By Tomi Shobande 
The Journal of the Medical Science Liaison Society, recently posted an article sharing common challenges faced by medical affairs teams, discussed during the 9th Annual MSL Society Conference in Las Vegas. MSLs and Medical Affairs professionals participated in a panel discussion to talk about the challenges they face, and how to overcome them. A major focus of the discussion was the increasingly limited access to healthcare professionals that MSLs are facing. This creates a potentially damaging vacuum for MSLs who are losing a key channel for understanding the needs of the HCPs they serve. They have also lost track of their customers’ daily patterns of behavior – the moments in their day when they would be likely to catch them between ward rounds, or taking their mid-morning coffee break.
In another post, we will tackle the options for filling the vacuum in understanding, but here, we will show you how CREATION.co can help you to understand your customers’ daily patterns of behavior.
The number of doctors active online and their level of engagement has increased since 2019 therefore, our MSLs need to go where the doctors have gone.
A ‘Digital Day in the life’ of your HCPs around the world
CREATION.co has been tracking HCP digital behavior for more than two decades. We track the hour-by-hour, country-specific and speciality-specific trends in the digital activities of your customers. We know how these patterns change when you release data, or when experts gather together at congresses or consensus panels.
We curate over 3 million eHCP profiles and over 2 billion eHCP social media posts, to see what HCPs are doing online, throughout their day anywhere in the world. Our graphic below shows you the behavior of HCPs across specialities and across themes. Frequently, we drill into the behaviors of specific specialists, with particular topics of interest.
This diagram compares HCP digital behaviors in Australia, Europe and Asia. HCPs in Australia start their day at 8 am, engaging in conversation about disease prevention while at 9 am in Europe HCPs are exchanging opinions about current affairs or upcoming events. At 10 am, HCPs in Australia and Europe start posting original content while our Asian HCPs start much later at noon engaging with social media. Our data tells us:
- What platforms are HCPs using?
- What devices are HCPs using?
- What are HCPs talking about?
- What time are HCPs most active?
So MSLs can actually access detailed information about what their HCPs are doing at multiple phases during the day.This may shed light on their moments of availability, the topics that may be of greater relevance or good times in day to release data for higher engagement.
Taking this step to further understand the kind of content each eHCP shares (infographics, articles, videos, podcasts), can be crucial in guiding MSLs in knowing what resources will be most valuable to their customers. More on this another day!
For more information on where your HCP customer are online please get in touch or check out our webinar ‘What if HCPs Leave Twitter?‘
