• by Les Luchter , March 9, 2026

 Pharma companies used to pitch their drugs to healthcare providers from two separate departments: medical and marketing.

They still do, but thanks to changing technologies over the past few years, the efforts are getting more coordinated.

Sanofi’s global marketing director Ridhima Sharma called the new approach a “unified customer journey” during a recent Reuters Events webinar titled “Orchestrate Medical and Marketing for Measurable Results.”

She described how it might work in practice: “In week one, a targeted email is sent by an MSL [Medical Science Liaison] about clinical study results. In week two, we could follow up with a personal MSL visit and have a scientific discussion.

“Then…from a commercial point of view, we could share digital portal access with the implementation tools. And lastly, we could have an account management for account manager follow up on some of the proactive specific solutions.”

This approach, she said, optimizes customer engagement by putting out one message instead of a “flurry” of them coming from both marketing and medical departments to the same customers.

Types of content, increasingly created via AI, are also changing.

“Clinicians now require more bite-sized learning rather than full papers,” summed up Emad Siddiqui, pharma company Astellas’ senior vice president and head, medical affairs global brand strategy. He also cited infographics, interactive posters and microsites.

There’s still a role for longer scientific documents, he noted, but their success is being judged in different ways,

In addition to such measurements as how many people attended the medical congress where a clinical study was presented and which medical journal published it, he said, “we've recently started…looking at the social listening impact of the data that we disseminate…. Health care professionals are using social media so extensively these days that they tweet, they use various forums to spread the message We’ve been using social media listening to see how many times that data has been shared and how widely it has been shared. At the end of the day, when you deliver groundbreaking data, that’s one of the things that you're most interested in.”

Another possible trend to watch, he said, was reps – whether marketing or medical – engaging in live conversations with bots. He cited a recent example of an Astellas sales rep chatting with a professor who wasn’t really a professor. “The only way we found out that it was not a real person was when the bot would stop talking, their lips would come to one static position.”

Alaa Alqraini, Novo Nordisk’s senior director, digital & customer engagement capabilities, stressed the need for clear and shared KPIs among medical and marketing.

KPIs, she said, should include “how we are executing on what we planned, how we're reaching our customer, are we engaging in the right message and right content, how we can adapt and how we can complement each other.

“Medical and marketing can really complement, and medical can have a huge role in how we…can drive impact on HCP behavior and change also the way they understand the therapy area, the drug ,and how they can give to their patient.”