The Second Article in the ERH Series
For healthcare marketers, EHR marketing holds tremendous potential—but achieving success in this space requires a shift away from the typical advertising mindset. As we explored in our previous article on the EHR landscape, this platform offers access to moments of healthcare decision-making for physicians, nurses, and medical staff involved in patient care. However, realizing its full value requires a dual focus on strategic approach and content development to make EHR marketing an educational and supportive tool rather than just another channel for promotion.
Education Over Advertising: Rethinking the EHR as a Strategy, Not Just a Channel
Angelo Campano, EHR consultant and CEO of Flora Management, shares his frustration with reducing Point of Care to a mere “channel”: “It drives me crazy when I hear people call Point of Care a channel. I have always thought of it as this long form strategy, not necessarily just a singular channel. There’s so much that goes behind an impression in the Point of Care… I feel it is the sum of all means, but it also needs to be an education rich environment, especially the EHR.”
This distinction is more than a terminology debate—it speaks to the role of EHR as a thoughtful, integrated platform for engagement that prioritizes educational value and patient support over mere visibility. Marketers should view EHR not simply as an advertising outlet but as a channel that demands thoughtful, educational content within a strategic framework.
Table of Contents
Data-Driven Education: Driving Outcomes Through Insights
Building trust through educational content within the EHR provides tangible support for patient care in ways traditional advertising cannot. Maria O’Mara, SVP of Business Development at ConnectiveRx, provides a powerful example: “We designed a campaign for a colonoscopy product. Is this patient 45-75? have they been referred for a colonoscopy? Did they go? The aim of this campaign was to assist physicians in identifying a patient who may be a good candidate for an alternate approach to the standard colonoscopy. And encourage a discussion.”
When combining data insights with education, brands add value by identifying patients in need of specific care and offering actionable clinical insights to HCPs. “We leveraged patient history, lab values, and notes within the doctor visit” O’Mara explains. Transforming data into education strategy allows brands to drive positive outcomes and establish themselves as meaningful partners in patient care.
From Impressions to Nudges: Reframing EHR Engagement
Harshit Jain, Founder and Global CEO of Doceree, stresses a shift from traditional impressions to more purposeful “nudges”: “An impression is something that is delivered to you and there is a brand expecting a click on that impression in that moment, right? A nudge on the other hand is a soft message delivered to you at a highly contextual and relevant location. An action is not expected from you at that moment, but the message retention is very high.”
Subtle, well-placed “nudges” characterize effective EHR strategies. These messages appear within clinical workflows, making brands an unobtrusive part of the healthcare process. “We do advertising that does not come across as advertising to physicians,” Jain notes. “Our messages are introduced contextually and organically so they don’t think it is advertising..” When content genuinely supports patient care, it integrates seamlessly into the provider’s workflow without distracting or detracting from their primary focus.
Harshit Jain, Doceree
Maria O'Mara, ConnectiveRx
The Stakes: Quality and Trust in EHR Marketing
Trust and quality are paramount in EHR marketing, not just campaign goals. Damon Basch, VP of Strategic Partnerships at Veradigm, accentuates this responsibility: “Quality is the most important thing, first and foremost, in Point of Care in every way. In our case, we’re protecting our most important stakeholders, the physician and patient. Building trust with the physician requires delivering value consistently in a clinical workflow, even if that value comes from a commercial source. The best point of care partners do that with precision targeting, curated experiences in workflow, and relevancy to the practice, specialty, and patient encounter they are in.”
This unwavering focus on quality informs every aspect of EHR engagement, serving as the cornerstone of effective and ethical Point of Care marketing. Dan Wilmer, Chief Product Officer of InStep Health, emphasizes the critical need for “an extra level of scrutiny and careful stewarding” throughout the process. He explains that “at the end of the day, if this doesn’t work for the providers or contribute to improving patient care, it ultimately undermines the interests of all stakeholders—patients, healthcare providers, and industry partners alike—and erodes the trust we have worked so hard to build.”
Maria Cipicchio, Vice President of Marketing and Communications at OptimizeRx, explains: “We want to keep providers focused on care delivery while they’re in clinical platforms. So, when we think about the content that we’re delivering there, as long as we continue to deliver content that’s relevant to that doctor and relevant to that patient, we will be successful in supporting care delivery.” This commitment to relevance ensures that each engagement contributes positively to the care process, respecting the physician-patient relationship.
As the industry matures, maintaining ethical standards and proactively addressing challenges will be essential for sustainable success. Damon Basch emphasizes the industry’s ethical responsibility, “We have to protect data. We, as marketers, have to engage in a way that respects the sacrosanct relationship between a physician and patient.” He stresses the importance of strong measurement hygiene and that education must always take precedence over promotion. Navigating issues of data privacy, message personalization, and regulatory compliance will require ongoing collaboration between brands, agencies, platforms, and Point of Care partners.
Dan Wilmer, InStep Health
Damon Basch, Veradigm
Redefining Success: A Full-Funnel Approach to EHR
Traditional marketing metrics often fall short when applied to the EHR environment. “You have to think about engagement differently,” Maria Cipicchio explains. “Clicks are a good example of an engagement metric that is different. We don’t expect to see a large number of clicks in the EHR because a doctor is working, and likely sitting with an active patient. In these moments, we don’t want the doctor to leave the care delivery screen.” In the EHR context, success means supporting clinical workflow and enriching the patient care journey rather than maximizing traditional metrics like clicks or website traffic driven from the EHR.
Maria O’Mara reinforces this point: “This shift requires brands to focus on meaningful impact rather than traditional media metrics like impressions or clicks. Instead we look at long term impact like script lift and improvement in patient adherence.” Instead of merely measuring visibility, the focus is on supporting real healthcare decisions and contributing to improved patient outcomes.
Damon Basch captures the fundamental shift in purpose driving modern EHR marketing: “There’s an inherent and incorrect belief that all Pharma marketers believe in is spending a dollar and returning three. But every brand team I’ve spoken to, every market access person or field reimbursement manager, every agency person who’s been in HCP for a while–they truly believe that what they’re trying to do is provide the information a Provider can use when they can use it to improve patient care.” This statement reinforces the deeper mission within EHR marketing—enhancing patient and provider experiences over simply driving return on investment. By focusing on outcomes that genuinely improve lives, EHR marketing positions itself as a critical partner in healthcare delivery.
Angelo Campano, Flora Management
Maria Cipicchio, OptimizeRx
Beyond the Point of Care: EHR’s Full-Funnel Reach and Impact
While EHR’s proximity to care decisions offers valuable conversion opportunities, thinking only in terms of conversion limits the channel’s potential. Harshit Jain advocates for a broader perspective: “The way we would like marketers to think about Point of Care is as they think about their marketing funnel… A new perspective is to think about all three parts of the funnel within Point of Care.”
This expanded view of the EHR includes critical post-prescription opportunities, such as supporting patient adherence and encouraging follow-up care. Jain explains: “Once the script is written… the patient comes in, that’s where the co-pay offering enters. How do I get the patient to the pharmacy? How do I get a patient to comply? That’s beyond the conversion point in the funnel, to include the patient messaging.”
O’Mara expands on how creatively leveraging Point of Care tactics, such as EHR and the pharmacy, can transform marketing beyond traditional funnel stages into full-lifecycle engagement “There aren’t many places where you can engage directly with your patients, understanding exactly where they are in their therapy journey and supporting them at that very moment.” A lot of traditional media focuses on driving awareness of the brand and driving new patient starts, but these POC tactics give you the ability to reach patients beyond the first script—helping patients trust changes that may go unaddressed or seem minor but truly impact patient behavior from medication scheduling, to pill color changes, to addressing concerns about side effects for better adherence.
“To provide an example, we worked with a brand who had a complex titration schedule. We created custom content for both the HCP and the patient to drive awareness and support based on where they were within that schedule. HCPs found it helpful having that information at their fingertips, alleviating the need for them to go out of workflow, and we saw an increase in compliance and persistence metrics for patients.”
By recognizing EHR as a tool that spans awareness, engagement, and post-prescription support, brands can maximize their impact and extend their value across the entire patient journey.
Measuring Impact: Beyond Traditional Metrics
Success measurement in EHR marketing requires looking beyond traditional engagement metrics. As Maria Cipicchio explains, “The information delivered has to be as actionable as absolutely possible. We’re talking about delivering information at the moment of ‘conversion.’ This is the moment that the prescriber is thinking about your drug or thinking about how to do their job of managing the care.”
Key Performance Indicators and Impact
Effective measurement frameworks for EHR marketing should focus on metrics that capture its true impact within the healthcare journey, including:
- Script lift and conversion impact
- Workflow efficiency improvements
- HCP satisfaction and engagement
- Patient care support metrics
- Long-term adherence impact
Maria O’Mara highlights this broader perspective, emphasizing, “Work with your EHR partner—What is the objective of this campaign? What data is available to illustrate the impact on that objective? What does success look like? Whether you want to run a test and control measurement, work with a 3rd party to run a campaign analysis or feed data into your marketing mix, it is all possible.”
Implementation: Moving From Strategy to Practice
Successful implementation within the EHR space begins with a clear understanding of your EHR partner’s capabilities. It’s essential to know which providers they can reach, how and where your brand’s messages will appear within the clinical workflow, and the targeting criteria they can support. This foundational knowledge ensures your campaigns are strategically aligned and impactful.
Verifying reach and refining targeting are critical steps in this process. As Dan Wilmer explains, “The requirement to be scrupulous when activating a messaging campaign inside the EHR is not an excuse for vendors to be opaque about their actual capabilities and reach.” Transparency from your EHR media partner is non-negotiable. Wilmer adds, “EHR partners should be able to perform an NPI match to verify physician reach and provide contractually committed, transparent reporting to confirm these criteria are being met.”
By insisting on clarity and accountability from your EHR partner, you not only ensure compliance and precision but also foster trust—both with the healthcare providers you aim to support and with your internal stakeholders. This diligence sets the foundation for campaigns that truly enhance the provider and patient experience.
Cipicchio adds essential context: “In order to understand care context, and provide relevant information within the EHR, you have to start with some data about the patients your target NPIs are likely to see. Validation that an exact patient is sitting with an exact doctor when information is being delivered is not a privacy-safe approach, and isn’t how marketers should be thinking about the marketing interaction within the EHR. Instead, marketers can focus on the types of activities a doctor is likely to be engaging in while treating a specific patient profile. For example: are there certain tests that need to be run, what comorbidities are common, what other treatments are these doctors thinking about, etc.?” Marketers must learn to work creatively within these established boundaries to ensure effective, compliant messaging.
Creative Approaches That Build Trust
The most effective EHR content supports clinical workflow while addressing patient needs in meaningful ways. Maria O’Mara shares a strong example: “One engagement opportunity within the EHR happens once a Rx is written. After a prescriber has written a prescription, a branded asset is appended to the discharge paperwork and is hand delivered to the patient prior to leaving the doctor’s office. It provides the brand an opportunity to put information in the hands of a patient who was just prescribed their brand. What, as a brand, would you like to communicate? Maybe it’s cost savings programs, or information about how to take the medication, or what to expect while taking their Rx—these touchpoints are helping reduce barriers to fill and drive a positive experience.”
This approach exemplifies how EHR integration can enhance both patient outcomes and HCP engagement by delivering customized content at critical moments. These tailored solutions reduce adherence barriers and support the prescriber’s decision.
By engaging prescribers with actionable information during critical workflow moments, these campaigns improve patient access to treatment while enhancing brand value. Seamless EHR integration provides clinical support while delivering brand messaging in ways that feel intuitive and physician-centered. When you meet HCP expectations for relevance and utility, you diminish reliance on online searches or unreliable information that can undermine adherence or patient understanding.
These innovations highlight the value of intuitive, workflow-aligned marketing. By addressing genuine problems faced by HCPs and patients, such campaigns build trust, improve adherence, and support positive treatment outcomes.
An Illustrative Case: Supporting Patients Through Coverage Gaps
A case shared by Campano highlights how one healthcare brand retained patients through a targeted support program. Patients on a particular medication often faced coverage gaps late in the year due to Medicare lapses, leading them to pause treatment until coverage resumed. A significant portion of these patients did not resume treatment after lapse. The brand worked with an EHR partner to predict non-adherence among this patient population, and leverage strategic EHR placements to raise provider awareness of their support plan, ensuring continuous treatment, increasing patient satisfaction, and improving adherence rates significantly. “Patients felt supported, healthcare providers experienced more consistent outcomes, and the entire system benefited.” This targeted EHR intervention utilized predictive technology to alert healthcare providers of patients likely to enter the coverage gap, enabling them to offer a support plan at the right moment. As Campano puts it:
“They saw an insane return on investment from that program because they were able to predict it for the value over time. Those patients who fell into that coverage gap were kept on their medication for that period of time without any breaks or exceptions. If I’m that patient or, even better, the health system, I will never move from that program.”
“These types of engagements with patients and healthcare professionals are vital,”says O’Mara about broader creative thinking. “That is not just placing a branded display banner in the EHR as another promotional channel. It’s about understanding the workflow of a physician, the journey of a patient and your EHR partner’s capabilities to support the HCP and patient at those critical moments.”
By recognizing EHR as a tool that spans awareness, engagement, and post-prescription support, brands can maximize their impact and extend their value across the entire patient journey and into adherence with measurable results.
Measuring Impact Across the Care Journey
The most successful EHR programs provide value at multiple touchpoints across the patient journey. Each stage, from prescription through to adherence, offers critical opportunities for meaningful measurement, demonstrating how EHR campaigns contribute to improved health outcomes and patient support.
Understanding how to measure and evaluate data is a more nuanced process. Messaging in the Point of Care is unique and understanding the value is critical. For instance, Maria Cipicchio explains, “The same doctor may use 2 to 3 EHRs over the course of a week. Sometimes they may go back and forth between a private practice and a hospital system. Those two places may have different EHRs.” Later, that visibility at critical moments can translate to measurable impact, She continues, “You may see that while you’re running an EHR campaign you’re getting higher direct traffic. What’s the reason for that? The reason for that is because the doctor may have seen an ad earlier in the day and then made a note to go check out later how to prescribe that medication.”
To correctly assess value, you have to look at that window of context around the patient and HCP, and what actions you’re trying to drive. According to Cipicchio, that varies depending on the care journey and brand needs: “We’ve been working with an oncology treatment brand, and one of the big pain points they’re trying to solve for is a lack of awareness among oncologists that a certain diagnostic test is required prior to prescribing. In this case, we’re looking at the occurrence of this test as a leading indicator of the success of this campaign.”
Striking the right balance may be understanding where in the care journey your messaging makes the most sense, and to what end. “If what you’re trying to achieve in the EHR is extreme precision, it will be difficult to achieve scale. So if you’re measuring success by how many people see your campaign or you’re measuring by how many people engage, you’re never going to be successful,” cautions Cipicchio on determining the right metrics for the goal.
To determine the best measurement strategy, it’s important to look at the way the EHR operates and your campaign objectives in a unified way. One goal may be HCP awareness, while another is new prescriptions to a specific segment. “If you’re not clear about the goal, you’re not going to be able to process the KPI’s effectively,” Cipicchio advises, “I would really encourage conversations between the EHR partner, agency, and pharma to understand truly how you are measuring the success of your EHR programs. If you are not all on the same page from the beginning, you’re not going to be able to communicate about that and determine if it was successful at the end.”
Building for Tomorrow: Strong Marketing Foundations
As the EHR landscape continues to grow and change, brands must focus on core principles that support sustainable, impactful engagement:
- Educational Value First: As Angelo Campano emphasizes, keeping the EHR an education-rich environment is essential for success.
- Quality and Trust: As Basch reminds us, “We’re protecting the most important customer, which is the physician.” Maintaining trust is crucial for lasting impact.
- Workflow Integration: Cipicchio reinforces that relevance to both HCPs and patients ensures effective, trustworthy engagement.
Conclusion: Strategic Imperatives for EHR Success
EHR is more than a marketing channel; it’s an opportunity for brands to become part of direct healthcare delivery. Dan Wilmer captures this well: “EHR messaging should be the nexus of any provider-focused campaign; it’s an indispensable element of a truly comprehensive marketing strategy. I firmly believe that as long as industry partners approach this tool with thoughtfulness and care—prioritizing compliance, relevance, and provider trust—the use of EHR in life science marketing will not just grow but expand exponentially.”
To effectively leverage the EHR, healthcare marketers should focus on key success areas that honor the responsibilities of this unique channel:
Key Areas for Success in EHR Marketing
- Center Content on Education and Value: Effective EHR marketing goes beyond promotion, focusing on content that truly supports healthcare providers and enhances patient care. Prioritizing quality in this way builds trust and aligns brand objectives with the goals of healthcare professionals, positioning the brand as a partner in patient outcomes.
- Verify Your Target Reach: Before launching campaigns, perform an NPI (National Provider Identifier) match to ensure your messaging reaches the intended healthcare professionals. This verification process is essential for realistic planning, effective resource allocation, and maximizing engagement within EHRs.
- Align with Clinical Workflow Needs: Success in EHR marketing relies on creating content that enhances, rather than interrupts, clinical workflows. Campaigns should demonstrate genuine value by supporting healthcare providers and aiding in patient care, going beyond simple “click here” prompts to become indispensable parts of the provider’s workflow.
- Adhere to Privacy Standards: Respect for patient and provider privacy is essential in EHR marketing. Compliance with privacy protocols and HIPAA standards maintains the trust that underpins EHR systems. While data boundaries may limit access to detailed insights, working creatively within these constraints allows for effective, compliant engagement.
- Adopt a Full-Funnel Approach: EHR marketing can extend beyond initial awareness, supporting each stage of the patient journey from prescription through to adherence. This comprehensive approach addresses the ongoing needs of patients and healthcare providers, maximizing brand impact and fostering better health outcomes.
Looking Ahead
As EHR capabilities continue to evolve, the opportunity for meaningful brand engagement grows. However, this potential can only be realized through careful attention to quality, trust, and value delivery. Brands that master these elements while respecting the unique dynamics of the EHR environment will find themselves well-positioned for sustainable success.
In our next article, we’ll explore the broader marketing context surrounding EHR messaging and the future of EHR.
