Introduction

The pharma industry faces a paradox: as clinical evidence proliferates, HCPs struggle more, not less, to access what they need. AstraZeneca's two-year research initiative with Accenture reveals the depth of this challenge and positions conversational AI as a practical solution to transform content engagement.

Georgia Spain, Director of Oncology Digital Innovation at AstraZeneca, presented findings that quantify what many suspected: HCP burnout and information fragmentation have reached crisis levels, demanding a fundamental rethink of medical content delivery. "There have been 2,000 new clinical trials since 2023 and the number of cancer treatments has increased by 9% every year since 2019," Spain explained. The human cost is significant, with "57% of oncologists reporting burnout" and "80% of HCPs who are reporting burnout link this directly to their job."

The Research Foundation: Quantifying Information Burden

In partnership with Accenture, AstraZeneca surveyed 250 oncologists and urologists across the US, UK, and Germany from 2022 to 2024, combining quantitative surveys, 21 in-depth interviews, social listening, and secondary research. The focus was oncology, using prostate cancer as a case study amid significant treatment paradigm shifts.

Busy clinical workload remains the primary barrier to medical education, but content fragmentation emerged as a critical pain point. Spain noted that "HCPs are struggling because content is split, spread out across multiple platforms and providers and it's too time-consuming to digest." Even when HCPs carve out time, they face a high cognitive burden piecing together data across multiple sources.

Treatment guidelines and clinical data on new options are the most sought-after resources and paradoxically, the hardest to locate. This "reiterates that HCPs are being burdened by sifting through just volumes of information because they can't find that right information at the right time."

Format preferences underscore the tension HCPs navigate. Primary journals and peer reviewed data remain the gold standard, yet podcasts and audiovisual formats gained traction between 2022 and 2024 because "they're easier to absorb, they can integrate them into a busy workday," Spain observed. HCPs want shortform entry points with seamless pathways into comprehensive data.

One 2022 interview quote from an HCP proved prescient: "If I had a magic wand, every time I had a question I would Google it and instead of a thousand articles I would get a focused reply from a respected expert," Spain shared, months before ChatGPT's launch, signaling HCP readiness for conversational AI.

By 2024, when AI specific questions were added, "over 80% of them anticipated that they would use gen AI in some capacity within the next two years." HCPs expressed interest in AI's potential but stressed the need to validate outputs against peer reviewed sources. Some reported using ChatGPT specifically to understand what information patients receive from consumer AI platforms.

The Solution Architecture: Conversational AI Implementation

Sandy Kaur, Director of Digital Acceleration in AstraZeneca's Medical Communications and Information Team, outlined how these insights translated into a conversational AI solution. The tool delivers medical content in concise, guided, and interactive formats, incorporating both visual and text assets to align with diverse HCP preferences and address discoverability and digestibility gaps.

Engagement metrics demonstrate step change impact. "We've observed tremendous engagement with the tool: 2 to 20 engagements per HCP visit, 200% increase in engagement with our medical content and 4.7 out of 5-star HCP feedback rating," Kaur reported. HCPs move from search and exit patterns to exploratory, iterative interactions, with multiple engagements per visit indicating real perceived value.

The technical approach balances ambition and risk. "We're currently at a stage where we're using AI to understand the user input, so natural language understanding and making sure we return approved content." The team is transitioning toward a more advanced large language model approach as the technology and internal readiness evolve.

From inception, the architecture was designed for market level configurability to enable alignment with local regulatory requirements. "The approach needs to be scalable across your portfolio channels and markets. As we know, one size doesn't fit all when it comes to the market, so the need to make it configurable is key."

AstraZeneca highlighted the importance for governance and the need for deep integration with existing content platforms. "The tool needs to reflect your latest data. This is so important to make sure that it stays relevant to the HCP and of the highest value." Automated content release processes are central to maintaining value as new clinical evidence emerges.

Implementation Realities: Compliance and Governance

Kaur highlighted implementation realities that many organizations underestimate. "The governance and oversight of HCP facing AI products after go-live can be just as big as the implementation itself"—requiring ongoing monitoring, compliance checks, and continuous improvement.

AstraZeneca's compliance framework is built around KPI-based monitoring with pre-agreed accuracy thresholds. This marks a shift from binary approve reject models toward collaborative risk management.

Transparency is also critical. Kaur stressed the importance of "citing the sources to build trust with HCPs" so users can distinguish AI generated summarization from underlying peer reviewed evidence.

Spain described a broader mindset shift with compliance partners toward problem solving, framed around HCP needs. "When you frame it from the lens of HCPs are looking for more information, they're looking for this disease education, how can we provide towards HCP needs compliantly?"

For organizations starting this journey, Kaur advised: "Start small and prove value with one market, one channel, one brand, building the right foundations you need for scale." This phased approach allows teams to validate value, refine governance, and build internal confidence before broad rollout.

Strategic Implications and the Path Forward

AstraZeneca's experience shows that conversational AI in medical affairs has moved from aspiration to operational reality, with measurable value and repeatable implementation patterns. Yet strategic questions remain around distribution and HCP adoption at scale.

A central challenge is the "traffic paradox": driving usage of proprietary AI tools without further fragmenting an already crowded information landscape. AstraZeneca's emerging model positions conversational AI as the "front door" for its owned channels while using SEO and geotargeting to surface content in third party AI platforms like ChatGPT. "The vision is for it to be AstraZeneca's front door for engaging with our content, no matter what portal it's on."

Spain underlined the need for a user centric, ecosystem view: "How do we not further fragment the information? Because that's what we've seen. It's over multiple platforms. So how do we, like you're saying, trying to surface it in ChatGPT and other things. We need to take a more user-centric approach to this, more holistically than I think we typically have with content."

With over 80% of HCPs anticipating gen AI use within two years, pharma companies face a narrow window to establish trusted AI mediated channels before HCPs default to generic consumer tools for clinical information retrieval. The implications are competitive and clinical: ensuring that HCPs access accurate, current, contextualized information rather than noncurated outputs.

The research confirms that HCPs will adopt pharma AI tools when they deliver superior experience and strong trust signals. The 4.7/5 satisfaction rating and 200% engagement increase demonstrate that meeting HCP needs—not deploying technology for its own sake—drives meaningful adoption. As Kaur summarized: "HCPs aren't asking for more assets, but asking for our data to be delivered in a quick and engaging manner."

Spain captured the core imperative: "We need to make our science more discoverable. We need to enable HCPs to be able to find that information when it is the right time for them. We need to make content and our formats more digestible." Organizations that execute against this will secure trusted source status as the clinical information landscape undergoes AI driven transformation over the next two years.

Speakers:
Georgia Spain, Director Oncology Digital Innovation, AstraZeneca
Sandy Kaur, Director Digital Acceleration, Global Medical Communications & Information, AstraZeneca

Key takeaways:
• Two-year research quantifies HCP burnout and content fragmentation crisis
• Conversational AI achieves 200% engagement increase with 4.7/5 satisfaction rating
• Market-level configurability enables compliant scaling across diverse regulatory environments
• Post-launch governance complexity equals or exceeds initial implementation demands
• 80% HCP AI adoption window creates strategic urgency for trusted channels

To get you highlights of Pharma Customer Engagement EU faster, we are using generative AI technology to summarise the transcripts of the sessions. If you have any feedback about the summary, please contact lucy.fisher@thomsonreuters.com.

"Historically we always wanted to be customer centric, but now we have the data and the operations to understand our customers, evolve to where they are, and let them tell us what they require and what they need,"

Canlas explained.

SPEAKERS:

Chiara Bolognini, Global Lead CX, Marketing and Sales, Roche
Kruti Popat, Director of Customer Experience, Boehringer Ingelheim
Yvette Venable, Head Global Market Access, Payer Partnerships and Policy, AstraZeneca
Jalilah Gibson, Associate Partner, Wavestone (Moderator)
KEY TAKEAWAYS:
• Fragmented touchpoints erode trust when customers experience pharma companies as different people across functions
• Early R&D engagement with payers and regulators prevents costly market access evidence gaps
• Patients consolidate all stakeholder perspectives, making patient experience the ultimate engagement quality test
• Human expert interpretation prevents data misattribution that misdirects strategy and wastes resources
• AI-powered responsive ecosystems enable customers to choose content rather than receive pushed messages

Imagine meeting a pharma company representative who speaks eloquently about patient outcomes, then encountering the same company through customer service where the tone, messaging, and approach feel completely unfamiliar. This jarring disconnect defines the current state of pharma customer engagement. "If you move for example, from sales to customer service, they feel lost our customer experience," Chiara Bolognini explained at Pharma Customer Engagement Europe 2025.

As Jalilah Gibson reinforces, "Our customers don't care which company we work for or which part of the function that we work for, but they do care when they get a very disjointed experience."

From Fragmented Touchpoints to Unified Ecosystems

The pharma industry's traditional organizational structure creates silos that customers experience as disconnected interactions. Sales, medical affairs, market access, and patient support each optimize their own engagement models without coordinating on how the company's identity is expressed across the patient journey. Trust, the foundation of prescribing influence and treatment adherence, erodes when customers cannot recognize consistent company presence.

"It's designing ecosystems where our customers can thrive, where we build the familiarity with them and basically expose them to best attributes of our identity," Bolognini emphasizes. This shift from isolated touchpoints to integrated ecosystems requires governance that operates above functional levels, with authority to transfer methodologies across commercial, medical, and patient partnership organizations.

For Kruti Popat, the strategic imperative is clear. "Delivering a seamless customer experience is not nice to have. It's really important strategic imperative. It's a really great differentiator," she notes, particularly in complex environments like the UK's NHS where multiple stakeholders each have distinct needs yet expect coherent company engagement.

The ecosystem approach extends beyond commercial interactions to the earliest stages of development. Yvette Venable describes how AstraZeneca's "Transforming Healthcare" framework orients all teams toward patient outcomes and health system resilience. "It's crucial that we're talking to patients, to payers and policymakers, and also to clinicians very, very early on in R&D in order to make sure we can change those paradigms over time," Venable explains.

This early engagement prevents the costly disconnect between regulatory approval and market access that plagues many launches when evidence generation fails to address payer requirements.

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Discover more on this topic at Pharma 2026 (22-24 April, Barcelona) - the global collaborative network for leading pharma innovators. Visit the website here.

The Patient as Universal Stakeholder

Patients aren't just another customer segment; they represent the consolidation point of all stakeholder perspectives. Healthcare providers treating patients today become patients themselves tomorrow. Policymakers making reimbursement decisions will eventually navigate the healthcare system as caregivers or patients.

"The patient is the consolidation of all our customers. Each of us in the company, so experiencing the perspective of the patient and the customer experience is fundamental," Bolognini emphasizes. This perspective shift has profound implications for how companies design information architecture and support systems across disease awareness, diagnosis, clinical trial participation, treatment initiation, and long-term management phases.

Yet the industry still struggles to move beyond transactional engagement models. "We as an industry do so much better today than we ever have on patient engagement, but at the same time, we're still not doing it well enough," Venable observes. The gap lies in viewing patient engagement through the lens of extraction rather than true partnership with mutual benefit.

Structural issues within organizations, where patient advocacy teams, patient support programs, and commercial patient engagement operate independently, create the same fragmentation patients experience externally.

The solution lies in persona-based approaches that maintain message consistency while adapting delivery. "It's understanding what is important to these personas, what's the value, what language resonates for them. You're still using the same content thread, you're not amending the content," Popat explains. For HCPs with high empathy toward patient journeys, the same clinical evidence is delivered with emphasis on patient experience rather than purely clinical endpoints.

Bridging the Evidence Gap Through Multi-Stakeholder Dialogue

A critical challenge in pharma development is the misalignment between regulatory requirements and payer value recognition. Clinical trials are designed using validated endpoints that satisfy regulatory approval, but health technology assessment bodies and payers often require different evidence, particularly hard outcomes rather than intermediary endpoints.

Venable shared a powerful example from AstraZeneca's experience with a chronic condition therapy. The regulatory-approved intermediary disease progression endpoint wasn't acceptable to payers demanding solid heart outcomes. However, extending trials to capture those outcomes would take so long that withholding new treatments from patients would be unethical.

"We got the regulators, the payers, clinicians and patients in a room together to have a conversation about how meaningful these endpoints were," Venable recounts. The resulting dialogue revealed striking disconnects, with clinicians sometimes "literally head in hands going, how do you not understand how important this is to clinical practice?"

While the immediate outcome didn't change payer positions on endpoint acceptance, it initiated the long-term process of building shared understanding across stakeholder groups that often operate in isolation from each other. This example illustrates why early multi-stakeholder engagement in R&D is essential.

When market access teams, medical affairs, and R&D collaborate from early development stages, they can shape trial designs that satisfy both regulatory approval and value demonstration needs. The alternative creates costly delays and restricts patient access to innovations.

Insights, AI, and the Human Interpretation Imperative

The pharma industry is investing heavily in data analytics, real-world evidence, and AI-powered insights to understand customer behavior and optimize engagement. Yet without human expert interpretation, these investments can generate misleading conclusions that misdirect strategy and waste resources.

Venable illustrated this risk with a striking anecdote about real-world evidence analysis. Data showed consistent patient treatment drop-offs at six months, which analysts attributed to intolerable side effects. "You bring a patient expert in and they look at that data and they go, well yeah, you need refrigeration and cold chain and everybody goes on holiday in August," she explained.

The operational reality was invisible in the data itself but immediately obvious to patients living that experience. As Gibson reflects, "Too often we've sat in data point and go, why is that happening without asking actual customers." This gap between data observation and customer validation leads companies to address the wrong problems.

The solution requires building patient expert consultation into data interpretation processes, not just data collection phases. Roche has developed sophisticated infrastructure to consolidate insights while enabling actionable application. "We have actually created a wonderful insights platform called Before Insights Intelligence, linking to our R&D excellence program to basically identify commercial ability of our molecules," Bolognini describes.

The platform uses large language model interfaces, allowing marketers to request insights for specific strategic needs rather than analyzing dashboards themselves.

Responsive Ecosystems and the AI Transformation

The convergence of these themes points toward a fundamental transformation in pharma customer engagement. The future belongs to responsive ecosystems where customers choose their own content through AI-powered interfaces rather than receiving pushed messages through predetermined channels. Large language models connected to validated company knowledge bases can provide instant, personalized responses while maintaining narrative consistency across stakeholder groups.

This technological capability must be balanced with human insight. Emotional journey research, patient expert validation of data interpretations, and persona-based delivery ensure that efficiency doesn't come at the cost of empathy. "Delivering a seamless customer experience empowers accelerated decision making and therefore ultimately patient outcomes," Popat notes.

The companies that will differentiate themselves are those that establish governance above functional silos, co-create narratives across medical affairs and commercial teams, and engage multiple stakeholders from early R&D through market access. Technology enables scale, but human expertise ensures relevance and trust.

The pharma industry's ultimate customer, the patient, navigates a complex ecosystem involving diagnosis, treatment decisions, adherence challenges, and disease management. When companies design experiences that support patients through these transitions with consistent identity, validated insights, and responsive support, they build the trust that influences not just individual treatment choices but entire standards of care. The shift from fragmented touchpoints to unified ecosystems isn't merely operational improvement. It's the foundation for delivering meaningful health outcomes at scale while strengthening relationships across every stakeholder group that influences patient access to innovation.

To get you highlights of Pharma Customer Engagement EU faster, we are using generative AI technology to summarise the transcripts of the sessions. If you have any feedback about the summary, please contact lucy.fisher@thomsonreuters.com.

"It's the combination of the patient and the HCP journey. As the patient is living with their disease for two years, three years, the information that physician needs is very different than the patient that walks in and says, 'I have these symptoms and I don't know what's wrong with me.'"

explained Dalton.

Wall highlighted the importance of considering the entire patient journey, not just the initial prescription: "One of the things I think we don't talk enough about is that it isn't just that first script. Part of the journey is also when you stay on something, and your physician helps you throughout the entire journey."

Cross-Functional Collaboration and Implementation

Successfully implementing omnichannel strategies requires breaking down traditional silos between departments. Canlas emphasized the importance of cross-functional teams that include "the entire commercial customer engagement, commercial operations team, the brand team, medical, legal, regulatory, and privacy."

The panel agreed that involving compliance teams early in the process is essential. "Having very good conversations and transparent conversations with your compliance colleagues are just key," said Canlas. "Leaning in, bringing them in that level of inclusion earlier in any experiment that you're looking to do, any sort of journey mapping exercise, is so key."

Measuring Success Beyond Activities

When asked about the most impactful KPIs for omnichannel marketing, the panel emphasized business outcomes over activity metrics. "MBRX [market basket Rx]," Canlas stated firmly, "because that is the culmination of all of the efforts. That means that physician and that patient have made a choiceful decision to start therapy."

Wall cautioned against metrics that focus solely on output: "Often I hear my friends and colleagues talk about how much they did, how many assets they created, how many channels they're on... if at the end of the year those people write in their self-input, 'I created a lot and I did more,' then we're measuring the wrong things."

Key Takeaways

1) Patient-centricity drives effective omnichannel: "It's the combination of the patient and the HCP journey... You start with the patient, identify then who are the HCPs in that moment," said Canlas.

2) Content strategy requires fundamental transformation: "Instead of that claim, chart, and table, we need to think about five claims, three different ways to display that data, and four different charts," explained Dalton.

3) Cross-functional collaboration is essential: "It's bringing the entire commercial customer engagement, commercial operations team, the brand team, medical, legal, regulatory, and privacy together," noted Canlas.

4) Measure business outcomes, not activities: "MBRX is ultimately the most customer-centric KPI," stated Canlas, emphasizing the importance of measuring actual patient impact.

5) Consider the complete patient journey: "Part of the journey is also when you stay on something. And your physician helps you throughout the entire journey," Wall emphasized, highlighting the need to support patients beyond initial prescription.

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Discover more on this topic at Pharma 2026 (22-24 April, Barcelona) - the global collaborative network for leading pharma innovators. Visit the website here.