The Goal Is to Read The Doctor’s Mind

Q: Last year, PLM Latina (PLM) talked about starting a project with the Amazon virtual assistant Alexa called Salud PLM. Where do you stand with this project?

A: Salud PLM is a service for the health sector. Its growth depends on the adoption of Alexa, which has not been as fast as we thought. However, the project is gradually advancing and we expect its use will explode soon. In general, we have been working to improve the digitals tools in our applications and on the web, as well as APIs for third parties. We make improvements according to the demands of our clients, who want to be able to place messages about their products in very specific places. We help them by collecting intent data. This is data that tells us what doctors do when they search for medications and prescribe them. This allows us to place product messages at the moment when the doctor is going to make the decision.

Apart from individual doctors, we are focusing on other audiences, such as hospitals, pharmacies and universities. We have over 50 digital tools. Our goal is to take the final step: the fully automated placement of a message about a product. Because the pharmaceutical industry is highly regulated, digital platforms like ours allow pharmaceuticals to reach their target groups. The main challenge is to improve our analytics by putting them together with third-party data into one mathematical model.   

Q: What is your perspective on health marketing?

A: High-level professional audiences search and find information for their decision-making process. In the journey to fulfill their inquiries, physicians, for example, investigate and respond their prescription doubts with the content provided by databases, web services and digital media. Those searches are recognized as prescription intent data, delivering real-time information on pharmaceutical market decisions. For marketing purposes, this is a fundamental element for driving campaigns, for accuracy in audience selection and effectiveness in message delivery. Just in 2019, PLM’s digital media reached over 700,000 health professionals with more than 90 million views. This amount of data, bounded by a particular content domain and specific audience, has been demonstrated the correlation between drug sales and inquiries in PLM’s services, as all searches are brand correlated.

Concretely, PLM’s intent data brings market knowledge of brand awareness, market share and, most importantly, who is the critical audience to look for to change the market share composition. Furthermore, in the patient's market, for example, PLM holds real-time intent data of organic searches on the web by millions of patients looking for a more precise understanding of their prescription. That set of intent data, for marketing purposes, is the real-time description of the pharmaceutical market distribution by the brand that allows effective and efficient marketing campaigns over the frequent use of data whispering in social media.

Q: As the infrastructure of technology expands, will company’s like pharmaceuticals develop their own software for intent data?

A: Yes, technologies such as cloud computing are very democratic and there are essentially no limits. Companies will develop their own technology. For this reason, we need to be attentive to what services can disappear and always be attentive of new innovations. What matters is creating the capacity to integrate the largest amount of information. You then need to bring this to clients in a manner in which they can see how they can benefit.

We break up the information we collect according to target groups. Generally speaking, we see that this industry, unlike others, is generally slow in adopting technology. There is a high level of regulation that is dampening the spirit of innovation and risk-taking. The transfer of technology greatly depends on the number of people who know about natural language processing. In Mexico, there are about three people who know this very well. However, this represents growth because five years ago there were none. One of the ways in which large businesses can attain a technological footprint is by acquiring smaller digital platforms. Mergers can also effectively accelerate the adoption of technology in Mexico. Ultimately, intent data is highly useful and its potential is great.

Q: What is your objective for the next year?

A: Our objective is to be better. We want to be there at the moment a doctor makes an important decision. We want to contribute to reducing erroneous choices and giving the doctor better options for prescriptions. To grow our platforms, it is important to raise awareness about the possibilities of this technology.

Our clients enjoy high returns on their investment. It took us quite a lot of time to build our services. No doubt it is going to take others time to adopt technology too. Each interaction between a health professional and PLM message read for around four minutes and the cost of communication between the PLM message and addressee health professional is between MXN$25 (US$1.28) and MXN$45 (US$2.3). Comparef to the average price of a physical visit of MXN$450 (US$23) per consult, the effectiveness of campaigns through PLM services is 10 times cheaper. Prescription intent data fuels the analytic process for designing precision campaigns for PLMs clients, excelling in higher results and generating 90 percent campaign repurchase of clients.

PLM Latina provides digital marketing services that make use of intent data. Its platforms collect large amounts of information about the decisions of health professionals that provide opportunities for real-time advertisement placement. Its main clients are pharmaceutical companies