EPG Health’s pioneering approach to digital medical education – valued highly by healthcare professionals (HCPs) and tailored for pharmaceutical industry sponsors – has been recognised with a prestigious award.

The company was delighted to win the Most Innovative Digital Experience award at Opticon London in November 2022 for its independent learning environment, Medthority (www.medthority.com). Other winners of cross-industry awards at the ceremony included media giant Channel 4 and motor vehicle manufacturer Mazda, placing EPG Health in good company. 

The accolade recognises the boundary-pushing platform’s advanced functionality and celebrates its user-centric experience, which is designed to support better treatment decisions and patient outcomes by making it easy for HCPs to discover critical medical information, aligned to their specialty. 

 

As a business founded on the principle of bringing digital innovation to healthcare information and education, we were absolutely delighted to win this award. It is hard to overestimate the meaning of this win for the business and the entire team of cross-functional experts, who have worked tirelessly to bring Medthority to reality and continuously develop the website for our audience of healthcare professionals

By applying forward-thinking technology and providing a stimulating and inspiring user experience, we are able to quickly serve relevant and trusted content to our users based not only on their persona and interests but also their previous interactions on our website and the behaviours of other doctors ‘like them’. This is a ground-breaking approach that we feel sets the standard in global healthcare information and education.

Chris Cooper, Founder and CEO, EPG Health 

ADDRESSING THE CHALLENGES

EPG Health’s mission with Medthority is to address the challenges of both HCP audiences and pharmaceutical industry partners by easing the discovery and consumption of valuable medical information to support better outcomes for all stakeholders.  

Providing real value through digital HCP engagement has long proven to be a stumbling block for pharma. Our most recent research highlighted this as a major challenge facing 77% of companies, while over two-thirds also struggle with delivering HCP and patient outcomes.[1] 

Part of the difficulty stems from a lack of digital maturity among pharma’s own medical education channels, with just a third of companies considering their digital HCP engagement to be ‘sophisticated’ or ‘mature’.[2]

This challenge comes on top of the fact that HCPs feel most comfortable placing their trust in independent content, which is perceived as being more credible and of greater worth than industry-produced information. They rate third-party platforms significantly higher in value to their clinical practice than those that are pharma-owned; 82% describe the former as critical or very important versus just 40% for the latter. [3] 

“Our customers recognise the importance of making the scientific argument for a particular treatment approach, and doing so in a credible and independent environment away from the background noise of advertising and overt promotion,” says Chris Cooper, Founder and CEO, EPG Health. 

Backed by a 20-year heritage in the evolution of a both independent and digital platform, EPG Health is inherently well-placed to deliver value, and delighted to have our innovative approach recognised and validated. 

 

A PERSONAL TOUCH

In creating our award-winning website, multistakeholder research and EPG Health’s own extensive real-world experience identified demand for personalised content delivery in order to reach, and meaningfully engage, time-poor but digitally savvy HCPs in an information-saturated marketplace.  

As a result, Medthority is designed to present users with the most pertinent content based on their profile, search behaviour and peer activity. Developing such advanced functionality is far from simple and EPG Health decided to collaborate with a leading specialist software company to draw on in-depth technical knowledge and drive innovation. 

With a keen focus on the digital user experience, a Platform-as-a-Service approach was selected to leverage sophisticated artificial intelligence and machine learning enabled personalisation. EPG Health is building a fully immersive digital ecosystem in an infant digital marketplace.

 

Given the competition for time in a healthcare professional’s busy day, we do the hard work for them by leveraging ‘hyper-personalisation’, combining real-time data with AI processing to provide a personalised user experience

This involves surfacing relevant content suggestions and tailored content journeys, including ‘your peers are looking at’ and ‘recommended reading for you’ style recommendations in conjunction with sequencing of key educational messages. We base this on the user’s profile, behaviour and content consumed which are intrinsically linked to generating good engagement

Selena Smith-Taylor, Digital Project Manager, EPG Health 

 

 

User feedback demonstrates impressive outcomes which – for pharma companies sponsoring content on the platform such as our flagship Learning Zones – are helping to address key engagement challenges experienced by the wider industry.  

An overwhelming 96% of HCPs say Medthority eases their discovery of medical information and 90% report that engaging with information on the site helped support their treatment decisions.[4]  

MEASUREABLE OUTCOMES

Development of the innovative digital experience offered by Medthority is allowing EPG Health to maximise HCP engagement, show them the right information at the right time and successfully demonstrate the delivery of Key Educational Messages (KEMs). 

Improved data capture underpins Medthority’s personalisation capabilities and provides enhanced behavioural insight to track user journeys through these KEMs, aligned to agreed educational objectives. This helps to solve another of pharma’s major challenges – demonstrating impact and ROI. 

By driving the right audience to the most important educational material, and measuring their engagement and learning, EPG Health is able to confidently feed back to clients on key message consumption, knowledge gain and behaviour change in practice (or intention of). 

Chris Cooper says: “By enabling and facilitating – through Medthority – doctors to self-serve critical medical information, our pharma clients are both underpinning their relevance to their target markets and positioning themselves as trusted partners in healthcare, empowering doctors to make the best and most appropriate treatment choices, and ultimately improving patient outcomes.” 

Further upgrades to the platform are planned throughout 2023 to improve upon the way engagement outcomes are measured and reported, providing even greater detail to our partners on the impact of sponsored activities. 

To learn more about how our award-winning platform can help reach intended HCPs, engage them with valuable content and measure the outcomes, see EPG Health’s solutions or book a meeting. 

 

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[1] The Gaps Between HCP Demand and Pharma Supply of Medical Information, p43

[2] The Gaps Between HCP Demand and Pharma Supply of Medical Information, p40

[3] The Gaps Between HCP Demand and Pharma Supply of Medical Information, p14

[4] 2022 feedback survey of Medthority users