CREATION.co

Webinar: The beginner’s guide to DOLs

An Introduction to Digital Opinion Leaders

Wednesday 22 April 2026

3:00pm GMT (London)

10:00 am EDT (New York)
04:00 pm CEST (Paris)

Daniel Ghinn Founder & CEO

Influential online healthcare professionals (HCPs) have changed the world of healthcare engagement. When a physician is trusted online, they can have a significant impact on the online perceptions of health stakeholders, medical practice, and ultimately on health outcomes across the globe.

Deciding how to identify, profile and engage Digital Opinion Leaders (DOLs) is a process as unique as your own goals. To avoid disappointment it is important to start by considering what you really want to achieve and how DOLs could support your objectives.

CREATION.co has tracked HCP digital behaviour for more than two decades. Based on the online behaviours of healthcare professionals, specific to your country and specialities of interest, we have discovered indicators to identify and compare DOLs, including unique metrics showing digital peer-to-peer trust and engagement.

This beginner’s guide to DOLs webinar will help you understand how a HCP Digital Opinion Leader is identified and inspire you with ways in which you can learn from and connect with them. You will discover:

  • What is a Digital Opinion Leader and why engaging them is important.
  • How DOLs compare to other influencers in healthcare.
  • The similarities and differences to running a DOL vs KOL campaign.
  • The right metrics to create your HCP DOL selection criteria.
  • Examples of HCP Digital Opinion Leaders.
  • How to best engage your DOLs: Examples of great DOL activation.
  • Overcoming common challenges faced by leaders implementing DOL strategies.

This webinar is useful for pharmaceutical leaders who are new to the concept of a Digital Opinion Leader, who have not yet piloted a DOL study, are struggling to identify the right DOLs or want to take action to activate DOLs.

If you have already worked on Digital Opinion Leader identification projects and are looking to engage and activate your DOLs, we have articles, white papers and webinars that look deeper into this topic.

Register here

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DOL Finder FAQs: Digital Opinion Leaders Working with CREATION.co

Each HCP is given a global rank based on their overall impact within the therapy area. This is a factor of their peer trust, their social reach, their overall volume of posts and their treatment interest. The HCP list can also be sorted by any of these factors.

Yes! While the standard implementation of DOL Finder comes with aggregated data, we have an optional verbatims bolt-on available for an additional fee.

Our Enterprise implementations of DOL Finder include unlimited custom integrations with third party platforms. Tell us about your needs and we’ll scope an integrated solution.

DOL Finder has fixed annual subscription fees. Review our DOL Finder price sheet for more information.

Brandwatch is an excellent platform for listening to the public social media voice.  DOL Finder uses our unique data source, CREATION Pinpoint, to isolate the voice of HCPs specifically so you can better understand the online HCP community. 

Veeva Link Key People is a great platform built for identifying Key Opinion Leaders and includes rich data on traditional offline metrics such as academic publications. While Veeva Link Key People does include links to social media content, DOL Finder is created with a digital-first approach, meaning we focus on all HCPs who are part of the online social media community. 

To learn more about how DOL Finder compares to traditional KOL mapping tools such as Veeva Links Key People or IQVIA Expert Ecosystem, read our article, Veeva Link Key People, IQVIA Expert Ecosystem or CREATION DOL Finder: which DOL insights platform to choose?

A standard license includes up to 40 seats, allowing access to DOL Finder for your wider team. If more seats are needed, there is a low fee per additional user.

Yes! The standard DOL Finder implementation comes with one year of rolling data. Additional data is available as an optional add-on feature. Please talk with us about your needs.  

 

We measure peer trust by analysing the interactions of an HCP with other HCPs within the conversation about a particular therapy area. For example, in the online HCP breast cancer conversation, if an HCP has been referenced (or mentioned) extensively by other HCPs and their own posts about breast cancer are often cited (or re-posted) by other HCPs, then we would score them high for peer trust.

Peer trust is an important component of an HCP’s overall online impact, and is a unique metric to CREATION.co, thanks to CREATION Pinpoint®, our global database of HCP social media profiles.