Personalizing the Healthcare Experience
April 22, 2024
Aletta Brandle is pushing the pharmaceutical industry in Canada to improve the connection between digital channels and deliver more personalized experiences to patients and physicians
“When I sign into my Netflix profile, the display of recommendations reflects my previous interactions and interests,” says Aletta Brandle of Boehringer Ingelheim Canada. “It’s a one-on-one interaction tailored to my needs.”
In Aletta’s view, physicians and patients should experience a similar level of personalization: “There’s no reason why the pharmaceutical industry can’t engage with them in this way. With the right technology, regulatory expertise and infrastructure, we can deliver timely, personalized healthcare messages with the objective of improving patient outcomes.” Currently the Team Lead, Omnichannel Excellence, Aletta is working with her team to connect the company’s channels and build more personalized cross-channel experiences. In certain diseases areas, “it can be difficult to locate the right audience, and effective use of digital channels is key to augmenting the abilities of the customer-facing team.”
“With the right technology, regulatory expertise and infrastructure, we can deliver timely, personalized healthcare messages with the objective of improving patient outcomes.”
After working in consumer goods for several years, Aletta first stepped into the pharmaceutical world in 2019 in a European role that had her working entirely in German. “Learning about the patient journey through symptoms, diagnosis, access, and treatment was fascinating to me,” she recalls. “I wanted to do more.”
As Aletta explains, her consumer goods background has prepared her well for her current mandate: “I brought in the lens of using digital channels, such as websites, social media, and podcasts, to deliver a connected online and offline experience and needs-based content.” Aletta’s excitement about omnichannel marketing comes through on LinkedIn, where she posts what she calls “random thoughts” on such topics as frequency planning in media (how many times a message needs to be repeated to “stick”) and pharmaceutical Tik Tok.
Describing her to-do list as “never ending,” Aletta plans to explore AI’s potential to save time and extract insights from data. Some questions she hopes to answer: Could generative AI help us speed up and simplify the PAAB review process? Could we use AI to analyze our customer data and determine which channels and messages have the greatest impact? “Come back to me in a year or two and I can share what I’ve learned when it comes to driving efficiency with AI.”