Harnessing the Power of the EHR to Drive New Patient Starts

Second in a three-part series on maximizing the strategic value of EHR messaging campaigns.

Your medication’s brand and marketing teams are fully aligned and have a strong plan, but concrete reasons exist for a prescriber to not think of or choose your brand in the moment. Maybe they’re struggling with diagnosing the patient? Perhaps a long-standing therapy is simply their default first prescription? Or, what if they’re concerned your brand will be expensive, opening administrative burden for both the patient and their office? You can hit these potential roadblocks head on. Aim your messaging campaigns to conquer real pain points and prove that your strategies are increasing market share.

When Brand Awareness Meets Its Limits

Every pharma company invests heavily to build awareness. Sales reps, journals, conferences, television, digital campaigns and peer-to-peer education all play an important role in introducing prescribers to new therapies and building confidence in the clinical data. Those investments remain essential.

But prescribers make treatment decisions in the middle of busy clinic days, often seeing dozens of patients while balancing clinical guidelines, payer requirements and limited time. They develop preferences for therapies they know well and therapies that have worked. A prescriber who read about a new treatment over the weekend doesn’t necessarily have it top of mind when they are seeing their fifth patient of the day on a Tuesday afternoon. So the question isn't whether your brand made an impression; it's whether it surfaced in the prescriber’s mind at the exact moment it was needed.

That's where patient identification changes the equation. The EHR reliably houses the rich data you need: patient demographics, family history, vital signs, diagnosis, medication history, lab values—the list goes on. Leveraging that data, you can help HCPs identify patients who may be suffering from an undiagnosed disease. For patients who are already diagnosed, you can ensure that your brand surfaces to the HCP at the exact moment they are making a treatment decision. These messages surpass reach and frequency because they are contextual, behavior-based, and action-oriented. 

Sophisticated point-of-care campaigns can approach patient identification in many ways, depending on the therapy, disease state and patient population.  This is a critical bottom-of-the-funnel opportunity where marketing planning can culminate in measurable results. 

Three Real-World Examples

Technology itself isn't the differentiator, as most vendors have similar capabilities. What separates a high-performing program is how a partner designs trigger events and uses contextual data to surface what's already in the record.

Take metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis (MASH), a progressive liver disease. For years, there were few meaningful treatment options, so identifying patients wasn't always a clinical priority. As new therapies have emerged, that’s changed. A high-performing campaign embeds clinical scoring tools inside the EHR to help identify patients who warrant additional evaluation based on medical record information, making it easier to recognize candidates for therapy before the disease progresses.

The same concept applies in more familiar disease states. Consider a patient with type 2 diabetes who is already taking two oral medications, yet whose most recent A1C remains elevated. The prescriber has everything needed to recognize that the current regimen isn't adequately controlling the disease, but connecting those pieces of data in real time isn't always easy. An EHR campaign designed to look at the full set of rich data for a patient will surface that signal right inside the prescriber’s clinical workflow, so they don't have to identify those data patterns manually during a busy day of patient visits.

The same idea applies in rare diseases, where diagnosis can take years. No single symptom may point to the underlying condition, but fatigue, tingling and other seemingly unrelated findings can begin to tell a different story when viewed together. Well-designed EHR campaigns can help bring those signals together, giving prescribers an opportunity to ask additional questions, order appropriate testing and potentially shorten the path to therapy. 

When a Campaign Becomes Clinical Decision Support

Campaign opportunities that stay in prescriber workflow deserve a much larger role in commercial planning. Prescribers have no shortage of digital resources across the internet, from clinical calculators to AI-powered search tools to brand educational sites. But every time a prescriber has to leave the workflow to find that information, you're adding another step.

This shift also changes how brands should think about targeting. Commercial planning often begins with a familiar question: Which prescribers should we reach? That's still important, but it's only part of the strategy. An equally important question is: Which patients are the best candidates for this therapy?

Therapeutic categories are becoming more competitive, so that question becomes increasingly valuable. In COPD, for example, prescribers have multiple treatment options available today, with additional therapies on the horizon. Success will come from helping prescribers determine which therapy fits the specific patient in front of them.

Ultimately, driving new patient starts isn't about reaching more prescribers. It's about helping the right prescriber recognize the right patient at the right moment. When EHR campaigns are built this way, they stop functioning like a media channel and start functioning like a clinical decision support tool – one that helps translate immense brand investment into a prescription.

The final article in this series picks up where a written prescription leaves off. That gap between what gets prescribed, which patients start therapy, and how patients stay on therapy is larger than most brands realize, and the EHR has a meaningful role there too.

Questions Your EHR Partner Should Be Able to Answer

If you're evaluating a point-of-care EHR program for new patient starts, push past reach and frequency metrics. Ask:

• What patient-level data points will trigger our messaging, and how are those triggers defined?
  

• Can our campaign distinguish between a patient who is newly diagnosed and one who has been on therapy for two years?
  

• How does your platform handle disease states where diagnosis itself is the barrier, not just prescribing?
  

• Can messaging respond to real-time clinical signals, like a lab value or a change in medication history, rather than just prescriber specialty?
  

• What does the workflow experience look like for the prescriber? Are they required to leave the EHR to act on the information?

If the answers stay at the level of impressions and reach, the program is being designed like a media buy. The EHR can do considerably more.