Tim has spent 20+ years at Publicis Sapient and is currently serving as the global leader of Publicis Sapient Health. He works with clients to reimagine their relationships with their customers to achieve better health outcomes and fluid access to health care. Tim is located in the Greater Boston Area.

When looking at the Health and Life Sciences industry, I think each segment has been impacted in different ways. Starting with the provider side, we saw them scramble as they shifted their focus to COVID. One interesting fact was that they were struggling – not only on the front lines of the pandemic, but financially as well. Providers saw significantly less income as people were postponing non-essential care and elective surgeries.

We are currently seeing a heavy investment in telemedicine to get care to people in ways that don’t require in-person contact. Anecdotally, we think patients are liking as it an easier way to receive care. We believe in the long run this will be the beginning of a lot more investment in digital as a way to improve and enhance how people experience, connect with and are cared for by the health system.

Pharma is also interesting because we’ve seen two paths taken. Some companies are in the race to come up with a COVID vaccine and have diverted many of their resources to do that. Additionally, clinical trials are struggling with recruits and the required in-person testing to move them along. This could ultimately slow down the drug pipeline in the short and potentially medium term. For existing drugs – there is a shift in how reps are able to share information to healthcare professionals. Reps are no longer walking the halls and connecting with physicians. So, the next challenge is to figure out how to leverage digital technology to enable reps to better connect and support healthcare providers. 

We have seen a quick response from Salesforce in rolling out functionality within their platform to respond to COVID. We have assisted clients in rolling out contact tracing and identifying trends of where the virus may be spreading. These measures allow our clients to make educated decisions based on data in real time.

There has also been a major investment over the past year in the Health Cloud functionality.

We have been able to create an entire patient journey starting from the moment they first engage with a provider all the way through their treatment, follow up and after care with their primary physical. All of this information is able to be captured within a single patient record allowing providers to give the best standard of care.

We are currently working with a large pharmaceutical company on both the patient and the consumer side of their business. We are leveraging the abilities within Health Cloud as well as the entire suite of products within Marketing Cloud – omnichannel, etc. By building a CDP, we will enable them to have 1:1 personalized communication at scale. The client will be able to reach out to one specific individual at a specific point in time with a message tailored to appeal to that unique individual.

For example, we can look at “Individual A” – a patient, “Individual B” – a prospect, and “Individual C” – a former patient. Each individual has a different experience with their pharmaceutical company and are at different points in their journey. By leveraging data we are able to work to target “Individual A” with one type of messaging, while simultaneously connecting with “Individual B” and sharing information as to why they may be a good candidate for this specific drug. These capabilities are only achieved by leveraging a major combination of the technologies Salesforce has in place.

First and foremost, we would like to have Salesforce across all of the sub-industry buckets – med tech, med device, payers, providers, etc. – look to us as subject matter experts within the practice. Ultimately, the goal is to align Salesforce AEs to our Account teams in partnership for the client. When everyone is working together, it leads to the best outcome for our clients, and even more so for our clients’ customers. We also recognize it is never a clean slate when we go into these large players, and we believe that we have a unique advantage to provide a seamless engagement by identifying the areas of opportunities and enhancing the end user experience.

If you look at what Ohana means to Salesforce in terms of trust, building relationships and putting customers first – it aligns with how we go to market in everything we do. I believe there is a sense of responsibility to one another and we feel that when both groups get together and blend seamlessly, we have productive conversations driving towards one ultimate vision.