Navigating Personalization in Regulated Environments

Personalization is a powerful tool for companies who want to improve customer experience, engagement, and loyalty. For pharmaceutical companies, personalization can provide significant value to healthcare providers (HCPs) and patients -most often with lifestyle and chronic disease products where a long-term relationship between patient and brand is crucial.

But in the pharmaceutical industry, there are particular challenges in developing a personalization strategy given the fine line between privacy and personalization. How do you know how much data is too much to collect and tailor a patient’s experience? What do HIPAA and other privacy laws allow for ethically storing patient health data?

At Think Company, we regularly work with pharmaceutical companies that face these challenges. While the solutions may initially seem obvious to people new to this industry, our experience has taught us that there are many considerations when balancing personalization and privacy in the healthcare industry. These challenges require an expert’s touch.

We’ll share some of our best practices here, discussing how pharmaceutical brands can provide the personalized experiences that users expect while working within the constraints of a highly-regulated industry.

Best practices for personalization in healthcare

Content tagging

For many healthcare brands, content comes from multiple sources. For a single brand or product, different teams may create content intended for the patient population and healthcare providers. There may also be a variety of teams ranging from brand marketers and data scientists to medical affairs directors, generating a range of content, including product overviews, real-world evidence models, and clinical data outcome reports. With content being produced across disciplines and departments, keeping a cohesive content strategy and helping users find the information they need can be complex.

Consistent content tagging is a great way to help with this. By tagging your content internally, you can more easily group relevant content and appropriate audiences and make it easier for users to search on your site.

On the legal side of things, tagging makes it easy for compliance folks and legal reviewers to see precisely what will appear if a user does a specific search. This ability is crucial for reducing unintentional claims and related legal issues.

Mastering search

As mentioned above, if your content isn’t tagged correctly, it will be complicated to have an effective search. But there are other issues inherent in search, specific to healthcare companies.

While many teams and less-experienced consultancies would want to implement an algorithmic search (the best-in-class and most common search option), this is a significant issue if you’re in healthcare. Even “fuzzy search” (when content is suggested after an exact match isn’t found for phrases or sentences in a database) can be a compliance minefield.

Because of the regulatory requirements surrounding claims and adverse events, healthcare and pharmaceutical companies must work closely with their legal teams to ensure that searchers are getting the information they need-while the company remains compliant with FDA laws.

Role-based access

In conjunction with tagging, on portal or login-based websites, you can use role-based access to govern the display of secure content and ensure that content is only viewed by certain audiences. Maybe you have secure economic impact data that may only be relevant to formulary decision makers, or mechanism of action overviews that should only be seen by health care providers.

If those business-to-business customers are already logging-in to a digital portal, you can use a combination of tagging and role-based access permissioning to provide a curated and compliant content experience for those customers.

Sophisticated chat experiences

In healthcare, building and developing an ongoing relationship with the patient or HCP is crucial. Chatbots are an easy frontline way to quickly and efficiently meet the customer where they are. But even better, a chatbot can be a practical way to connect that person to someone at the organization who can field their question or request.

Getting people in touch with a human as quickly as possible also helps meet requirements for reporting adverse events, where understanding the true nature of the issue and reporting adverse events on time is crucial.

First-party data

There’s a fine line in personalization. Too much customized information can seem creepy and, ironically, impersonal. But finding the right balance helps to deepen trust with your users and nurture your relationship with them.

By utilizing first-party data, people feel a sense of control about how much information they’re sharing with you-and in regulated environments like healthcare, first-party data helps to sidestep some of the issues that can come with data collection.

Empowering your field-facing team with the right tools and systems (like ) to understand customer data allows them to leverage that information to deliver relevant content in the future. (Better than scribbles on a sales rep’s legal pad, right?) This centralization of first-party data makes it easier for anyone in an organization to uphold a continued level of service and stay within the legal requirements surrounding data collection.

Personalization in regulated environments

If your organization wants to improve customer experience, engagement, and loyalty, personalization can be a powerful tool. But the specific challenges of working in a regulated environment like healthcare can discourage many companies from making personalization efforts. There are legal issues to contend with, and any customer can feel uncomfortable if a company seems to know too much about them.

In our experience working with pharmaceutical companies that face these challenges, there are several solutions. Content tagging, search optimization, and first-party data are just some of the ways we work with teams in regulated industries to provide personalized experiences while still protecting user privacy.

Is your organization looking to improve personalization for their digital products? Chat with our team of experts today!

Originally published at https://www.thinkcompany.com on November 28, 2022.