Reaching a healthcare professional (HCP) inside an electronic health record (EHR) is an effective way to provide clinical utility and contextual relevance that goes deeper than traditional direct-to-consumer messaging.
The importance of EHR in the healthcare journey is well established - the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology describes office-based physician EHR adoption as nearly ubiquitous, based on its analysis of 2024 survey data.
But in order to maximize the impact you see from your investment in EHR media, you need to have a full understanding of who your campaign can reach, when your message will appear, what makes it relevant and how its impact will be measured.
Those nuances matter because EHR media brings marketing into the systems clinicians use to document, evaluate and manage care. Its potential comes from connecting useful information with a specific clinical task or desired next action.
In POC As Foundational Spend: What Changes When You Plan It First, we argued that bringing Point of Care (POC) into planning earlier can shape audience strategy, messaging, channel coordination and measurement. EHR media puts that principle into practice: the details of the environment should help shape your approach from the beginning.
POCMA’s EHR Media: Foundational Guide for Healthcare Marketers gives media buyers a framework for evaluating those details. Coupled with these four questions, the tips presented in the EHR Media Guide can enable a more productive buying conversation.
1. What Job Should EHR Media Do in the Care Journey?
Before evaluating EHR media partners, start by defining your communication needs.
A brand may need to build understanding of a treatment option during care planning. Another may need to make affordability resources easier to find when a prescription is being considered. A third may need to support education after treatment begins.
These objectives call for different audiences, placements, messages and measures of success. Starting with a generic request for EHR impressions leaves too much of the strategy unresolved.
As POCMA’s earlier exploration of the EHR as a marketing channel explains, EHR capabilities vary. So it’s critical to match an available capability within EHR to a real need your brand has.
Consider an illustrative brand facing a treatment-initiation barrier. If care teams need help locating patient-support resources, the brief should specify that need. It should identify the relevant team members, when the information would be useful and what action the experience should make easier.
That is a stronger starting point than selecting a format and deciding later what to put in it. It also gives EHR media a clear relationship to your broader media plan. POCMA’s guide to building smarter POC media plans describes the value of coordinating these touchpoints. Apply that thinking by giving each environment a defined contribution to the journey.
2. Which Providers Can We Reach in a Relevant Clinical Context?
Once you’ve set your strategy and comms goals, it’s time to move into evaluating how and where you can reach your audience with different EHR solutions. An EHR network’s total provider count is only the beginning of the audience discussion.
Buyers need to understand how many relevant providers are reachable under the campaign’s actual rules. Specialty, care setting, recent platform activity, available inventory and targeting permissions can all affect that answer. Overlap across partners can also change how much additional reach a second investment contributes.
To get clarity, ask media partners for the assumptions behind the audience estimate. What activity window qualifies a provider as active? Which settings are represented? How much inventory overlaps with other partners under consideration? What happens to reach when the proposed targeting criteria are applied?
Then examine what will make your message contextually relevant.
An NPI, or National Provider Identifier, identifies the professional. A clinical trigger may help determine when a message is useful. Depending on the partner and platform, potential triggers can include diagnosis information, prescribing events, laboratory results or workflow stage.
You should also consider historical information and signals - because a provider’s past treatment patterns may help identify a relevant audience. A signal from the current encounter may support a different level of timing and specificity. It’s important to understand which type of signal(s) your EHR partners offer (historical, current or both) and how frequently the underlying information is updated.
The same discipline applies to predictive targeting. If a proposal includes AI or modeling, ask what is being predicted, what inputs support it and how performance is validated. The label alone does not explain the targeting advantage.
When weighing these capabilities, return to your campaign brief. Greater specificity may reduce available reach, but that trade-off can be appropriate when the objective zeros in on a particular care moment. Conversely, broader education may justify a wider audience.
A useful partner discussion should make the relationship between audience size, clinical relevance and timing explicit. That allows the buyer to choose deliberately and establish realistic expectations before committing budget.
3. Will the Message Help the Clinician Complete the Task?
The EHR’s proximity to a care decision creates an opportunity for the information you deliver to be useful, but the experience still has to earn the clinician’s attention. To ensure you capture that attention, the goal is to design around the work already underway.
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality recommends a “Five Rights” framework for clinical decision support: information should fit the recipient, format, channel and moment in the workflow. That framework offers a useful design principle for marketers: evaluate the whole information-delivery experience.
Ask to see where the message appears: the patient chart, order entry, prescribing screen, messaging center or discharge workflow. Is it embedded in the interface or presented as an overlay? What is the clinician doing immediately before seeing it? What happens when they engage?
Those answers should shape the content. A short educational placement may need to communicate one relevant point quickly. An affordability resource should make the next step clear. Longer educational content may require a placement that supports deeper engagement without disrupting the immediate task.
You should also request a demonstration of the proposed placement with representative creative. Review whether the message can be understood quickly, whether its purpose is clear and whether the next action fits the setting. Confirm which elements remain consistent across EHR implementations and which require adaptation.
A trusted clinical setting also raises expectations for relevance and clarity. Sponsored content should be recognizable as such, and its presence should not be treated as an endorsement by the EHR or health system.
4. What Will Demonstrate Success—and What Is Guaranteed?
Measurement should follow the job assigned to the campaign. The guide encourages buyers to look beyond conventional digital metrics and determine what outcomes can actually be measured. That conversation needs to happen before launch, when there is still time to establish the necessary data access and evaluation approach.
Ask partners what reporting is available at the provider level, which actions are observable and how the measurement window aligns with the objective. If the campaign is intended to support treatment initiation, for example, confirm whether the analysis can assess the relevant downstream behavior or only an earlier interaction.
Where incremental impact is the goal, discuss the comparison method. A well-designed test-and-control analysis can help distinguish campaign contribution from other influences. Buyers should understand how groups are selected, whether other marketing exposures are considered and what limitations remain.
A positive signal after launch can be encouraging, but timing alone does not establish attribution. Similarly, an outcome reported for a multichannel campaign should not automatically be assigned to its EHR component.
Guarantees deserve their own discussion. An impression guarantee commits to delivery volume. An engagement or performance guarantee makes a different commitment, with definitions and conditions that need to be understood. Ask what is guaranteed, how it is calculated and what happens if delivery or performance falls short.
Finally, examine the evidence behind inventory and targeting claims. We recommend asking about independent third-party audits and leveraging POCMA certified products where possible. Confirm the scope of any audit or certification presented, including which product or inventory it covers.
Build the Buying Decision Around the Care Moment
EHR media brings a distinct opportunity to POC planning: connecting relevant information with the systems and tasks involved in care delivery.
Making that opportunity valuable requires alignment across the brand objective, reachable audience, clinical context, delivery experience and measurement approach.
For healthcare marketers, the next step is to bring greater specificity to the buying conversation. Define the communication need, ask partners to demonstrate how they will address it and compare proposals against the same strategic criteria.
POCMA’s EHR Media: Foundational Guide for Healthcare Marketers provides the foundation for those conversations, with explanations of distribution and buying models, connection technology, and practical questions covering reach, targeting, workflow integration, measurement and guarantees.
Download the guide to evaluate EHR media opportunities more confidently and build a strategy around the care moments your brand needs to support.