-1-1.webp?width=640&height=360&name=Nurses%20Discussing%20in%20Hospital%20Hallway%20(1)-1-1.webp)
How AI Helps Pharmaceutical Marketers Engage Beyond Physicians to Reach Today’s Collaborative Care Teams
As healthcare delivery increasingly shifts toward collaborative care teams, nurse practitioners (NPs) and physician associates (PAs) are diagnosing patients, managing treatment plans and prescribing therapies across nearly every specialty. Yet pharmaceutical engagement strategies remain largely physician centric.
To help marketers better understand and engage today's collaborative care teams, IQVIA Digital developed the industry's first AI-powered full care team audience. The solution enables pharmaceutical marketers and agencies to identify and reach expanded clinician audiences who are actively delivering patient care.
By combining IQVIA Digital’s healthcare data and proprietary healthcare-grade AI capabilities with NP/PA intelligence from POCN Group, an IQVIA Digital company — acquired in December 2024 — the company can now reveal the full care teams behind prescribing and patient management and their specialties, enabling more accurate and precise healthcare professional (HCP) audience targeting.
“NPs and PAs often practice across multiple therapeutic areas and care settings, making them difficult to classify using traditional data,” said Eric Lloyd, Chief Revenue Officer at IQVIA Digital. “By applying AI to data like real-world claims and prescribing patterns, we can define their true clinical focus and teams, helping pharmaceutical marketers avoid guesswork and engage the right providers more effectively to improve patient outcomes.”
POCN Group data shows NPs and PAs write 35% of all U.S. prescription claims each year across a range of specialties, but the industry often reflects a common undercount when NP or PA prescriptions are billed under a supervising physician. As a result, NPs and PAs have largely remained a hidden audience in healthcare marketing strategies.
AI is the foundation of IQVIA Digital’s ability to accurately understand and classify NP and PA specialties. IQVIA Digital applies proprietary, healthcare-grade AI models to continuously analyze HCP affiliation, education, Rx and Dx, practice and behavioral data to infer each clinician’s true clinical focus with a high degree of precision.
This AI-driven intelligence is dynamically updated within the HCP profile and cannot be reliably captured through traditional static datasets or physician-reported information, particularly as NP and PA roles evolve and span multiple therapeutic areas and care settings. Using these same AI capabilities, IQVIA Digital also maps NPs and PAs to supervising physicians and the broader care team, creating a comprehensive view of care delivery. This enables life sciences organizations to move beyond generalized classifications and align engagement strategies with how modern, team-based care is actually delivered:
- Reach the full care team, including physicians, nurse practitioners and physician associates, and others.
- Identify high-value clinicians previously overlooked in traditional HCP datasets and accurately map them to their true clinical specialties.
- Understand true prescribing influence through AI-driven attribution models.
- Map clinician collaboration and uncover patterns across practices and health systems to reveal how care teams operate.
“POCN has always focused on understanding how NPs and PAs think, practice and make decisions, informed by ongoing engagement with the community,” Carmen Mazzatta, Co-Founder of POCN Group, an IQVIA Digital company. “Integrating that perspective with IQVIA Digital’s AI and analytics capabilities strengthens how our customers can understand and support the full care team.”
Click here to learn more about NP and PA marketing.
