Patients and providers often engage with health content during overlapping time frames. When HCPs and consumers are aligned, behaviors change and brands grow. While many marketers see HCP and DTC alignment as ideal but difficult to execute, the landscape is shifting.

With the trend toward health consumerization, today’s patients are more informed, empowered, and proactive. Today, 60% of Americans get more medical info online than from doctors (Merck), but many feel overwhelmed and confused by the sheer volume of evolving health content. Consumers now cross-check sources, prioritize “what works for someone like me” relevance, and come to appointments already informed, often driving the treatment conversation.

Still, providers and hospital systems remain the most trusted information sources (McKinsey, 2024), meaning digital-first discovery still needs validation from credible medical authorities.

When consumers ask for a brand and HCPs are already aligned on its clinical value, prescriptions increase. Programmatic strategies like PulsePoint’s that coordinate touchpoints across both audiences can deliver the scale, trust, and impact needed to drive action.

How to Align HCP and DTC Healthcare Marketing

Patients and providers move fluidly through the healthcare journey. Patients come and go based on symptoms, diagnoses, and life events, and providers based on new data, evolving guidelines, and clinical experience. 

To influence behavior on both sides, healthcare brands must move beyond siloed efforts and adopt a unified, real-time approach to HCP and DTC marketing. That starts with investing in health-specific programmatic technology that enables precision, agility, and scale. By activating campaigns based on real-time condition signals, content behavior, or HCP clinical activity—and dynamically adjusting spend, targeting, and creative—brands can keep both audiences in sync as they move through their decision-making journeys. 

Executing this effectively requires four foundational capabilities:

• Precision Targeting – Reach the right audiences. Use real-time health signals and behavioral insights to reach the most clinically relevant, engaged consumers and the HCPs most likely to treat them.
  
• Omnichannel Execution – Deliver responsive messaging. Execute a smart media mix HCPs and consumers actually use, including display, CTV, OLV, native, and more, to ensure engagement regardless of where the audience is spending time. A smart media mix ensures you’re maximizing reach through non-endemic and endemic environments. 
• Measured Media Effectiveness – Measure what matters. Metrics like NRx lift, ROAS, HCP engagement, and deduplicated audience performance provide a full view of health journey impact.
• Adaptive Optimizations – Use dynamic insights to drive data-driven adjustments to campaigns in real time, including fine-tuning messages, targeting, channel investments, and creatives to maximize performance.

When executed well, this HCP-to-DTC crosswalk improves marketing efficiency and directly influences patient outcomes and brand growth.

A Real-World Example of Impact

Butler/Till, a leading marketing agency, activated an HCP/DTC omnichannel campaign powered by PulsePoint’s health-first programmatic platform to elevate a gastroenterology brand facing low consumer awareness despite clear clinical advantages.

On the HCP side, the campaign focused on precision targeting and positive prescribing outcomes. Using PulsePoint’s DirectMatch™ technology, the team validated and reached individual HCPs with relevant prescribing activity. To expand beyond the existing target list, Clinical SmartLists™ were used to identify additional providers actively treating the condition or engaging with related brand content. Sequential messaging played a key role in nurturing HCP engagement, retargeting brand site visitors, and tailoring outreach based on behavioral signals to move them closer to prescribing action.

On the DTC side, the campaign centered on contextual relevance and intent-based targeting to drive consumer engagement. PulsePoint’s Health Pages and Health Populations (Plus) were used to identify high-intent users actively consuming condition-related content across the web. To further improve precision, the team built Bespoke Audiences™ using deidentified claims data, targeting audiences with a higher likelihood of condition prevalence. Campaign scale was expanded through integrations with leading third-party audience providers. Brand site visitors were also retargeted to reinforce awareness and deepen consideration along the path to action.

The result? Coordinated exposure met consumers in discovery mode and ensured HCPs were primed to prescribe, creating a powerful crosswalk and connected care journey that drove measurable impact through aligned engagement.

According to a leading independent pharma measurement firm, this integrated campaign delivered the largest NRx lift to date for the brand. It’s being touted as the most successful campaign in the brand’s history. In just six months (January–June 2024), the campaign showed significant scale and brand impact, delivering a positive ROAS of 4.32 across consumer audiences and 6.48 across provider audiences.

Curious what success looks like? Download the full case study here. 

Why the HCP-to-DTC Crosswalk Matters More Than Ever

Healthcare journeys don’t unfold in silos. Patients research, providers prescribe, and, increasingly, their decisions influence one another. That’s why an aligned HCP-to-DTC strategy is no longer a nice-to-have; it’s essential.

When brands guide both sides of the prescription conversation, they build clinical confidence and consumer demand in tandem. With the right data, creative, and channels activated, marketers can deliver synchronized experiences that move audiences toward action. As the success of PulsePoint and Butler/Till’s campaign demonstrates, the most impactful healthcare strategies aren’t linear—they’re crosswalks. And when executed well, they lead to something far more powerful than engagement: measurable outcomes.