Brace yourselves for another year of rapid evolution across the digital landscape. That’s the takeaway from talks with eight industry leaders, who see advances in artificial intelligence, personalized messaging and channel optimization shaping direct-to-consumer (DTC) communications in 2024.

Predictions about new and intensifying trends are an annual tradition, but the changes in store for 2024 look more significant than usual to experienced leaders who have seen and driven the transformation of healthcare over the past decade. In the Phreesia report, Industry voices: Trends to watch in 2024, Pallavi Garg, Head of Global Oncology Products and Pipeline Strategy at Takeda, says now is perhaps “one of the most exciting times to work in our industry.”

Indeed, Cassandra Sinclair, a senior health and wellness advertising executive and board advisor, foresees the intersection of science and personalized storytelling fundamentally changing how teams engage consumers, patients and caregivers in 2024.

Brands have the tools to deliver messages at every point in the healthcare journey, from screening through treatment. They also have the power to personalize those messages, particularly at the point of care. As Roz Silbershatz Tomás, who leads the Global Libtayo Core Brand Team at Regeneron, explains, the point of care provides more opportunities for personalization and specificity than other channels, making it a key enabler of tailored, one-to-one campaigns.

“Point of care is a critical space to give the patient precise education on their disease state, knowing that they’re sitting in the doctor’s office, potentially about to make a decision on their healthcare and treatment,” she says.

The proliferation of options and embrace of omnichannel is driving companies to look at the role of each channel “with much more scrutiny,” says Alison Tapia, Senior Director, Performance Marketing and Digital Innovation at Dermavant Sciences.

“Brands are asking more questions to understand whether their strategy is working,” Tapia says. “Some of these critical considerations include: Are we reaching the right people? Are we showing up with appropriate messaging for that channel? Is it impactful? And can we compliantly message in that channel?”

Arielle Chavkin, Group Director of Digital Partnerships at Initiative, anticipates that teams will expand their communication toolkits in greater recognition of the needs and priorities of various patient subpopulations. That awareness makes it important to “truly embrace and plan campaigns based on how the same disease can impact different communities,” Chavkin says.

Social media also can help reach specific communities, but success requires an understanding of the nuances of each platform. Juli LeDoux, Director, Marketing–Patient at ImmunoGen, uses TikTok as an example. “Elaborating on disease states relevant to younger audiences or disease states that might not be considered as highly emotional, such as neurology or dermatology, is key for reaching the largest audience” on the popular short-form video app, she says.

Longer-term trends are building beneath the fast, continual shifts in where people meet online and within the communities they are building. Those long-term trends indicate that patients are, in the words of Meredith Odell, Senior Marketing Director at AstraZeneca, “choosing to share more, learn more and to be their own advocate.”

Artificial intelligence (AI) cuts across all of these trends, and teams are assessing its potential to do more for them operationally, from reviewing content to conducting market research. Over the past year, access to AI tools has become more democratized, observes Alexandra Beneville, Vice President of Content Strategy at Phreesia, and with those tools now more widely available to teams, she foresees 2024 as the year of AI adoption and application.