Pharma companies that get omnichannel commercial models right have reported meaningful gains: one McKinsey analysis found 5 to 10 percent revenue uplift, 10 to 20 percent gains in marketing efficiency, and 3 to 5 percent growth in prescribers among effective adopters (a 2022 analysis, still frequently cited as a benchmark for what good omnichannel execution can deliver). Those numbers explain why so much has been written about omnichannel strategy in pharma. What's written less often is how a brand actually knows, channel by channel, whether any of this is working on physicians in the first place.
Most omnichannel planning still runs on assumption: rep visits matter because they always have, digital advertising matters because the budget keeps growing, email matters because it's cheap to send. Whether a given channel is actually reaching the target physician, and whether it's changing anything about how that physician thinks or prescribes, is a different question, and it's the one this post is about.
What "Reach" and "Move" Actually Mean
Reach means a specific, verified physician or patient encountered the channel, not that content was delivered to a list or an ad was served against a target demographic. Move means that exposure measurably shifted something: attention, awareness, consideration, or ultimately prescribing behavior. A channel can achieve one without the other. A rep visit clearly "reaches" a physician in the sense that a conversation happened, but if nothing from that conversation gets referenced afterward, it hasn't necessarily moved anything. A digital ad can be served to the right NPI-matched device and still fail to register at all.
Most channel measurement stops at delivery: calls completed, emails sent, impressions served. Few pharma organizations measure reach and movement together, at the individual channel level, using physician-reported or verified behavioral data rather than internal activity counts.
Coordination Isn't the Same as Effectiveness
It's tempting to treat "are our channels coordinated" and "are our channels effective" as the same question. They aren't. A recent ZoomRx survey of 105 US physicians found the audience nearly split on whether pharma outreach feels coordinated at all: 47% described it as coordinated, 45% as disconnected (ZoomRx). That's a real problem, but solving it only guarantees that channels are working together. It says nothing about whether any individual channel in that coordinated sequence is actually landing with the physician on its own.
A brand could perfectly sequence five channels and still be running two or three of them that barely register with the target audience. Coordination and effectiveness need to be measured separately, because fixing one doesn't fix the other.
What the Data Actually Shows About Individual Channels
Two recent physician-reported studies give a clearer picture of where specific channels succeed and fail.
Rep visits don't automatically leave something behind. In the same 105-physician study, 10% of physicians said they reference nothing at all after a rep visit. Among those who do follow up, 38% turn to clinical studies or data, 36% reference printed leave-behinds, 31% use websites or digital resources, and 30% access patient support materials (ZoomRx). The visit itself reaches the physician. What happens after it, whether anything from that conversation actually gets used later, is a separate and far less consistent outcome.
Channel count changes how much attention digital actually earns. In a Digital Tracker analysis of roughly 600 oncologists and oncology nurse practitioners, physicians exposed to a brand across two or more digital channels captured more than double the share of attention (over 6.7%) compared to physicians reached through a single channel (2.8%), a pattern that held across six oncology indications (ZoomRx). A single digital touchpoint can reach a physician without meaningfully moving their attention at all; a coordinated multi-channel presence does measurably more.
Taken together, these two studies point at the same underlying issue from different angles: reach alone is a low bar, and pharma organizations generally have far less visibility into what happens after reach than they assume.
Building a Channel Mix Around Evidence Instead of Assumptions
Getting a real answer to which channels are reaching and moving physicians requires tracking the individual channels themselves, not the campaign-level activity metrics that usually stand in for them. That means promotional effectiveness tracking that captures what happens after a rep or MSL interaction, not just whether it occurred, paired with digital and media tracking that captures verified exposure and downstream attention across paid search, banner, email, social, TV, and AI platforms.
Digital Tracker covers the digital and AI side of that picture, built from passive observation of verified HCP and patient panelists rather than delivery counts or spend estimates. Combined with promotional effectiveness data on rep and field activity, a brand gets a channel-by-channel view of where physicians are actually spending attention and where a channel is technically running but not really landing.
What This Means for Channel Planning
Pre-launch, this kind of evidence helps a brand decide where to put weight in the initial media plan rather than defaulting to whatever mix worked for the last launch, since physician research and attention patterns shift by therapeutic area and by year. Post-launch, tracking reach and movement by channel on an ongoing basis makes it possible to catch a channel that's quietly underperforming (technically active, barely registering) before an entire quarter's budget has gone through it. Neither of those decisions is possible from activity counts alone. Both require actually knowing which channels are reaching physicians, and separately, which of those are changing anything once they do.
To find out which of your own channels are actually reaching and moving physicians, get in touch with Digital Tracker.
