In today’s competitive market, HCP targeting is vital to help sales leaders identify rare disease patients faster. Pharma sales leaders dream of a healthcare landscape where patients with rare diseases are diagnosed early, so sales reps and HCPs can step in quickly to start treatment. But for patients with rare diseases, the reality is often a long, frustrating journey—multiple doctor visits, misdiagnoses, unclear test results, and countless setbacks before they finally get the right diagnosis.
According to a study published by the National Organization for Rare Disorders (NORD), an estimated 30 million, or 1 in 10, individuals of all races, ethnicities and backgrounds in the United States are affected by rare diseases. Unfortunately, it typically takes 6 to 9 years from symptom onset to an accurate diagnosis. This lag between symptoms and diagnosis means HCP targeting strategies often lack the intel needed to find HCPs treating rare disease patients sooner. For sales leaders, these delays reduce market opportunities, impact patient access to treatments, and slow the rate of product adoption.
The good news? New AI-driven tools are helping to overcome these obstacles and accelerate treatment—but more on that later.
Pharma sales teams have long struggled with HCP targeting approaches, and it’s even more challenging when dealing with rare diseases. For example, most sales territories involve small, scattered patient populations whose symptoms often overlap with more common diseases. Because of this, traditional strategies like broad provider outreach, KOL engagement, and large field teams just don’t cut it. In fact, most HCPs might never even see an eligible patient. The result? Wasted time and lost revenue.
Claims and prescribing data are another avenue pharma sales teams use to inform sales strategies. Claims data include ICD-10 diagnosis codes, treatment details and costs, while prescribing data include which drugs prescribed, by which HCP, in what volume, and in what geographical region. While seemingly a gold mine of information, these traditional datasets suffer from the realities of diagnosis: Rare disease patients are often miscoded, misdiagnosed, or diagnosed so late that the window for effective treatment has already closed. In some cases, rare diseases are so newly identified that ICD codes or claims data may not even exist yet, further complicating the process of identifying and treating these patients.
But what if sales teams could tap into real-time insights, straight from the doctor’s room, instead of relying on limited datasets? HCP targeting enhanced by AI can provide this level of precision.
Data and AI-driven solutions are changing the game for pharma sales teams, making it easier to get the critical insights needed for precision HCP targeting.
Take AI platform AnswerY™ for example. This unique dataset is powered by millions of real doctor–patient conversations, which are transcribed by physician transcription companies after patient visits. All patient information is fully de-identified before being fed into AnswerY, where advanced AI and NLP tools analyze the data. Unlike traditional claims data, these raw and unbiased interactions help pinpoint HCPs treating patients with a rare disease earlier in their journey, answer the “why” behind treatment decisions, and even get recommendations on next best actions.
AnswerY uses a powerful proprietary large language model to analyze over 82 million real-world, HIPAA-compliant patient-doctor conversations across 155,000+ multispecialty HCPs. This means the outputs are not just tailored but grounded in actual behavior. Plus, the database is updated every 30 days, with around 1 million new patient records added each month, so the insights stay fresh and relevant.
By leveraging AI to analyze insights, AnswerY helps identify patients with specific symptom profiles along with their healthcare providers. This approach helps predict the prevalence of a rare disease, locate affected patients, and identify their HCPs.
This doesn’t just guide your strategy; it can help you convert high-value HCPs into prescribers, giving your team a real edge in the market.
For sales teams, the benefits are profound:
Advanced AI tools like AnswerY also shift the sales strategy from reactive to proactive, enhancing your pharma competitive intelligence strategy so you can direct your teams with confidence, ensuring that commercial efforts align with both patient needs and business goals.
Pharma sales leaders know by now that the days of traditional strategies, including hard-to-get face-to-face meetings, spray-and-pray emails, and incomplete, lagging claims data—can’t keep pace with the need of connecting patients to therapies. But equipping your sales team with insights from nuanced, compliant doctor–patient conversations can, by revealing hidden populations that would otherwise get missed. The result is a sales strategy that is sharper, faster, and more effective.
Sales leaders and teams that adopt AI-driven HCP targeting reap several benefits to help inform their sales strategies:
1. Shorten The Path To Treatment Adoption
Streamline the path to an accurate diagnosis by locating patients before they have to endure a barrage of tests, specialist visits, and misdiagnoses. This means faster treatment initiation and product adoption.
2. Accelerate Market Penetration Across Territories
Find and reach eligible patients faster, ensuring earlier adoption of your therapies. This is critical in rare diseases where exclusivity periods impose time constraints for your product, and every year counts toward peak sales.
3. Maximize Your Revenue Potential During Short Time Windows
Capture high-value opportunities sooner by accelerating the uptake of therapies that are up to 10 times more expensive than “mass market” diseases, strengthening ROI across the product lifecycle.
4. Target High-Impact Providers
Assign your sales reps and field teams to the highest-value HCPs, eliminating wasted outreach and increasing productivity toward hitting your sales targets.
5. Strengthen Payer Support & Market Access
Demonstrate that your therapies are reaching the right patients, helping secure payer approval and favorable reimbursement while reducing barriers to patient access.
6. Gain A Competitive Edge
Be the first to connect patients with treatment, securing your market share in therapeutic areas where multiple players compete for limited patient populations.
The bottom line: AI-driven platforms like AnswerY are not just tools, they are strategic enablers. By surfacing the right physicians who are treating patients with rare diseases, they help organizations achieve the dual mandate of rare disease commercialization: improving patient outcomes and delivering measurable business impact. In a market where time is critical, AnswerY is the competitive advantage needed to stay ahead.
Ready to learn how AI-backed HCP targeting can identify high-value HCPs and boost your ROI? Download our white paper now.
