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Earlier this year, Rx EDGE Media Network / LeveragePoint Media acquired Brandperx. The company has now transitioned into a brand-new company, InStep Health. In an interview with DTC Perspectives' Chairman, Bob Ehrlich, InStep Health's president and CEO, Nathan Lucht, discussed ways their programs educate patients and consumers, providing brands with new opportunities to reach audiences in meaningful ways.

Bob Ehrlich: The company has undergone some very big changes in a short period of time. In less than a year, you have acquired another company, Brandperx, and undergone a full rebranding. What inspired these changes?

Nathan Lucht: Reflection, evaluation, and ultimately change are all important components of a healthy company—and imperative to performing at your peak. Before we began the acquisition of Brandperx, we had already started reflecting and evaluating, and adding new offerings to our platform. We were improving our targeting capabilities, adding digital programs, and making our data insights even stronger. When we became familiar with Brandperx and their HCP network and relationships, we thought it was a natural fit for us. It provided the perfect opportunity for us to bring even more marketing solutions to pharma marketers that want to educate patients and their providers. As for the rebranding, a new name and aesthetic is the quintessential way to break away from past narratives. We are proud of our past accomplishments from over the last 19 years, but we wanted a new name and look that would convey the excitement we felt about the new offerings.

Bob: What is behind the name ‘InStep Health'?

Nathan: During our background work, we reflected on the strong culture our company (both legacy companies) have and the relationships we have with our clients. There were a few themes that consistently resurfaced, and connection was one of them. The connections between clients’ messages, providers, patients, and consumers. We wanted to produce marketing that matters to care providers and consumers and remain in stride, in sync, and inspired by what’s next. Doctors want to be in step with the patients, and patients want information that’s in step with what they’re going through! That’s what we deliver.

Bob: How big is your network ‒ in physician offices and in pharmacies covered?

Nathan: It’s very large, which is why our programs work so well—because we can reach consumers and patients at healthcare destinations all over the country. Currently our network consists of 250,000+ healthcare providers and more than 30,000 retail locations.

Bob: What is InStep Health able to do better by bringing together services offerings at the pharmacy, HCP, and point of care?

Nathan: Great question. We are delivering brand messages to specific audiences in the physical locations when health is top of mind, and we are making an impact as they use their digital devices whenever and wherever they are. Our platform keeps clients’ products at the forefront throughout their target audience’s entire healthcare continuum.

Bob: What specific products are you offering patients at each step?  What does this network actually look like to a consumer?

Nathan: At the pharmacy, millions of consumers see our media displays in the aisles that offer prescription savings and high-impact educational materials that drive the consumer to the pharmacist or physician to find out more. In the providers’ offices in our network, they’ll see physician-endorsed activation bags and education kits filled with relevant samples, incentives, and other resources. And our addressable digital programs allow microtargeted campaigns to reach the right patients as they move throughout their daily lives.

But what our new platform has really focused on is keeping our clients in step with the consumer’s individual experience ‒ it’s what we call the iX design. We connect the consumer to our client’s brand messages throughout their unique care path with all of the tools we mentioned above, and by inspiring meaningful conversations between patients and healthcare providers for healthier outcomes.

Bob: How have you increased your technical abilities to support these networks?

Nathan: This is an especially exciting area for us! We’ve made a lot of investments in this area and we break that effort into two parts: one, using data from the pharmacy and HCP office networks to create more effective programs. And two, using digital activation programs to provide clients seamless patient reach. From the data perspective, we’ve always been focused on using prescription fulfillment data to place our clients’ programs in exactly the right pharmacies. We’ve now amped that up so that we can do that type of planning in any of our physician offices. And on the digital activation front, we now have technology that we call “Arrivals” that allows us to serve mobile takeover messages as the consumers step into our waiting rooms and our pharmacies. This technology then combines with some leading-edge capabilities in HIPAA-compliant audience targeting when patients aren’t in our point of care settings. All these pieces fit together like a jigsaw puzzle and it’s really great stuff!

Bob: What kind of returns are clients seeing within your network and how are you measuring those?

Nathan: Clients know us for the results we deliver since we have been quantitatively measuring our legacy pharmacy programs literally since day one! So, creating smarter, data-driven programs and measuring their success remains at the core of our new platform. InStep Health has built a flexible measurement approach utilizing best in class data and third-party partners to deliver metrics and insights for every initiative we execute. We can successfully measure prescription lift and ROI in stores. On average our clients see a script lift of 12% and an $8 ROI through the pharmacy alone. We also measure changes in prescribing at the physician level, OTC/CPG sales lift and ROI, increases in physician recommendation and awareness, response to digitally served ads, and digital audience composition. 

Bob: Bringing it back to all of the renovating the company has recently done, what has been the best part of this process?

Nathan: Yes, we have a great new look, and an inspired new name. But personally, to me the best part has been unifying two great companies with their individual strengths and bringing together two incredible teams of people to form one powerhouse. We know we can do really extraordinary things together, and we have just gotten started bringing them into the current landscape of healthcare marketing.

In the latest research update from the Commonwealth Fund, Harvard University, and Phreesia, analysts investigated how office visits have adapted to a “new normal” during the COVID-19 pandemic. Findings revealed a “‘cumulative deficit' in visits over the last three months (March 15-June 20) is nearly 40 percent,” with the greatest decline being in states that “had an early surge in COVID-19 cases.”

Telemedicine, which was utilized as in-person visits dropped, has begun to decline after peaking in mid-April. The use of telemedicine “remains substanially higher than prior to the pandemic” however.

Furthermore, researchers found that in the week starting June 14th, “visits to some clinical specialties, such as dermatology and rheumatology, have returned to their baseline rates. The cumulative decline in visits from the start of the pandemic is greatest among pediatricians, pulmonologists, and several surgical specialties.”

Data was collected from Phreesia's clients, which include more than 1,600 provider organizations representing more than 50,000 providers. Visits were captured from February 1 through June 20, 2020.

Click here to read the latest round of findings.

Vilifying the pharmaceutical industry has long been considered an acceptable public sport. The criticisms have been wide-ranging and near universal at times, with both sides of the political aisle taking their shots. Hollywood movies feed into and perpetuate the systemic belief that Big Pharma comprises evil executives hell-bent on taking advantage of the American consumer-patient. And critics like to point to the fact that pharma innovations have slowed while many “me too” drug sales seem healthy and robust.

In a Gallup poll published last Fall, the pharmaceutical industry was ranked as the worst industry in the US—regarded less favorably than all others, including the oft-maligned industries of oil and gas, law, and the federal government. In fact, the four lowest-rated fields were advertising and public relations, the healthcare industry, the federal government, and—pulling up the rear—the pharmaceutical industry. Personally, it’s sobering to realize that as a healthcare marketer, three out of four of these reviled sectors are directly related to work I not only believe in, but to which I have dedicated more than 30 years of my life.

But then, along came a virus, which led to a pandemic that for all intents and purposes is holding the world hostage and will likely continue to do so for the foreseeable future. And suddenly, people all over the globe are depending on the embattled pharmaceutical industry to play a vital role in the future of…well, our future. Big Pharma—and those of us on its periphery—are starting to be viewed in a very different light as the push for a COVID-19 cure has borne extraordinary innovations in record time, remarkable acts of corporate giving, and turned the healthcare industry on its head. Could it be that the villains are now becoming the saviors?

The demand for companies to band together to create life-saving meds in a crisis isn’t unprecedented. In the early years of WWII, President Roosevelt put a call out for the mass production of penicillin to help prevent infection and save those wounded on the battlefield. Nineteen companies stepped up and one—Pfizer, then a fermentation company—came forward with a way to mass-produce the “miracle drug.” Some might argue that this is perhaps when the seeds of Big Pharma began in earnest.

With all of the positive contribution pharma has made over these last 70+ years, how and when did we end up losing favor? There are very real, scathing and justifiable criticisms that can be traced back to the industry; bad eggs like Martin Shkreli, incidents of life-saving meds not being covered by insurance due to their excessive cost, and the origins of the opioid crisis arguably traceable back to prescription drugs. But how did it get to the point that these issues ultimately overshadowed the greater good that the pharma industry has contributed during the last century to advance the health and well-being of consumers? How did we become so focused on marketing the medicine that we neglected to recognize there was a need to better market our industry?

In the era of COVID-19, the pharmaceutical industry is working day and night to simultaneously find treatments for the virus, a vaccine or even a cure, and the eyes of the world are laser-focused on it. There is a higher level of responsibility and expectation than ever before and the hope for our collective future now lies firmly in the hands of biopharma scientists, researchers and technicians. Tides are turning—reports suggest that consumers are now viewing the pharma industry with new regard, with 40% of the people who responded to a recent Harris poll looking to pharma with greater trust, perceived authenticity, and a more positive view of the industry than they did before the pandemic began.

Where pharma companies must do the heavy lifting in finding the holy grails of treatment and cure, healthcare marketers have a part to play, as well. We’re in a unique position to help foster and build upon the positive momentum that this industry is creating. Unlike our marketing colleagues whose clients are in the “want-based” categories of automotive, entertainment, or hospitality, we have the privilege and charge of working within a need-based category. “Health” is an industry that will never go out of style and won’t be as influenced by fluctuations in the economy as companies and brands in those other categories. Our job is to do everything in our power to create more connectivity, utility and value through our work as the industry’s loudest voice.

Rx EDGE® Media Network (part of LeveragePoint Media), a healthcare marketing company that supports pharma marketers in reaching consumers, announces the formation of a new company, InStep Health. InStep Health provides expanded services and product offerings to better support healthcare providers and consumers. With its recent acquisition of Brandperx, InStep Health has added to its portfolio to give product marketers access to 250,000 healthcare providers (HCPs) at the point of care (POC)—the providers’ offices. The increased capabilities will give pharma and OTC partners unprecedented direct-to-patient access that complements the company’s historically strong pharmaceutical marketing reputation in the retail pharmacy.

InStep Health will leverage past successes as it addresses consumerism across the continuum of care. “Now that consumers’ healthcare habits and expectations are changing, reaching patients is more critical than ever. Our intention at InStep Health is to do our part by engaging with them during and in between critical points of care, wherever that may be,” says Nathan Lucht, president and CEO of InStep Health. “No one does exactly what we do in the pharmacy, in the doctor’s office or digitally for patients, consumers and providers. By design, this is more than just point of care marketing.”

The company’s name expresses the distinct and diverse educational scope of the firm’s products and services they provide to consumers as they proceed along their personal healthcare paths. “The name change represents our future-facing, comprehensive platform by which our pharma and OTC clients can deliver education and wellness solutions to consumers when and where they need it most,” adds Lucht.

Heightened accessibility to the 30,000+ retail locations in the company’s network delivers an individual experience “iX” to healthcare consumers seeking solutions across thousands of integrated connection points.

InStep Health combines best-in-class data with the power of relationships to educate consumers at every point of their healthcare game plan, using a strategic blending of tangible and technical approaches. Their metric-driven marketing programs serve the health and wellness community by connecting brands, HCPs, and consumers via today’s ubiquitous digital access points.

About the Company
Since 2001, more than 70 pharmaceutical companies spanning 185 brands have leveraged the power of Rx EDGE® Media Network because they recognize the importance of the pharmacy as an education and communication channel. The acquisition of Brandperx added 80 OTC and CPG brands to their client base. Now as InStep Health, the company connects consumers and patients to brands through unique online and in-aisle resources and at the healthcare providers’ (HCPs) offices. www.instephealthmedia.com.

Contact:
InStep Health
Kathleen Bonetti
EVP Marketing
(847) 879-6036
kathleen.bonetti@instephealthmedia.com
www.instephealthmedia.com