Two decades of digital: the changing habits of pharma and HCPs

When Chris Cooper of EPG Health launched his ‘European Prescriber Guide’ software twenty years ago, he was among a select few taking digital in pharma seriously. Since then he has seen the industry slowly come to embrace every aspect of digital. He tells pharmaphorum how pharma can learn from the past to enter an innovative future.

“I always knew pharma was notoriously slow to adopt change,” Cooper says when asked about the unexpected digital changes he has seen in the industry over his career, “but I never thought 20 years ago that change would take this long in digital!”

Luckily, he says, the industry has now got to a stage where it is starting to think beyond just clicks and impressions and is treating doctors as consumers of valuable and relevant information – and there has been no better time for pharma to harness this to make their content more impactful than ever.

This is a path Cooper has been on for some time, though, and he was somewhat ahead of the curve when, in 2000, he founded the European Prescriber Guide, which aimed to give up-to-date prescribing information to HCPs via a software application.

• Read the full article in pharmaphorum's Deep Dive digital magazine