Great HCP portals are good for business: How thoughtful design drives ROI

While the idea of HCP portals—sometimes called MedInfo portals—is exciting, the experience can often be disappointing. Many pharma companies report low engagement, and healthcare providers (HCPs) often say they’re frustrated using pharma-sponsored portals. 

Investing in your HCP portal can feel like a lot of work just to provide a slightly better user experience. After all, most HCPs are just looking for information—if you have the required data on your site, why should you invest further?

After years of designing effective HCP portals, we’ve seen our partners experience tremendous results when providing a better experience for healthcare providers. A thoughtfully-designed MedInfo portal can help HCPs deliver better patient outcomes and strengthen the relationship between healthcare professionals and pharma companies. 

Whether improving an existing portal or building from scratch, your company can benefit from investing in UX and content strategy within your MedInfo portals.

A closer look at HCP portals

When we refer to HCP portals (or MedInfo portals), we’re talking about websites built and maintained by pharma businesses to share product information and engage with customers. The content on these portals varies. There is usually both promotional and non-promotional content—and choosing the right balance is critical.    

Content on MedInfo portals should strengthen relationships with HCPs, increase digital engagement, and help healthcare providers feel both supported and informed. 

There are many ways that a thoughtfully-designed portal can be an asset to your business. Here are three of the top benefits we’ve seen.

Increased efficiency

One of the primary benefits our partners have experienced when they invest in their HCP portals is the increased efficiency that comes with improved team collaboration.

A structured content model and governance process—two critical components to a comprehensive content strategy—help streamline legal, medical, and regulatory reviews, allowing your organization to publish content much more quickly. And setting up your content management system (CMS) with built-in safeguards and best practices translates to easier and more efficient content creation—not to mention better relationships between your brand, medical, and review teams.

Containing all of your medical content and product information in a single repository also supports a “write-once, publish everywhere” strategy—which is especially valuable for organizations maintaining separate content databases. You can streamline your processes to flow from a single database of content that can be used to create web pages in your portal, medical response letters, call center verbatims, healthcare information, and chatbot responses.

Reduced operational costs

While an effective portal serves as a “front door” for HCPs, providing a one-stop shop for users, there are other operational benefits. The single most important internal benefit is that your organization now has a scalable tool for responding to requests in a compliant manner, reducing the time needed to respond individually to common requests.     

Content contained within a singular repository also lessens the cost of maintaining multiple platforms. Having one source of truth makes it easier to review content as labels change, and reduces the resources required to ensure content is reviewed in a predictable schedule.

With less and less time to see patients, healthcare professionals increasingly rely on digital methods when seeking medical information. They often resort to human-to-human interactions only when they can’t find the data they need. While it’s valuable to provide healthcare providers with the ability to speak to your team members directly, you can dramatically reduce call center volume by offering more comprehensive information through your digital portals.    

Value for employees and healthcare providers

At Think Company, we focus on improving customer and employee experiences through enterprise-scale digital platforms. A MedInfo portal ties these two experiences together, allowing you to improve both at once. Ideally, a mature portal can also replicate many typical face-to-face activities between HCPs and company reps—benefitting both groups at the same time.

Developing a sophisticated measurement strategy for your portal analytics can also provide insights to your brand and medical teams. Analytics can reveal market trends by tracking keywords leading to your portal, keywords used within your portal, and user behaviors connected to those keywords. For example, a trend in abandoned search terms may provide insights into competitive products or unknown interactions with new products on the market.

Some organizations’ regulatory needs require they gate more sensitive information behind a login to ensure compliance. If your portal falls in that category, the user experience can be effectively tied to your organization’s CRM, providing insight to marketing teams and empowering them to do “next-best-action” marketing. This means that your portal captures analytics that can point to the logical next step for users based on activity and queries, and provides you with the data to create a better customer experience in the future.

A portal with a user login also allows you to customize the user experience for different HCP roles, providing customized service to general practitioners, specialists, nurses, retail pharmacists, institutional pharmacists, office staff, and other healthcare professionals.

Elevate the ROI of your HCP portal today

HCP portal investment can seem like a low-priority investment. As long as you have the required info on a landing page, what’s the benefit of devoting precious time and resources to building a complex portal? 

We’ve partnered with pharmaceutical companies to build effective MedInfo portals since our foundation in 2007. Throughout that history, we’ve facilitated hundreds of discussions with HCPs about their needs and preferences, and navigated the complex regulatory and legal environments our clients operate in.      

Our partners have experienced greater efficiency and improved team collaboration, reduced operational costs, and driven value for HCPs—and themselves. Whether you’re improving an existing portal or building from scratch, these benefits are available for your organization when you invest in UX and content strategy for your HCP portals.    

Have a question about your upcoming HCP portals or site project? Chat with experts from our team.