DTC's New Era of Engagement

In the past few years, drugmakers, including those in Big Pharma, have been turning to direct-to-consumer (DTC) platforms at an increasing rate. This has attracted attention notably of late in the online pharmacy space. For example, at the start of 2024, Eli Lilly announced the launch of LillyDirect, a platform designed to deliver medications, such as its GLP-1 agonist Zepbound for weight loss, directly to customers’ front doors. Then in March, Lilly unveiled that it was partnering with Amazon to distribute a number of its drugs through Amazon Pharmacy.

Following suit in August, Pfizer launched its own DTC digital platform called PfizerForAll. According to the company, the new platform offers access to same-day teleheath appointments, Rx home delivery, and vaccination scheduling.

With this trend poised to continue growing in 2025, Pharmaceutical Executive sat down with Theresa Greco, chief commercial officer at OptimizeRx, to discuss other developments that are shaping what appears to be a new era in DTC on the healthcare front.

Theresa Greco

“There are three that I believe are the most relevant: the emergence and continued growth of privacy and compliance, the proliferation of data, and the application of technology to that data,” says Greco, adding that those three trends in particular have impacted how OptimizeRx conducts business. The technology company specializes in providing digital health messaging via electronic health records, enabling a direct channel for biopharma companies to communicate with healthcare providers (HCPs) and patients.

Concerning the issues of privacy and compliance, Greco explained: “Historically, the industry tends to self-regulate, which we’ve seen when pharma guidelines came out in the late 1990s and 2000s, when the Sunshine Act and the Affordable Care Act came out, and with the fact that the industry has been HIPAA-compliant for a long time. In addition to HIPAA, consumer protection laws are now effective in 17 states, affecting roughly 50% of the US population. By the end of 2026, more than half of the country will be operating under a consumer protection law. It’s very important as a trend to monitor because any marketing entity that is trying to engage consumers needs to be stringent and make compliance with privacy a No. 1 priority.”

Artificial intelligence is also playing a big role in the emergence of these DTC models, which are all leveraging the boom in data proliferation in recent years. “We produce about 4.3 million terabytes of data daily," says Greco. "I heard a news report say that the amount of data that we generate in two days in 2024 is about the same that it would have taken us 20 years to generate in the past. So, the growth of data and technology both create huge opportunities."

She cites the ability to tap multiparty data to better understand patient profiling as an example. Multiparty data is a combination of first-party data collected by an entity itself; second-party data, which can be purchased from surveys and interviews; and third-party data such as healthcare claims. "Blending those types of data together can have a lot of meaning when it comes to targeted messaging, but use of the data must be treated with the upmost caution to ensure the privacy element,” says Greco.

As far as efforts to enhance personalization and relevance through new DTC approaches, she believes that the messaging must always have one clear criteria: timeliness—specifically the information delivered to a patient or caregiver within the appropriate timeframe. “We actually worked with a third-party to do some research earlier this year, where we included over 170 physicians,” notes Greco. “The biggest finding was that the HCPs interviewed saw a huge opportunity to align messaging for patients and doctors. It’s the idea of getting the content to the patients at the right time, which really helps create meaningful conversations at the point of care and cut out some of that noise.”

This increased focus on personalized and timely messaging was fueled significantly by the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent rise in telehealth compared to traditional in-person appointments.

“With the changing healthcare experiences, our primary role within the marketplace is really on audience creation, whether that’s the healthcare provider audience or direct-to-consumer audience, and then allowing the ability for brands to work with that output for media activation, whether we’re doing that for them or someone else is,” says Greco on OptimizeRx's support in this area. “Looking at how privacy and personalization is so important, I feel like we’re meeting the demands of the market and emerging needs by creating these DTC audience data that is really meeting the needs to create a number of different channels.

Moving forward, Greco believes that the industry and its service partners will be ready to help usher in more novel DTC models.

“While we don’t engage directly with telehealth partners, we are available to create content for audiences that are relevant and meaningful,” she says. “The market will continue to evolve and create new opportunities for patient engagements. Data is going to continue to be a major part of that engagement."