Introduction

SPEAKERS:

Barry Daly, Head of Medical Excellence and Omnichannel, Sanofi
Vikram Mohan, International Director - Omnichannel Marketing & Content Enablement, Regeneron
Shelley Anderson, Field Force Effectiveness Director (EMEA), Kyowa Kirin
Stephanie Zhou, General Manager, ViiV Netherlands (Moderator)

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

• Only 28% of HCPs believe pharma engagement models meet their needs
• Change psychology requires dissatisfaction, vision, and concrete first steps
• True orchestration demands field force veto power over headquarters touchpoints
• Mindset progression metrics replace activity-based performance measurement
• Separate sales bonuses actively undermine required cross-functional collaboration

An interventional cardiologist recently showed a pharma executive something alarming: 17 medical education programs from different companies sitting in his inbox, alongside pages of webinar invitations and symposia requests. "He was being spammed by people's personalized omnichannel approach," observed Barry Daly, Head of Medical Excellence and Omnichannel at Sanofi, at Pharma Customer Engagement Europe 2025.

This isn't an access problem. It's an orchestration failure that reveals a staggering industry blind spot. Moderator Stephanie Zhou, General Manager at ViiV Netherlands, framed the crisis: "Only 28% of the healthcare professionals believe the pharma customer engagement model meets their needs, while 82% of the life science executives think they're doing a good job." The gap between confidence and reality has never been wider or more dangerous.

From Educators to Change Agents

The pharma industry has fundamentally misunderstood what field forces should accomplish. For decades, the focus remained on product education and message delivery, a model that worked when healthcare professionals had no alternative information sources.

Vikram Mohan, International Director of Omnichannel Marketing at Regeneron, reframed the core mission: "The key job of the rep over here is to create a sense of dissatisfaction with his current prescribing habits and instill a desire for change for the benefit of the patient." Healthcare professionals, like all customers, are creatures of habit. They prescribe the same therapies today that they prescribed yesterday, not because they've actively evaluated alternatives, but because habitual behavior is efficient.

Breaking through requires understanding behavioral change psychology, not just clinical data. Mohan explained Regeneron's approach: "Resistance can be overcome by three things: creating a sense of dissatisfaction with the current state, the vision of what that change would mean for the patient, and the first step that the doctor needs to take." This three-part change equation shifts engagement from information delivery to transformation facilitation.

The contrast with traditional methods is stark. Daly recalled his early days as a sales representative: "I went into this GP and I pulled out my new sales aid to show them all the details. He said, I've seen nine reps this morning telling me about this drug, I don't want to hear about it anymore."

That interruption-based model relied on repetition to wear down resistance. It worked only because HCPs had no alternatives. Today, information abundance demands facilitation of change, not repetition of messages. The old reach-and-frequency model that defined pharma selling for 140 years no longer creates value.

Orchestration Means Authority Not Coordination

The term "omnichannel orchestrator" has become pharma jargon, but few organizations have given field forces the authority the role requires. Using an orchestra analogy, Mohan explained that commercial teams have their instruments—face-to-face interactions, rep-triggered emails, closed-loop marketing—while marketing teams have theirs: HCP portals, headquarters emails, webinars, digital advertising.

"It's unique in our industry that we elevated the role of our field force to become true omnichannel orchestrators," Mohan noted. But elevation in title without elevation in authority creates orchestration theater, not orchestration reality. True conductors don't just execute someone else's score. They shape how the music is played.

Shelley Anderson, Field Force Effectiveness Director at Kyowa Kirin, emphasized that tools matter less than human connection: "It's how we connect with them as individuals that will make the difference." The focus must remain on what creates meaningful engagement for specific individuals.

The current reality often contradicts orchestration principles. Daly's example of the cardiologist receiving 17 medical education programs illustrates the problem. Each function—sales, medical, marketing, market access—operates independently, creating what sounds like cacophony rather than music to time-constrained clinicians.

Effective orchestration requires field teams to have veto power over headquarters-initiated touchpoints, input on content sequencing, and accountability for the total customer experience. Some organizations are implementing this authority structurally. Campaign management platforms now give representatives veto power over headquarters emails destined for their tier-one HCPs.

This isn't just symbolic. It recognizes that the person closest to the customer relationship must control the experience. Without this authority, orchestration remains coordination at best.

Breaking Silos Through Shared Accountability

Organizational structures actively undermine the collaboration that omnichannel orchestration requires. Anderson raised a provocative challenge to conventional pharma operating models: "Why should sales be different if we're truly actually working as a collaborative team, why should we not all have that same bonus and incentive structure?"

The question exposes a fundamental contradiction. Companies demand cross-functional coordination while maintaining compensation systems that reward functional optimization. When sales teams are measured on volume, medical teams on scientific exchange quality, and marketing teams on campaign engagement, the customer experiences fragmentation.

Measurement systems must evolve beyond activity metrics to outcome metrics. Daly described Sanofi's approach to tracking medical impact: "We've linked that to mindset so we have a clear idea from our KOLs in terms of what their mindsets are at the start of the year."

This mindset progression framework tracks awareness, attitude, and clinical behavior on one-to-seven scales. Medical science liaisons identify where key opinion leaders stand on strategic imperatives at year start, then take accountability for moving them along the progression. The approach shifts measurement from messages delivered to change achieved.

Critics note the subjectivity of self-assessment. But Daly argued that accountability creates accuracy: "Although it is subjective, they're accountable for the score they put in." If field teams collectively own KOL relationships across sales, medical, and market access functions, then metrics and incentives must reflect that shared ownership.

The Urgency of Authentic Transformation

The window for demonstrating field force value is closing. Daly issued an urgent warning: "The window is closing on field force relevance. If we continue doing what we've been doing and not moving to the next level and just talking about it, the reason for having a field force is diminishing."

This isn't hyperbole. It's recognition that expensive human capital cannot be justified if it creates the same channel proliferation problems that digital tools create more efficiently.

Technology offers enablement, not salvation. Previous attempts at AI-powered guidance failed because organizations positioned rules-based automation as transformation. Mohan reflected on those failures: "That didn't land really well with the field force because what we positioned it as was a game changer but it was essentially a rules based automation."

Current AI tools have better potential, particularly for coaching through recorded interactions and next-best-action recommendations powered by actual data patterns. But technology deployment requires proper change management addressing mindset, toolset, and skillset in sequence. Field forces need to understand why AI augments rather than threatens their relationships before they'll engage with the tools.

The panel's closing question revealed exhaustion with incremental talk and hunger for decisive action. Zhou asked what topic should be resolved by next year's conference. The sentiment reflects broader industry fatigue. Transformation requires moving from aspiration to execution, from talking about change to demonstrating measurable impact.

The 28-percent satisfaction rate among healthcare professionals represents not just a commercial problem but a patient care problem. When engagement models fail to meet clinician needs, patients don't receive optimal treatment recommendations. Field forces remain uniquely positioned to close this gap.

They are the bridge between healthcare professionals and pharma organizations. They can turn data into meaningful conversations and orchestrate experiences that drive positive change. But realizing this potential requires fundamental shifts in role definition, authority structures, measurement systems, and compensation models. The question is whether organizations will make these changes before the window for field force relevance closes completely.

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.