Symphony Health and dentsu health partner to efficiently reach rare disease patients

As a part of their ongoing Test & Learn strategy, dentsu health collaborated with several data partners to assess healthcare claims models and measure Audience Quality across two direct-to-consumer (DTC) display campaigns: – Brand A: Patient Pop - 49,634 – Brand B: ICD10: Patient Pop - 18,764 By standardising these inputs, dentsu health was able to fairly evaluate partner performance, identify the strongest drivers of diagnosed patient reach, and optimise campaign delivery toward the highestperforming segments to improve outcomes through the end of the year.

Given the extreme rarity of these conditions, the primary challenge was maximising diagnosed patient reach while maintaining efficiency.

To address this, dentsu health leaned into more sophisticated measurement methodologies, including: 

• Audience Quality (AQ) Index: Comparing the diagnosed reach rate against the condition’s baseline prevalence rate to gauge true campaign efficiency.
• Cost per Diagnosed Patient (Cost per Dx): Measuring spend divided by diagnosed patients reached, offering a secondary but important efficiency metric. 

Because of the tiny size of the patient populations, standalone reach rates can appear low — making AQ Index critical to understanding performance in context. For example, even a seemingly small 0.395% AQ Rate for Brand A in October translated to a performance 19.4x higher than targeting a random audience. 

Cost per Dx is Spend divided by Diagnosed Patients reached. This helps to understand the cost efficiency of reaching unique diagnosed patients per partner (secondary KPI to AQ Index).

Through rigorous comparison, Symphony Health, an ICON plc company, emerged as a top-performing data partner for both rare disease campaigns throughout Q4 2024. 

Working closely with dentsu health, Symphony Health consistently delivered the highest AQ Indexes, significantly outperforming other third-party partners. Symphony Health’s precision in claims modeling enabled dentsu health to maximise diagnosed patient reach while maintaining strong cost efficiency. 

“Symphony Health is a trusted partner that has consistently helped dentsu health improve diagnosed patient reach for multiple rare disease brands. Within Q4 alone, Symphony delivered an AQ Index that was over 550% higher than comparable third- party partners.” – Brad Fox, SVP Health Media, dentsu health media

By leveraging Symphony Health’s advanced claims modeling, dentsu health was able to: 

• Prioritise media delivery toward verified diagnosed patients.
• Optimise campaign performance in extremely rare disease categories.
• Improve both Audience Quality and cost efficiency, ensuring meaningful engagement with the right patient populations.

This strategic partnership showcases how clinically precise data models can transform outcomes, even in the most challenging media environments