How to Engage Ideal Patients with Privacy-Safe Targeting and Drive Rx Lift

What are traditional patient audience segments?

Traditional patient audience segments include demographic data, off-the-shelf segments and behavioral/clickstream data.

Why do traditional patient audience segments fall short?

Despite being a go-to approach for many, demographic data, clickstream/behavior-based engagement and off-the-shelf segments reveal too little about patients and are not targeted enough to maximize campaign effectiveness.

The result of improper targeting is simply, nothing. An undifferentiated message that broadly reaches too many or even the wrong patients, who never actually engage with health care providers, seek treatment for their condition and commit to a line of therapy. In other words, connecting with the right audience is everything.

Why isn’t HIPAA enough?

With respect to DTC marketing efforts, there are several ways to breach HIPAA, even inadvertently. For example, if a patient completes a contact form or survey on a health website that in any way indicates a diagnosis, it must be protected as PHI.

As HIPAA was not created exclusively for targeted advertising, certain ambiguities prevail — although HIPAA certification attests if a data set is de-identified, it does not guarantee privacy within the segment itself. The most obvious example is if a condition-specific segment consists of a single person and that person receives an ad, it’s clear they have the disease.

HIPAA & Patient Privacy

• HIPAA certification attests that the entire data set is de-identified

• But a HIPAA certification does not guarantee a segment itself maintains patient privacy

• Swoop maintains its commitment to patient privacy through k-Anonymity

What is the NAI?

Founded in 2000, the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) is a self-regulating body that builds on HIPAA by going a step further, providing specific guidance for health advertising. The NAI’s Code of Conduct is regularly updated to reflect relevant technologies and developments; it was last updated in 2020 to address health data segments and sensitive conditions.

NAI requirements are stringent and include an annual review by a member of the compliance team. Opt-in consent is required for the use of Personal and Device-enabled Identifier Information (PII/DII). Furthermore, all data collected, used and retained must be transparent. If it originated from an unqualified source, it won’t pass the audit. This purposeful system built on explicit patient permission assures privacy in all advertising environments and provides direct guidance on patient audiences for targeted marketing.

What are the risks to advertisers that breach patient privacy?

Advertisers that breach patient privacy risk their reputation and may be subject to further legal penalties. No matter how superficially cheap an audience segment might be, it’s never worth the cost of jeopardizing an entire brand.

How can I ensure my patient segments are privacy-safe?

The easiest way to ensure privacy-safe patient segments is to work with an NAI accredited vendor. Swoop is the first health data technology company to become a member of the NAI.

In addition to being NAI-accredited, we are HIPAA-compliant and embed our proprietary k-anonymity process — a scientific way to de-identify patients — into every custom audience we create. A segment of one is impossible with k-anonymity, which requires data sets of at least two people — 50% is the maximum allowable audience quality (AQ) — to keep identities confidential. Although AQ cannot surpass a 50% prevalence rate, our segments typically include more than 100 to 5,000 times the number of patients found in the general population.

Patient Privacy & k-Anonymity

• k-Anonymity provides a scientific guarantee that the individuals who are subjects of the data cannot be re-identified

• To meet this standard, each person in a segment cannot be distinguished from at least k-1 individuals who also appear in the data

• This means that k must equal at least 2, which means 50% would be the maximum Audience Quality (AQ)

• The lower the prevalence the higher the k. For instance, you would want to have k=2 for a specific zip code

What kind of patients can I reach?

With custom audiences, brands can realize any ideal patient definition.

What is an example of a custom audience?

Custom DTC patient audiences are built to meet any brand-specific criteria, whether targeting rare and specialty disease patients or those with common conditions. These custom audiences can be tailored to include patients who are currently diagnosed or on a competitive treatment, for example, and factor in any lifestyle characteristics.

Custom DTC Patient Audiences / Examples

Why are targeted audiences higher value?

Higher quality audiences are more valuable because they lead to greater engagement. According to third-party measurements, Swoop’s brand exclusive privacy-safe patient segments outperform our competitors by 2-4 times and most importantly, drive higher script lift. Swoop’s AQ is 72% higher than the second-best performing partner.

Predictive Power in Action

What are the results of custom audience targeting?

Custom audiences result in a higher ROI. Though many platforms recently experienced significant audience drop off because of new privacy permissions – according to consumer tracking firm Flurry Analytics, 96% of US users opted out of Apple’s in-app sharing – Swoop’s RWD-based segments continued to be successful. In fact, one of our primary DSPs shows that from April to October 2021, the total number of unique targetable matches to our custom audience segment markedly increased.

What is a successful custom audience segment case study?

Abbott, a medical device and pharmaceutical company valued at $35 billion, turned to Swoop to overcome low awareness and understanding of a surgical treatment for mitral regurgitation (MR), a common though rarely diagnosed heart valve condition. The company combined powerful messaging with hyper-targeted audience segmentation for actionable results. Swoop’s reach included a digital relaunch, website refresh, integrated digital campaign across paid search, email to endemic, and programmatic display/native, as well as paid social. Upon seeing the multi-channel campaign, patients and their caregivers were motivated to act urgently and approach treating physicians about the procedure. By working with Swoop, Abbott gained a 13x return on marketing investment within months.

HOW CAN I TARGET AND REACH HIGH VALUE HCPS?

Health marketers can target and reach high value HCPs by understanding who they are, where they are, and what they’re engaging with. Instead of outreaching to HCPs as if they are all the same, we create custom segments based on brand definitions – the same approach we take to patient-finding. Our exclusive data-driven Affinti™ Intelligence Platform enables health marketers to determine the best channel, device and message for each HCP, and can include a specific location (hospital, clinic, office or congress) as well as any event (recent diagnosis, payer/formulary, affiliation or recent prescription) to drive script lift and increase patient lifetime value.

By uncovering HCP content consumption patterns and understanding their channel preferences, it’s possible to optimize HCP engagement, including while at the point-of-care and in the EHR. Once a campaign has been deployed, advertisers can measure their audience reach, frequency and engagement across channels and strategize to achieve better results going forward.

PROGRAMMATIC

Swoop offers a fully managed programmatic solution as well as the only DSP-agnostic offering in the market with physician level detail (PLD) reporting.

Engage HCPs through display, video and contextual native based on individual content, message and channel preferences.

Incorporate time-sensitive triggers based on diagnosis and prescribing behavior.

SOCIAL MEDIA

Apply the same ideal HCP audience used for programmatic activation to social media.

Engage verified HCPs, including key opinion leaders and influencers, on the most popular social media networks.

Activate via Social Native or directly in the platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok.

TELEVISION

The first HCP TV advertising solution scaled across addressable TV and connected TV/OTT.

Access over 1.7M verified HCP households and affiliated devices.

Apply the same audience used in digital channels for TV planning and activation to optimize reach and frequency.

EMAIL

Deliver dedicated, branded emails to providers who have an affinity for email communications.

Trigger next best action and activate providers in other preferred channels based on their engagement with emails.

POINT-OF-CARE

Target HCPs on their personal devices at point-of-care locations such as pharmacies, hospitals, clinics, urgent care, outpatient and private practice.

Better engage with no-see HCPs in their priority point-of-care locations.

Incorporate time-sensitive triggers based on diagnosis and prescribing behavior.

EHRs

Message HCPs inside of leading EHRs during the clinical workflow.

Activate the next best message in the next best channel based on EHR exposure.

Integrate into 200+ EHR systems through app modules like DxWeb and at the institution level.

CONGRESSES AND MEETINGS

Reach NPI-verified HCPs attending live medical congresses and meetings on-site and at associated hotels.

Access HCP targets who previously attended conferences including US-based medical professionals who attended meetings abroad.

CTV Campaign for Movement Disorder Therapy Results in 130 New Brand Starts and 10% Script Lift in Five Months

The CTV promotion resulted in a 10% script lift leading to an incremental 130 New to Brand (NRx) starts within five months. Nearly $900k was generated in incremental lifetime patient value for the company, which benefited from a 12:1 ROI.

1:1 Programmatic Campaign Results in 29:1 ROI and $1.6M Lifetime Patient Value in Four Months for Newly Launched Oncology Therapy

The campaign resulted in more than 500,000 impressions and greater than 2x the industry average click thru rate. This led to 8 new patient starts during the four month campaign, generating $1.6M in lifetime patient value, or a 29:1 ROI.

Elevating Script Lift for a Multiple Myeloma Drug by 21% Through HCP and DTC Activation at the Point-of-Care

Engagement led to 44 New to Brand (NRx) starts and 21% script lift within ten months of promotion. This generated more than $1M incremental lifetime patient value, which was a 4.3:1 ROI.

Targeting HCPs at the Point-of-Care Results in 19% Script Lift for COPD Drug

The targeted promotion resulted in 157 New to Brand (NRx) starts, 19% script lift, more than $500,000 in incremental lifetime patient value, and a 3.5:1 ROI within ten months.

Increasing Vaccine Brand Awareness by Targeting Competitive HCPs Drives 53% Script Lift

33,000 HCPs were served more than 225,000 impressions over the course of the 9 month campaign. During the campaign, writing behavior of the target audience was measured, showing lift of 53%, which generated an ROI of 5.7:1.