Large Pharmaceutical Company Optimizes MedEd For Better, Customized Experiences for HCPs

RESEARCH STRATEGY GROUP worked with a large pharmaceutical company to optimize their continuing medication education (CME) experience for healthcare professionals (HCPs).

Our client aspires to be the industry partner of choice in medical education by delivering engaging, relevant, and customized MedEd for customers. Our client looked to us to help them clearly understand the touch points and pain points surrounding CMEs from an HCP perspective to enable better and more customized MedEd offerings and experiences for specific segments, specialties, regions, age groups, etc.

The goal was to understand physicians’ preferences and needs, explore their motivations and factors for participation, evaluate current experiences to assess what’s working and what’s not working. We focused on understanding novel and interesting experiences and trends in the MedEd space, and had them describe “best-in-class” experiences.

We conducted a series of in-depth interviews with HCPs to understand their experience engaging in continuing medical education (CME) and assessed for the pain points, unconscious needs, and cognitive biases embedded in their experience. We spoke with respirologists, endocrinologists, cardiologists, nephrologists, rheumatologists, oncologists and radiologists stratified across Canada.

We uncovered drivers of engagement via the Fogg Behavior Model. This framework helped us understand the relationship between various drivers (motivation, ability, trigger) and identify optimal interactions for desired behavior.

Using the Fogg Behavior Model we identified a hierarchy of motivations, explained how ability guides motivation, provided insights into functional needs, level of effort and expected rewards, and provided recommendations on how to bridge the gap to online engagement

By applying a BSci lens to our research, we uncovered the subconscious cognitive biases that were shaping how HCPs perceive CME events/materials and how they made choices regarding which events/materials to engage with.

The result was a set of opportunity areas and design principles for optimizing the digital CME experience. These design principles nudged HCPs towards CME initiatives designed by our client because they accounted for the cognitive biases that shape HCPs’ decision-making.