In just the past handful of years, the Point of Care (POC) options available for messaging have undergone dramatic expansion. Where once POC meant patient messaging at the pharmacy or specialized magazines distributed to doctor office waiting rooms, we now have choices that offer an array of patient and healthcare provider (HCP) media solutions. New companies offer messaging services through in-office displays, Electronic Health Records (EHR), patient registration tablets, telemedicine, place-based apps, wearables and more.

With so many compelling choices to consider, the importance of creating a plan to execute, measure, and optimize programs delivered through these companies is critical. While goals may differ brand to brand, there are three strategies that can help you get the most from POC programs.

1. Data driven insights are used to craft a complementary combination of relevant messages delivered to the right audience at the right place and time. For example, while messaging according to decile-based HCP target lists remains a staple consideration, it’s important to think about additional segmentation criteria made possible through the use of anonymous-patient data. The ability to select doctors according to their patients’ access to your brand, adherence, pattern of adoption, and more, allows us to consider a variety targeting criteria to help ensure campaign effectiveness.Staying with the HCP as our target example, a network of POC partners must be selected so that the combination of partners brings the desired reach across the targeted HCP offices. Such a network can be comprised of a single POC vendor type, like a group of in-office-display partners. Or it might make sense to knit together a variety of POC partners to include vendors that provide EHR messaging plus in-office display companies. The resulting plan can touch patients in the waiting room with a complementary message to the HCP through the EHR platform.

2. True patient outcomes are used to understand what works best for each program and message type. Each POC media partner and message type represents a measurable tactic. It’s vital that the same data source and business rules are used for all measurement across a campaign so that each message and tactic can be evaluated in relation to the other. Staying with the example above, each patient response is aggregated to their targeted doctor and the relative impact of each POC media partner can be ranked. It’s important to employ anonymous patient data to ensure that a clear signal of behavior change is captured. Depending on the objective of the campaign, key performance indicators (KPIs) such as changes in new patient brand starts, adherence, or other metrics may be used to determine program effectiveness.

3. Incremental results versus a control group need to be consistently monitored to optimize spend according to what’s working best. If new patient brand starts are the KPI of interest, then each new patient can be tied to the cost of acquisition through the POC tactic(s) that drove the outcome. POC media partners and tactics can be adjusted during the campaign in order to optimize spend where the tactics are having the greatest effect in driving new patient brand starts.

Of course, each campaign is different. Innovations in place-based messaging and other complimentary capabilities will continue to help POC programs bring new opportunities to drive HCP and patient behavior and improve overall outcomes.

These considerations represent an approach to optimization, and while there are other viable methods, media analytics are a fast evolving science. The explosion of available data in recent months makes it possible to apply cross channel targeting and optimization to all media channels (POC, digital, television, print) at the patient and HCP level. Today, we have more ways to assess our work and, most importantly, to use the findings to develop more effective messages and delivery channels that help HCPs, as well as improve direct-to-patient outcomes.

Two of Dave Nussbaum’s Publicis Health Media colleagues, Matt McNally & Sharon Patent, will delve further into this topic during their session on leveraging big data, only at the 2015 PEPP National Conference. Their discussion will teach you to know how, when, and where to engage with patients and HCPs. Don’t miss out – 2015 PEPP National Conference, held Nov 5-6 at the Ritz Carlton in Philadelphia. Register today!