Did you know the US and New Zealand are the only two countries that allow pharmaceutical companies to advertise prescription drugs directly to consumers?
That means the only way for pharma brands to reach consumers everywhere else in the world is to communicate with them via their physicians, says Harshit Jain, founder and global CEO of Doceree (pronounced “Doe-care”), on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.
Doceree is a programmatic health care marketing platform with a twist.
Rather than allowing brands to target patients on the open web – a potential HIPAA violation waiting to happen – Doceree has a specialized DSP for targeting doctors with secure, real-time messages on physician-only platforms, such as point-of-care systems and electronic health record platforms.
Put more simply, a patient with diabetes isn’t being hit with an ad for a new insulin medication. Their doctor is.
But there’s another use case for this technology: recruiting participants for clinical trials. Patient recruitment is notoriously complicated, in part, because doctors must recall the eligibility criteria for scores of different trials and recommend them to potential participants.
Jain knows firsthand how challenging that can be. Before founding Doceree in 2019, he trained as a physician and practiced medicine for three years at Northwestern in Chicago.
“In an era when we talk about artificial intelligence data, we are still depending on humans to remember everything,” Jain says. “We’re just using technology to address that.”
Also in this episode: The ethics of pharmaceutical advertising, how pharma brands can prepare for the end of third-party cookies and what the FTC’s recent settlement with X-Mode over the illegal sale of sensitive location data means for the ad tech industry. Plus, the regulatory compliance challenges ahead – including Washington state’s My Health, My Data Act, a consumer health data-specific privacy law going into effect in just over two months.
For more articles featuring Harshit Jain, click here.
