Filling HCP Knowledge Gaps: 2 Resources to Help Shift Healthcare Content Strategies

Healthcare marketers struggle to find the perfect mix of content that will attract and inform healthcare professionals (HCPs). Part of that struggle is determining the best way to fulfill unmet needs as HCPs quickly look for answers on a daily basis. Elsevier has discovered where the challenges exist and how brand marketers can address those unmet needs.

Filling Knowledge Gaps

Today’s healthcare professionals often find themselves lacking for suitable content from marketers when their looking for answers, revealing knowledge gaps across the industry. Knowledge gaps are a result of contributing factors such as rapidly expanding clinical advancements and more questions coming from informed patients.

 In a Taking the Pulse® survey that reached 2,784 US physicians, respondents revealed what it takes to connect with them. Key findings include:

• 70% say providing evidence-based content is critical to gaining their trust, yet 50% say healthcare companies fail to do this.
• 86% use a smartphone to access websites for professional purposes, and 41% don't visit healthcare company websites more often because it takes too long to find the content they need.

These unmet needs provide opportunities to adapt marketing strategies to inform your audience and even move leads further into the sales funnel.

Timing and search visibility are critical to meeting those needs. HCPs say when they have 10 minutes or less to find an answer to a question, they rely on the Internet – with 70% indicating that they search online daily.

To discover more about knowledge gaps and what is required to fill those gaps, access our infographic Closing Knowledge Gaps For HCPs.

Redefining HCP Education

In an era of rapidly expanding content targeting at HCPs, knowledge gaps are growing. So healthcare marketers have an opportunity to redefine what it means to educate healthcare providers.

Time-consuming administrative tasks, care complexity, and the 21st century patient constrain HCPs like never before. According to Lynn Nye, president of Medical Minds, “HCPs have only about three to four, ten-minute intervals of time each day they can devote to self-education.” This means knowledge gaps must be filled with easy-to-access, quickly digestible content that answers their questions.

In our whitepaper, Redefined: The Role of Healthcare Companies in HCP Education, Elsevier explains the challenges HCPs are facing, the delta between what is available and what they are seeking, and why credible educational content is in demand.

To learn more, download the whitepaper today.

Article Written by: Alex Brown