During my years on the agency side, understanding segmentation for patient audiences was one of my favorite parts of planning campaigns.

We’d get personas from the brand that looked something like this. Mary, who is 35 to 54 years old, has Rheumatoid Arthritis and enjoys birdwatching. But because agencies generally don’t have access to claims data, we were unable to know more about Mary’s specific demographics or use relevant data for campaign planning. That gap in information made it difficult to plan campaigns specifically for Mary’s condition.

To fully understand patient audiences—and therefore be able to plan relevant advertising campaigns—healthcare marketers must be able to see how health claims data ties to channel behavior and demographics, such as age, gender, and geography.

To help solve the information gap problem, we launched Patient Planner. The first and only tool that unifies medical and pharmacy claims within a healthcare DSP, Patient Planner enables on-demand patient audience creation and real-time campaign planning. With unified data, healthcare marketers can explore patient populations, project addressable audiences, and forecast cross-channel reach in real time.

Because claims data is tied to addressable media in our platform, marketers can hone in on patient populations tied to specific disease states and see their age, demographic, and channel behaviors. With a greater understanding of clinically relevant patient audiences, they have total control to create smarter, faster, transparent, and privacy-safe patient audiences and campaigns.

The Winning Combination of Viewership Data and Clinical Data

Pharma companies have traditionally allocated most of their advertising dollars to linear TV, a proven channel for reaching patient audiences. However, they’re increasingly seeing the value of connected TV (CTV), which enables them to reach incremental patient audiences more cost-effectively.

Patient Planner is the first and only solution that combines automatic content recognition (ACR) viewership data and real-world clinical data. Once combined, the data is then visualized in a way that allows marketers to see:

• The incremental percentage of patients they can reach on CTV
• The overlap between CTV and linear TV
• What they are missing by just running linear TV

This helps TV and CTV teams to improve their investment decisions and find the optimal budget split across both.

Maximize Patient Audiences with Real-Time Planning and Forecasting

Agencies rely on third-party data partners to understand the size of their modeled audiences. With Patient Planner, you can now project and onboard third-party audiences in order to forecast in real time.

Let’s say you’re planning a campaign to raise awareness for a migraine treatment. Of the 200 million patients in our platform, we can see that a little over 3 million have been diagnosed in the past year. Utilizing the patient criteria, you can create a Patient Modeled Audience within the platform.

In addition, Patient Planner will allow you to understand the audience overlap of all first- and third-party audiences. This will provide insight into how many unique patients you can potentially reach and how many are addressable. Ultimately, you can understand the best combination of audiences based on unique reach and efficiency.

By forecasting clinically relevant audiences, healthcare marketers can answer questions such as:

• What channels and inventory mix will maximize reach?
• How much do I need to spend to achieve my goals?
• How can I make my plan more efficient?

Patient Planner is in beta testing with leading agencies, including Havas Media Group, Klick Health, Fingerpaint, and Matterkind. It is now available to all advertisers for immediate use. Click here to learn more.