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4 minute read
Physicians are split almost exactly down the middle on whether pharma outreach feels coordinated: 47% say it is, 45% say it isn't, and the remaining 8% say it depends on the company. That near-tie is itself the finding. Coordination isn't the norm, it's a coin flip. And what physicians describe as "disconnected" isn't a complaint about too many channels or too much contact. It's a memory problem: no touchpoint acknowledges the one before it.
That finding comes from "What Earns HCP Time," led by Chitra Alagarsamy, Product Owner for Promotional Effectiveness Tracking at ZoomRx, a life sciences market research consultancy serving pharma and biotech brand teams. Most commercial teams already run genuinely multi-channel programs, rep visits, email, digital, virtual, MSL touchpoints, all active at once. That isn't the gap. The gap is whether any of those touchpoints know what the last one said.
Coordinated or Disconnected? Physicians Are Split Almost Down the Middle
Asked directly whether pharma's multi-channel outreach feels coordinated or disconnected, physicians split three ways:
- 47% coordinated: consistent message across channels, each touchpoint builds on the last
- 45% disconnected: channels operate in parallel, no touchpoint acknowledges the previous one
- 8% mixed: varies by company, some well coordinated, others not
- Right channel at the right time, 30%
- Follow-up continuity, 27%
- Personalized or relevant, 14%
- Seamless across teams, 9%
- Consistent messaging, 6%
One oncologist at an academic medical center described exactly what the disconnected experience looks like in practice: "Mostly disconnected. I'll attend a panel at ASCO, hear something compelling, and then a rep shows up two weeks later with no awareness that I was even there." A neurologist at an academic medical center put it more bluntly: "It feels disconnected, disjointed, like the right hand doesn't know what the left is doing."
What "Disconnected" Actually Means to Physicians
The near-even split matters less than what's behind it. Physicians who described the disconnected experience weren't complaining about contact frequency or channel count. Every account pointed to the same specific failure: nothing referenced what came before it. A rep didn't know the physician had just attended a relevant conference session. An email didn't acknowledge a question already raised in a prior visit. Each touchpoint arrived as if it were the first one.
That pattern points toward a data-sharing gap between field, digital, and medical teams, not a fundamental flaw in having multiple channels in the first place. Whether those channels are even being counted consistently is a related but separate question, one covered in ZoomRx's 5 questions to ask about your promotional effectiveness tracker, which looks at how personal and non-personal touchpoints, including email and digital, get folded into a single sample. Here, the question isn't how those touchpoints get counted, it's whether they know about each other at all.
What Coordination Actually Looks Like
When physicians described what a well-coordinated experience does look like, the answers centered on continuity rather than sophistication:
The top two answers describe the same underlying need from two angles: each touchpoint should build on the last. One oncologist framed it as a matter of intent: "A well-coordinated experience involves each person who contacts me knowing what was discussed before, and having a specific motive in mind." A neurologist described the version that actually earns trust: "The best experiences I've had are when the rep, the MSL, and the emails are all referencing the same clinical question I raised. That tells me there's a real team behind this product." Whether MSL programs specifically are set up to hold that kind of continuity is explored further in ZoomRx's research on rethinking MSL impact.
The operational implication is straightforward: coordination requires shared interaction memory across field, digital, and medical teams. Aligned messaging alone doesn't produce it.
Not Every Channel Should Do the Same Job
Part of what breaks coordination is treating channels as interchangeable when physicians clearly don't experience them that way. In-person visits earn substantive engagement, the kind of conversation that introduces something genuinely new. Email and digital serve follow-up and updates well, reinforcing what's already been raised. Virtual touchpoints handle scheduling and routine business efficiently. A strategy that swaps these roles, leaning on digital to carry relationship-building or under-resourcing in-person for new introductions, is optimizing the wrong channel for the job physicians actually want it to do.
The question worth checking against your own channel strategy: if a physician could trace their last three touchpoints back to your organization, would each one reference what came before it, or would each one read like the first contact they've ever had?
This data is drawn from ZoomRx's "What Earns HCP Time" study, led by Chitra Alagarsamy, ZoomRx's Product Owner for Promotional Effectiveness Tracking, surveying 105 US physicians in 2026. The full report is available as an ungated resource below:
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