AI and the patient journey
Though much of the focus of AI in pharma has been on how it can impact drug discovery, it is important that the industry remembers it can have an equally profound impact on the patient journey – from a person’s first worries about a disease, to their diagnosis, treatment and all interactions with the healthcare systems and HCPs. AI’s benefits to patients can occur at multiple points across the health ecosystem, and therefore represent enormous potential to pharma marketers, from search-engine optimisation, to sales-force CRM systems; from forum bots to connect patients with relevant treatment threads, to cross-referencing de-identified patient record data to better diagnose and recommend treatment plans. In this brief video, produced by Intouch Solutions and the Digital Health Coalition (DHC), we follow the story of Barb, who is worried about diabetes, and how she moves from initial awareness and education to diagnosis, treatment and adherence. She demonstrates how AI can help her make doctors’ appointments through scheduling tools, uses a smart assistant like Alexa to get information about a condition, tracks her insulin injections, and gets basic questions answered via an AI-powered chatbot. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpPqZKDCzzg It’s important to remember that this is not the future but the present. These technologies are already affecting patients like Barb every day, improving existing technologies like search and chatbots, and offering new services to help patients, caregivers, and healthcare professionals. Other potential benefits of AI include:
- Awareness and ad targeting to match a patient’s healthcare concerns with a possible solution
- Giving reps the tools they need to supply doctors’ information needs
- Refining diagnosis and treatment options
- Treatment selection
- Brand selection and access
- Switching and adherence
- Relevant ads and helpful social media posts based on where in his or her journey a patient is
For more on this video and the current state of AI in pharma and its impact on the patient, check out Intouch’s full ebook: ‘Modern Marketing: Pharma's Data-Powered AI Revolution’, which looks at how products, teams, plans, strategies, tactics, and results are all changing as a result of artificial intelligence.
