketers, provide HCPs with ‘Support Tools’ that simplify complexity, allow exploration at their own pace, and that can even be applied to real clinical cases, there’s an opportunity to turn education into action.
Examples of a successful Support Tools that have been used for ‘beyond-the-brand’ marketing.
GSK: COPD Assessment Test
A standout example comes from GSK and their COPD Assessment Test (CAT). Launched in 2009 with the Global Initiative for Chronic Obstructive Lung Disease (GOLD) and the COPD Foundation, this interactive questionnaire asks patients about their wellbeing and daily life to help healthcare professionals improve the management of their COPD and obtain the greatest benefit from treatment.
The real value lies in its use:
- Patients can complete it themselves, print it, and bring it to their HCP.
- HCPs can use the answers and test score to guide treatment decisions and improve patient outcomes.
Hemocraft by Pfizer and the Entrepreneurial Game Studio at Drexel University:
Designed as a game for younger individuals with haemophilia, Hemocraft helps patients learn the importance of integrating treatment into their daily routine. The combination of education and fun makes adherence feel less like a burden and more like an empowering habit.
Vertex CF Source:
This tool makes it simple to recommend a CFTR modulator based on a patient’s genotype. By removing complexity from genetic matching, it saves time and supports precision prescribing.
These examples highlight how ‘Support Tools’ can provide immediate value for HCPs and their patients, contribute to a brand experience that is customer-first and committed to improving the lives of their customers and patients, and create opportunities for commercial value by offering insights into an HCPs priority, or offering value in exchange for lead-generation information.
Cell and Gene Therapy Evolution Creates More Opportunity for pharma to demonstrate their commitment to clinical support.
With today’s Cell and Gene therapies, treatment journeys can stretch over weeks, months, or even years. The process also requires logistical complications for cell preparation and delivery. For HCPs, this makes planning a major challenge; whether it’s anticipating bed capacity or aligning treatment with a patient’s daily life.
The companies providing these therapies have an opportunity to provide a service to keep their customers and patients informed and confident, helping them to overcome the hurdles that may impact the experience and quality of the treatment.
Imagine a clinical planning tool for a gene therapy that:
- Takes input directly from patients on preferred treatment start dates.
- Incorporates manufacturing and product SPC data.
- Calculates a timeline that visualizes what a patient’s journey could look like
- Offers education and deeper clinical information on each step of the journey to help build HCP’s confidence and for them to anticipate bed capacity.
- Reduces uncertainty for patients by mapping their treatment journey and empowering them to play an active role in decisions about their care.
As a former in-house pharma marketer, I’ve developed support tools for rare diseases and seen first-hand the difference these tools can make.
If you put yourself in the shoes of a healthcare professional, which marketing or representative are you more likely to engage with; the one who offers you this tool to support your planning for gene therapy, or one that offers to talk to you about their product?
Research by DT Consulting shows that 35% of prescribing decision-making is influenced by customer’s experience of brand interactions. So, incorporating Support Tools into your content and campaign can give you a significant competitive edge.
The Lasting Impact of Support Tools
The benefits of ‘Support Tools’ extend far beyond single interactions. HCPs will bookmark them for repeated use and revisit your website to access them. We know that HCPs do not value pharma websites as much as we’d like them to, but if we can offer tangible benefits each visit, perhaps we can move the needle. They can also be showcased at congresses to attract audiences to your activity, and showcase your brand as committed to tangible clinical support.
In this way, ‘Support Tools’ are not just add-ons to your campaign, but a sustainable strategy for differentiation, brand loyalty, and a means to position your brand as a trusted partner to HCPs
How can I create a Clinical Tool?
Before you jump into development of a tool like this, you need to understand what problem you are trying to solve. Getting authentic insights about your audience, outside of the context of your product here is important.
Once you’ve understood the problem you want to solve, you need to determine the goal of the tool; not only for the customer but for yourself. How will it support your customer goals, and what value does it offer your business? For example, consent/insight capture, and/or direct education around a topic that’s important for adoption of your brand.
Once you’ve achieved this, you’ll need to look for a partner to help you build this tool.
At Brandcast Health, we’ve got experience designing, developing and delivering tools like this, and ensuring they fit seamlessly into your marketing workflow and customer journey objectives. So please get in touch if you have ideas you’d like us to help develop.
Become a better healthcare marketer. Sign up for 2 emails a month with insights, tips and resources.
