Face-to-face interactions shape the backbone of the pharmaceutical industry, even in today’s new technological age. One only needs to look at healthcare professionals (HCPs) to validate this – it’s Medical Representative (Med Rep) who spends most of his time interacting with HCPs in hospitals, clinics, out-patient departments (OPDs), pharmacies and other busy public healthcare places. Meetings such as this entail physical interaction – from shaking hands to dropping promotional leave-behinds. Pharma Med Reps spend their lives driving from one hospital or clinic to another.

Now, as the world braces itself during the COVID-19 pandemic, the question remains – will the events of this pandemic shift this practice towards a remote engagement permanently or will it remain unchanged?

In a recent survey conducted by Tranz-Life, selected HCPs were asked about their preferences regarding the matter – whether they favored seeing pharmaceutical representatives in future, even after the pandemic has lost momentum? A vast majority of HCPs preferred remote engagement with medical representatives in clinics as well as patients, though the latter has proven more difficult to arrange. More aspects divulged by this study were the rising interest in digital solutions by HCPs; specifically, virtual tools that enable F2F communication.

As it stands, remote engagement has been in practice by the pharma industry for quite a few decades. However, its wider usage has not been efficiently implemented as the industry has always gravitated towards face-to-face (F2F) interaction, favoring the more profitable outcomes of courtesy and human sentiment amalgamated with marketing strategies implementation. On the flip side, too, HCPs themselves do not consider virtual interaction as a favored interface for promotions.

Still, we must ask ourselves whether these virtual tools or pre-existing social applications provide a complete alternate for pharma companies to interact with HCPs for field force (FF) key performance indicators (KPIs) and efficiencies, or whether they can be expanded on for customized solutions. For instance, can these technologies efficiently allow users to share materials, while manage the FF KPIs? How can one supervise the medical representative’s KPIs remotely for improved efficiency and quality when the premise of remote engagement itself is to avoid or reduce social gatherings?

With the exponential spread of COVID-19 globally, such remote engagement could become the new backbone of the pharma industry as it prepares its sales representatives to adhere to a stay-at-home directive without jeopardizing the company’s profits. The pandemic has accelerated the longstanding marathon towards an age of digitalization to a race, and may leave a transformative change in digital detailing, permanently. 

Tranz-Life, a CSO and its partner company Zerorange Healthcare Malaysia offer a customized virtual solution for remote engagement. It is the most simple and advance technological solution developed to engage HCPs remotely, in an effort to stay true to the social distancing initiative that is currently overtaking the world and serve beyond after the pandemic has lost the momentum. 

With the ever-increasing burden on the healthcare industry, Tranz-Life strives to provide novel solutions to the pharma industry in times of crisis, and is committed to implementing new methods of engagement to ease the transition to remote engagement without compromising the well-being of its workers.

Contact us for more details and customized solutions for your company.