eDetailing meaning, strategy, and best practice

What will you learn

What is eDetailing? What benefits does it bring? How do you do it well? This guide answers the basic questions and then goes further — exploring the role that eDetailing now plays in pharmaceutical marketing. You will learn how it is changing and what it takes to meet today’s healthcare professional (HCP) expectations. At Anthill, we work with eDetailing every day. We know what works. And what doesn’t. So, if you’re new to the topic or looking to take your eDetailing to next level, keep reading. And do get in touch if you want to hear more about our work.

Sections:

• What is eDetailing?
• New developments
• Remote detailing
• Self-service solutions
• Use in omnichannel
• Benefits of eDetailing
• eDetailing best practice
• Technology platforms
• Generative AI and eDetailing
• Compelling storytelling
• eDetailing UI design
• Choosing an eDetailing agency
• Use in the field‍

What is eDetailing? 

eDetailing, electronic detailing, means digitising pharma sales content and displaying it on a mobile device. Pharma reps and medical science liaisons (MSLs) will use an eDetailer to make presentations to healthcare professionals (HCPs). eDetailing usually occurs through one-to-one calls, though presentations to small groups of HCPs is also common practice. eDetailing is also known as electronic visits, e-visits, iPad detailing, CLM detailing, electronic detailing, pharmaceutical detailing and other terms. But the meaning of eDetailing is the same in each case.

Today, eDetailing has largely replaced the paper-based communications used to ‘detail’ or explain products to HCPs in the past. While digital presentations were initially shown on laptop computers, the introduction of the iPad enabled a more engaging experience — as reps could hand the device to HCPs for increased interaction. This benefit led to the widespread adoption of eDetailing on mobile devices in the life science industry.  

eDetailing is often the primary channel for companies to inform HCPs about innovations, share developments in medical science, and train specialists, doctors and nurses on the optimal use of pharma’s products. It has long been considered essential for pharma product launches, for example. However, there are now more options due to the on-going development of digital communication technologies.

Consequently, eDetailing is now often combined with other channels, e.g. approved email, remote engagement, and on-demand self-service systems. This ‘omnichannel’ approach enables increasing sophistication in how eDetailing is used — with sessions carefully sequenced to take place when they provide the most value to HCPs.

Learn about Anthill Agency's eDetailing services
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New developments in eDetailing

While eDetailing – and pharmaceutical detailing generally – has been around for a long time, it continues to develop. In recent years, technology has opened new ways to provide eDetailing experiences. These advances enable greater efficiency by overcoming the constraints of time or geography. And they provide increased flexibility to HCPs in how they choose to engage with pharma and MedTech. If anything, these developments are now accelerating as companies become ever more fluent with technology and keen to engage HCPs in new ways.

Remote detailing

Remote eDetailing is the online form of the traditional ‘face-to-face’ detailing session. Instead of being physically present in the same room, the rep and HCP connect remotely through online meeting technology. Done well, remote detailing provides a high-quality eDetailing experience. HCPs can view content, ask questions, and engage in discussions with the rep or MSL — just as they would in a physical meeting.  

Remote detailing is now a major channel. Initially, forward-thinking companies implemented the technology to gain a more flexible and cost-effective way of engaging HCPs. Then when the COVID pandemic struck, virtual engagement became the primary way of contacting physicians. This move was very well-received. HCPs found that these channels offer specific advantages – providing access to the information they need easily and conveniently. And now doctors want to maintain or increase virtual engagements with pharma.

While remote eDetailing is broadly similar to face-to-face meetings, it does require specific strategies, skills and techniques. With more HCP engagements moving online, excellence in this channel is now a significant competitive advantage. You can learn more about effective remote strategies, technology and content in Anthill’s in-depth guide to remote detailing.

Learn how Anthill enables companies to engage remotely

Self-service detailing

A recent development that Anthill has championed is the self-service detailing concept (read our guide to self-detailing). This enables HCPs to access your eDetailing content 24/7 by making it available online in a secure and fully-compliant way. With content made more accessible, self-service detailing dramatically increases your marketing reach. It enables you to access HCPs who do not want in-person meetings. It also provides additional engagement opportunities with existing contacts, allowing HCPs to work through the content in their own time and at their own pace.

Self-service systems are a great way to get more value from your eDetailing content investments while still providing a high-quality experience. This is achieved by adding digital brand assistants to the content, powered by ‘chatbot’ technology. This technology helps maintain the guided nature of eDetailing and ensures an interactive and personalised experience. It is also possible to guide HCPs through the material with audio (voiceover) or visual overlays.

Learn more about Anthill Agency's self-service detailing

Omnichannel detailing

In the past, eDetailing would often operate somewhat separately from other channels. The rep or MSL would engage their HCP contacts as much as possible throughout the year, but there was little direct connection with a company’s other marketing activities. This has changed. The growing use of multichannel and omnichannel marketing in pharma, biotech and MedTech has encouraged greater integration of Sales and Marketing activities.  

In particular, customer journey strategies enabled companies to see their communication from an HCP’s perspective — and design engagements accordingly. Now, rather than many separate activities, companies want to provide one experience that is expressed across all digital channels.  

Far from being side-lined, the omnichannel strategies actually heighten eDetailing’s value because of its unique qualities. Meeting with a rep or MSL requires focused attention. eDetailing therefore provides an opportunity for HCPs to fully concentrate on your product story. It also enables personal discussion and the chance to exchange views and ideas — experiences that are hard to replicate in digital channels.

Consequently, eDetailing is now used to provide high-value communication at important touchpoints on the customer journey. Reps and MSLs can, for example, use eDetailing to instigate a particular sequence of channels for HCPs to explore and then schedule regular ‘check ins’ for personalised follow-up and discussion.

For global brand managers, combining eDetailing’s special qualities with the reach of digital channels also opens new opportunities. For example, forward-thinking life science companies increasingly use ‘content-first’ strategies which empower HCPs to educate themselves via digital channels before switching to more personalised eDetailing experiences later in the customer journey.

Learn more about eDetailing and content-first strategies

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Benefits of eDetailing

In many ways, the benefits of an eDetailer mirror those of other digital channels. Digitisation provides data that improve customer understanding. eDetailing increases relevance by matching specific content to individual HCP needs. And it enables you to keep content updated and refreshed more easily. There are also benefits unique to eDetailing. Done right, pharmaceutical eDetailing provides a high-value customer experience — as should be expected from one-to-one engagement. And it enables greater consistency by helping all reps and MSLs perform at the highest level.

Increased HCP engagement: Digitising presentations will produce a more engaging experience by enabling interactivity. Adding interactive elements to eDetailers will turn an HCP from a passive listener to someone actively engaged in the material. Placing these interactions at key moments in your product story will reinforce messaging where it counts and aid information retention. Being digital, eDetailing also enables more dynamic content — such as mode-of-action animations — that bring messages to life.

Efficient content management: Compared to paper materials, digital content can be changed quickly and easily. Digitisation helps the entire content management process — enabling faster content updates, aiding reviews and approvals, and speeding up localisation. It also helps compliance by ensuring that content changes can be made easily. And even enables specific slides or whole eDetailing presentations to be pulled from the market if necessary. The very efficiency of digital has, however, stretched traditional content supply chains, which were not designed to work at speed. In response, companies are now implementing content excellence processes and using tools such as Anthill Activator to boost marketing platforms like Veeva.

Consistent experience: With attention paid to content structure (see below), customer-facing teams get more than a series of independent slides. The best eDetailing content will have a storytelling strategy built into the eDetailer, enabling reps to make presentations in the most effective way. These communication techniques will be natural to your best-performing reps and MSLs. For others, having these strategies designed into the content is helpful. And with the general quality of engagements improved overall, HCPs receive a more consistent high-quality experience.

Market understanding: While you can now get useful data from PDF documents, the most detailed customer understanding will come from interactive eDetailing presentations. Each time an HCP engages with a presentation — moving a slider, playing an animation – they tell you something about their interests and knowledge levels. At a global or regional level, this data tells you where to focus your marketing efforts or where specific content elements need to improve. For the rep and MSL, the data confirms whether key messages were understood and where they should next move the conversation.

Content relevancy: If your eDetailer is designed in the right way, HCP interactions can determine the story that will be told. This can work by the system assessing their knowledge levels as they progress through a presentation. Or it works directly by HCPs ranking topics to express their interests. The very best eDetailing content then generates a relevant content pathway — that automatically unfolds in front of the HCP. On a more basic level, reps can achieve similar results with the right training by observing HCP actions and directing them to content that’s relevant to their needs.

Customer responsiveness: A straightforward benefit of eDetailing is that there are no real storage issues. That means that reps and MSLs have access to all scientific documentation, like clinical papers, at their fingertips. With good eDetailing design, this material will not interfere with the product story. Instead, it will sit ‘behind’ the main presentation, accessible whenever an HCP wants to dive deeply into a particular topic. It’s even possible to add these materials to a ‘shopping cart’ which the HCP checks out at the end of the session.

eDetailing best practices

Ultimately, what matters is the quality of the customer experience. What HCPs want from eDetailing, is what they are looking for from any form of communication: relevant information, personalised to their specific needs, and delivered engagingly. eDetailing requires getting each element right — delivering excellence in content, strategy and technology. Here you can find some best practices that ensure that you meet customer expectations and build a reputation for providing value in every meeting.

Compelling storytelling

Storytelling simply means how you deliver your content. It is the process of sequencing and unfolding your messages to improve understanding, create belief, and enable people to act. While storytelling might sound like a fancy thing dreamed up by agencies, it is an essential part of the best eDetailing solutions, being the communication methodology that underpins all your eDetailing content.

At Anthill, we apply many different storytelling techniques, including: message development, argumentation flows, logical and emotional reasoning, audience motivations and ‘warfare’ analysis. But, at its most basic, an eDetailing storytelling structure comprises three stages:

• first identify the problem
• then explore potential answers
• and finally, zero in on the solution

This ‘three act’ structure will be familiar from novels and films. It’s fundamental to how we think and so works in eDetailing too. First the HCP must understand the unique problem that your product solves. Then they need to explore possible solutions, reviewing them in the light of the specific problem you raised. If the problem was unique to your product, it naturally follows that your product is the solution. Storytelling works because it doesn’t jump to the solution. If you blast out messages, people will inevitably try to defend themselves with critical thinking about your eDetailing presentation. But if you engage them in a story, people are more open and intrigued to learn what happens next.

In eDetailing, this basic story structure works on multiple levels. It can drive the overall presentation flow. You can apply it at a chapter level. And it can be used on each individual slide. In this way, there will be one overall story (the presentation), stories about specific topics (chapters), and stories about individual messages (slides).

Clear, consistent and intuitive design

A great story needs a user interface (UI) design that tells it properly. It needs to come across to the HCP in the best way possible. Content overload, hard-to-read type, and confusing site architecture quickly turn users away. While clarity, elegance and simplicity — the hallmarks of a good user interface — enable conversations. Attention should be focused on your story, not on how to navigate through the presentation.

The UI is the foundation for your eDetailing presentation. Any UI that is too complex will push away both customer teams and HCPs. Even an eDetailer with amazing graphics, beautiful photography, and clever interactive possibilities, will fail to enhance the user experience without proper functionality. All the investments in impactful eDetailing content will go to waste if the user experience is neglected.

Good UI design is seamless, smooth and useful. At its best, it should hardly be noticeable. Achieve this by keeping things simple but elegant. Navigation should be obvious and consistent throughout the eDetailing presentation. People should not be looking around the screen to work out how to progress to the next slide. Layouts must be clearly structured, using grids and a clear visual hierarchy that focuses on the main message. Likewise, use animations and interactivity intelligently and never just for the sake of it. Keep them for key moments in your story.

As always, design for maximum accessibility. The font size, colour choices, and image clarity should meet many different people’s needs. Ultimately, attention to accessibility issues benefits everyone. It makes your eDetailing content clearer for all users. And it helps you make the right choices, providing the clarity that ensures that your messages stand out.

eDetailing technology platforms

There are many excellent technical platforms that support e-detailing. These solutions often integrate with customer relationship management (CRM) systems to enhance HCP engagement. For example, Veeva offers a comprehensive suite of channels for life sciences, with Veeva Engage being their e-detailing solution for both remote and face-to-face interactions. IQVIA OCE (Orchestrated Customer Engagement) is another excellent option.

In addition to a marketing platform that enables e-detailing engagement itself, many companies now use a content authoring solution that is designed for the needs of the pharmaceutical industry. These systems enable faster content creation for eDetailing as well as boosting content production for other channels. Solutions created specifically for the healthcare sector also include include tools to accelerate MLR — such as the ability to quickly trace the approval status of every content element in e.g. an eDetailer, and even offer ‘risk-based' MLR assistance that automatically flags potentially problematic content for closer review.

Content authoring is important in eDetailing because it makes production easier and that impacts the quality of the HCP experience that you can provide. In other words, more efficient production results in the ability to update content faster and therefore continually refresh the experience. Changes that wouldn’t previously have been made — even if they might have a big impact — because of the previous complexity, can be implemented with content authoring.

Learn more about content authoring pharma

Generative AI and eDetailing

The latest development in eDetailing is the use of generative AI to speed production. Scaling up content production has been a challenge in pharma, especially when trying to meet the different requirements of multiple customer profiles. But now AI provides a potential solution

AI systems can generate texts, images and even video with just a few prompts. The potential for eDetailing is obvious, though it needs to be applied carefully. While AI produces remarkable results, it is not infallible. It can generate content that seems plausible but is incorrect — a problem variously termed hallucination or confabulation. This is unacceptable in the regulated healthcare sector, where companies have a duty always to provide accurate information.

The ambition is to leverage AI’s potential to generate content quickly — enriching eDetailing presentations with refreshed content and enabling more personalisation — while avoiding incorrect or misleading information. The good news is that it is possible.

Anthill is partnering with healthcare companies to implement generative AI in around a simple division: before and after MLR. In this way, you can work with generative AI technologies when developing content and then — following MLR — apply different AI technologies to assemble the pre-approved content. You can also apply AI to simplify MLR reviews, enabling them to handle increased content volume. This approach benefits greatly from the application of modular content, which is pre-approved and can be assembled and reassembled in different configurations.  

Read Anthill’s in-depth guide to AI in pharma marketing

Choosing an eDetailing agency

If you just want an eDetailer, there’s no problem. You will get one. But it pays to be more demanding. Today’s standard for an eDetailing solution is one that is effective, meets the needs of many kinds of HPCs, is easy for reps to use, is delivered without any fuss, provides excellent on-going results, and is simple to update. To achieve all that, you need an eDetailing agency with multiple skillsets.

There are four main elements to the best eDetailing solutions. Presentations will have great design and UI, making it easy for the users to navigate. They have brilliant content, with the creativity and intelligence to create the right experience for all HCPs that use it. They are technically flawless, giving reps and MSLs confidence that it will work every time. And, as we believe in Anthill, they take account of the human factors so that companies and their customer teams can get the maximum value.

When choosing which eDetailing agency, it pays to confirm that all four skillsets are there. An eDetailer isn’t like any other piece of digital marketing. An agency might be brilliant at digital advertising, but they can struggle with the technical, logistical and content challenges of eDetailing. For example, the eDetailer may not be properly connected to your CRM. The agency may stumble with the complexities of global localisation. The solution might be hard to update. Or is not properly embedded in your organisation. And, while the content might look great on the surface, it lacks the depth to enable multiple engagements — bringing little long-term benefit to reps and MSLs.

More on choosing a digital marketing agency

In the field: better eDetailing conversations

Even the very best eDetailing content still benefits from a skilled and professional presenter. At Anthill, we always account for the human factor, which is a belief that technology’s full potential can only be fully realised by accounting for how people think and act. For eDetailing, a big part of this requires ensuring that reps and MSLs fully understand and support the technology and are entirely comfortable using it. That requires training. Often, little things make a big difference – such as these five simple eDetailing presentation factors that help customer teams make the right impression.

Before the call: Always dust off your device and wipe off any smudges or fingerprints. If the device was just updated or upgraded, check that everything is working correctly. Make sure that the battery is well charged. And that your eDetailing app (i.e. Veeva CRM) is in an easily accessible location e.g. the home screen. Brightness levels should be just above 50%, the screen rotation locked. Activate ‘do not disturb’ and ‘airplane mode’ if required.

Keep visual contact: Remember, eDetailing is a conversation and the eDetailer is an aid to discussion. Maintain visual contact as much as possible — being mindful of the need to switch between using the device and talking directly to the HCP so the interaction feels personal and natural.

Stay in control: It’s good practice for the rep to handle the device and involve the HCP where appropriate (usually your interactive content elements). To take the device back, just say “May I? or “Let me show you…” This keeps the meeting a conversation rather than the HCP reading through a presentation while the rep sits quietly.

Do not sit behind the device: There really is no advantage to placing yourself behind the mobile device. And if the rep or MSL do this, they will have difficulty handling the touchscreen. It’s much better to sit to one side, placing the device on a stable support so the rep can keep both hands free.

Be the focus of attention: For group eDetailing presentations, the rep or MSL should position themselves so that the audience is looking directly at them as much as possible. If using a larger screen, they should stand close to it. The rep should be the focus, not the iPad or the screen.

If your company is new to eDetailing, training is essential. And even organisations with a lot of experience are increasingly prioritising digital sales training. Continual skill development, delivered in more engaging formats, is now best practice. Small ‘bite sizes’ courses (micro-learning) integrate training into a rep’s normal working day. And it’s made more engaging with gamification and online coaching sessions.