Breakthrough patient reach with data-powered disease education campaign

In Q1 2024, Underscore Marketing, a leading data-driven marketing agency, launched a groundbreaking unbranded disease education campaign aimed at reaching and educating patients with a rare lung disease. This innovative initiative focused on validating patients’ symptoms while introducing them to a forthcoming treatment expected to receive FDA approval by year-end. By leveraging cutting-edge data and privacy-compliant strategies, the campaign not only raised awareness but also provided valuable educational resources to an underserved audience, setting a new standard for disease education in the healthcare space.

Reaching potential patients in a privacy-by-design, HIPAA-compliant manner remains a significant challenge for brands aiming to build awareness and provide educational resources. Underscore Marketing continuously seeks best-in-class targeting and measurement solutions to enhance understanding of campaign success in reaching the right patient audience at scale. In mid-2023, Underscore prioritised PulsePoint’s new DTC measurement solution and the Qualified Audience Reach (QAR) metric as its primary KPI for DTC campaigns, indicating PulsePoint’s targeting is reaching confirmed diagnosed patients in a compliant way. With this measurement in place, Underscore sought the right partners to help build effective patient audience cohorts.

In order to maximise the impact of this campaign, Underscore Marketing’s first challenge was to identify the right audience to reach compliantly. The Underscore team engaged with several data partners to build modelled audiences of potential patients, backed by claims data, and leveraged PulsePoint, the leading healthcare demand side platform, to activate and measure the results of the campaign. 

The main KPI was qualified audience reach (QAR). A PulsePoint metric, QAR score measures the rate the campaign reaches the right diagnosed patient audience. It’s used to optimise a campaign so that the appropriate audience is identified and targeted efficiently and effectively. This metric is focused on minimising waste and reaching a diagnosed patient audience at scale. A secondary KPI, developed by Underscore Marketing and supported by PulsePoint’s QAR data was Qualified Unique Individuals Reached (QUIR). This KPI leverages QAR data to estimate the number of actual patients reached. It’s a way for healthcare marketers to measure how specific people have successfully connected with digital advertising.

Four audience providers were tasked with developing modelled audiences for people likely to be living with the condition. Among the four, Symphony Health outperformed the others in QAR and QUIR. Symphony Health’s proprietary modelled audience, built from real-world patient data deidentified in compliance with HIPAA and NAI standards, successfully reached over 100 patients after only 3 days. It took other tested audience providers more than twice that amount of time to reach the same volume of qualified patients. 

The cumulative QAR score for the Symphony modelled audience was 2.3, indicating that for every 100 audience members reached, on average 2.3 of them closely match the profile of people who are living with the condition. Given the rarity of the condition and compliance procedures required to protect patient confidentiality when reaching likely patients, these results were stronger than expected. For comparison, cumulative QAR for the other audience partners ranged between 1.5 and 1.9. 

The outcomes of the disease-education campaign continue to serve as a foundational element for upcoming drug launch campaigns. Insights gained from partners like Symphony Health and PulsePoint are vital to the Brand at this stage, as they have helped shape the strategy for reaching the largest pool of relevant patients during the drug launch.

Underscore: 

“Underscore recognises the importance of having multiple third-party audience partners to maximise patient reach, and we always aim to collaborate with partners who exceed our expectations. Symphony Health and PulsePoint’s performance surpassed our expectations. Due to their exceptional results, we have expanded our partnership with Symphony Health and PulsePoint to include other Underscore clients, who are now experiencing similar success. Both companies will continue to be a cornerstone of our DTC initiatives.”