How Can We Ensure Ethical Use of AI in Pharma Marketing?

In this Pharmaceutical Executive video interview, Angela Tenuta, President, Full Service Agencies, at EVERSANA INTOUCH, explores the findings of their study What Matters Most: The Trends That Will Shape Pharma Marketing In 2025. Tenuta emphasizes the importance of embracing AI as an innovation and highlights specific examples of how AI is being used to improve efficiency and effectiveness in marketing campaigns. The discussion also discusses the ethical considerations associated with AI, particularly regarding patient privacy and data security. The conversation also touches on the growing importance of direct-to-patient (DTP) models and the challenges and opportunities associated with globalization in healthcare, emphasizing the need for cultural sensitivity and adaptability in global marketing campaigns to effectively reach diverse audiences.

Are there any specific areas where you see the most significant ethical concerns related to AI in pharma marketing? How can these be addressed?

Ethical concerns are very real with AI. I think we all have a hope that policy might come in and give us some regulation and some ground rules, but that's very likely not coming, so it's something we all have to spend a lot of time on and come to some standards for each individual organization. The biggest problems within healthcare really center around privacy.

I think there’s two parts of privacy, first and foremost, patient privacy, biases and algorithms or misuse of data for targeting or just decision making within these tools can really start to identify patients in a way that we don't want happening and disrupt a little bit of their decision making or basic path with their HCP, so that that's a piece Nobody wants a part of. And we really have to be vigilant to ensure what we're doing doesn't get that far. The second kind of wing of privacy, I think, that we're all struggling with, is related to strategies and proprietary information in a very competitive marketplace that we don't want getting out.

So, if we're asking a standard place a bunch of prompts that's getting at pre-launch strategies or differentiation between drugs, that's another part that we have to make sure we continue to build protections around. So, if we can keep kind of both of those patient identification targeting content along with protecting our sound strategies and our IP those two pieces solved, we can then, you know, adopt all of the wonder that AI will bring us.