Next Best Action: The Smarter Path to HCP Engagement

Pharmaceutical marketers face a critical challenge: HCP access has plummeted to just 45%, down from 60% 18 months ago. Among those still accessible, half restrict engagement to three or fewer companies. The instinctive response? Cast a wider net, increase outreach volume, and hope something connects.

Next Best Action (NBA) takes the opposite approach—engaging smarter, not broader, to deliver superior results through precision rather than proliferation.

Key Takeaways

1. HCP access continues to decline, with less than half of physicians open to engagement—underscoring the need for strategies focused on relevance and value rather than volume.
2. Next Best Action (NBA) shifts pharma marketing from broad outreach to precision engagement, optimizing timing, channel, and context for each HCP.
3. Real-time signal recognition and synchronized orchestration enable smarter, connected interactions that build trust and drive measurable impact.
4. Coordinated engagement strategies consistently outperform traditional campaigns, improving marketing effectiveness and conversion rates through relevance and timing.
5. PDQ Communications’ Precision Path operationalizes NBA—integrating data, decisioning, and execution to deliver compliant, high-impact HCP engagement at scale.

The Decline in HCP Access Demands a Strategic Response

When HCP accessibility drops this precipitously, traditional broad-reach tactics lose effectiveness. Volume-based strategies assume more touchpoints equal better results. Reality proves otherwise.

The shift toward digital engagement reflects changing professional preferences. More than 60% of HCPs now prefer digital outreach for professional communications, and 84% want to increase or maintain virtual interactions. These preferences signal opportunity一if pharmaceutical companies adapt their engagement models accordingly.

The challenge intensifies when examining what happens with current outreach efforts. The average HCP receives over 3,200 digital communications annually from pharmaceutical companies, yet meaningfully engages with less than 2.5% of this content. More concerning still, 65% of HCP engagements remain unsynchronized between sales and marketing teams, creating disconnected experiences that waste limited physician attention.

Why More Reach Doesn't Equal More Results

Volume-driven outreach assumes more messages mean more engagement—but when HCPs interact with fewer than 3% of communications, the issue is relevance, not reach. 

Next Best Action (NBA) reverses this logic by prioritizing engagement readiness and timing.

Consider two contrasting approaches to launching a cardiology therapy. Traditional strategy relies on broad outreach—emailing all cardiologists in target territories, following fixed schedules, and using identical messaging regardless of individual differences.

NBA takes a fundamentally different path. It prioritizes cardiologists whose prescribing patterns align with the therapy profile, focuses on those recently engaging with related clinical content, and emphasizes providers with formulary access and patient populations matching treatment indications. The result: fewer contacts, far higher conversion rates.

Response Capabilities That Drive Precision

NBA effectiveness stems from three integrated capabilities that transform how pharmaceutical companies identify and engage high-value opportunities:

• Real-time signal recognition underpins NBA. Systems monitor for key events—formulary wins, coverage shifts, or HCP digital activity—and trigger timely outreach based on engagement readiness, not preset schedules.
• Channel and content optimization tailors delivery to each HCP’s preferences. NBA selects the most effective channel—email, portal, or on-demand digital resource—and delivers content aligned with demonstrated interests and engagement history. 
• Synchronized orchestration ensures all outreach—digital and personal—works in concert. Automated follow-ups, notifications, and supporting content are timed to reinforce prior interactions, creating a consistent, connected experience across every channel.

Together, these capabilities turn fragmented outreach into a connected engagement ecosystem. Real-time insights guide when to act, channel optimization determines how to reach each HCP, and orchestration ensures every interaction reinforces the next. This builds audience trust and drives measurable impact.

The Evidence for Precision Engagement

Data from Veeva’s Pulse Field Trends Report, a global benchmark analyzing more than one billion annual HCP interactions, confirms the measurable impact of synchronized, data-driven engagement under the NBA model:

• Marketing effectiveness increases by 23% when field and digital interactions are coordinated—driven by reduced redundancy, complementary messaging, and optimized timing.
• Prescribing rates rise by 60% when HCPs visit a brand website after a representative meeting—the strongest performance across all engagement sequences.
• Prescription likelihood improves by 30% when digital follow-up occurs within 10 days of a rep interaction compared to field activity alone.

With 65% of current engagements still unsynchronized, coordinated NBA strategies represent a significant opportunity to capture untapped performance potential.

Implementing NBA: Foundation Requirements

Successful NBA implementation depends on four interconnected components that work together to enable precision engagement:

• Define high-value engagement. Establish what meaningful interactions look like within each therapeutic area by measuring not just volume but also depth, prescribing shifts, and relationship progress.
• Integrate data. Unite CRM, claims, engagement analytics, and approved third-party data into a compliant, privacy-secure environment that provides a complete view of each HCP.
• Apply decisioning intelligence. Combine business rules with predictive analytics to set engagement triggers, prioritize opportunities, and guide channel and content selection.
• Measure and refine. Track prescribing changes, engagement quality, and ROI by HCP segment to enable ongoing optimization and continuous improvement.

PDQ Communications: Your Strategic Partner in Next Best Action

Implementing Next Best Action requires more than technology; it demands coordination between your CRM, marketing automation, and sales engagement systems, rigorous compliance frameworks, and deep expertise in pharmaceutical HCP engagement. PDQ Communications operationalizes NBA through Precision Path, our proprietary platform that transforms segmentation strategy into coordinated execution.

Our Approach to NBA

With more than 20 years of healthcare marketing expertise, PDQ brings proven execution capabilities to NBA implementation. Our team manages deployment complexity, maintains compliance integrity, and delivers transparent performance metrics that demonstrate measurable results. We don't just provide platform access—we partner with pharmaceutical marketers to design, implement, and optimize NBA strategies that address specific therapeutic challenges and market dynamics.

Measurable Results Through Precision Engagement

PDQ's Precision Path helps capture the substantial performance improvements that synchronized engagement strategies deliver through disciplined implementation and continuous optimization. Our approach focuses on identifying high-value engagement opportunities, coordinating touchpoints across channels, and measuring impact through prescribing behavior and ROI metrics that matter to pharmaceutical brands.

Ready to transform your HCP engagement from volume-driven to value-focused? Contact PDQ Communications today to explore how Precision Path can operationalize Next Best Action for your campaigns and deliver the measurable results your brand deserves.