Beyond Reach: How to Evaluate Point-of-Care Environments

This article is part of solli’s October series exploring  HCP and Patient Engagement. 

Point of care is one of the few channels that reaches patients and healthcare professionals at the moment care decisions are made. So why does it so often get treated as a secondary line in the media plan? 

Targeting and budget concerns play a part, but one key reason point of care isn’t seeing greater investment is the ongoing measurement debate. Too often, marketers start by calculating reach: how many screens, how many offices, how many impressions. Reach is easy to count, and it makes point of care easy to compare with other media channels.  

But the value of this channel was never the number of eyes. It is about the moment and resonating with the target audience. Nor should point of care be measured directly against channels that serve different purposes, such as paid search, which typically captures hand-raisers actively searching for information. 

Marketers need to consider the environment and timing. A branded ad may be more beneficial for a physician who is educated about the disease and is continuously making treatment decisions throughout their day. However, a patient who is still learning about their treatment options may respond better to an unbranded message that offers information and empathetic support. 

A few years ago, I developed a plan with a heavy investment in point of care and high reach across the target audience. But the same creative was repurposed across every placement, with no differentiation in messaging and no consideration for where the patient was in their treatment journey. On paper, the plan looked strong, but reach alone couldn’t tell us whether the message fit the moment. 

A waiting room screen, an exam room display, a pharmacy counter and an EHR alert can each deliver impressions. However, they have very different jobs. The patient is in a different mindset in each, the healthcare professional is more or less available, and the message lands at a different point in the decision. Two plans with identical reach can produce very different outcomes. 

Point of care extends well beyond the exam room. Marketers should evaluate point-of-care environments through three lenses: clinical context, timing within the patient visit and how engagement is measured. Each asks the same question: Does this environment help HCPs and patients have a better, more informed conversation? Let’s take them in turn. 

Clinical context 

It’s important to match the environment to the therapeutic area, the patient’s mindset and who is in the room. Clinical context is the first thing to look at, because it decides what a message needs to communicate.  

A patient in a waiting room is in a different frame of mind than one in an exam room with the HCP present or one weighing cost at a pharmacy counter. Marketers should ask whether the setting fits the therapy area: Is this a chronic condition discussed at every visit or a narrower condition where the right specialty office matters more than volume? 

Brand safety also belongs in this lens. Brand safety and compliance matter in every setting, so marketers must evaluate what content and messages surround the brand in each location. The pharmacy is a legitimate setting to evaluate, since it is where patients decide whether to fill a prescription. 

Timing within the visit 

Brands should keep in mind that different moments in the visit serve different goals. Timing is where point of care is most often misunderstood. A visit is not one moment. It is a sequence of them, and each offers a different opportunity.  

At check-in, the patient is preparing questions and filling out forms, which aids awareness and prompts questions for the doctor. In the waiting room, the patient has time and attention but no HCP yet, which suits education and priming the conversation. In the exam room, the HCP and patient decide together, so the job is to support and reinforce what the HCP is saying. At the prescribing moment in the EHR, the HCP is at the point of decision, which calls for decision support and access or affordability information. After the visit, the patient decides whether to fill and stay on therapy, which suits access, adherence and reminders. 

Different outcomes map to different moments. The key is deciding which moment fits which goal and making sure the patient message in the waiting room and the HCP message in the EHR tell a consistent story. The question marketers must ask is simple: Is the moment I’m buying the moment my goal lives in? 

This is why it’s important to map the point-of-care journey before developing creative. Decide what message should be served in each location and make sure that strategy is clear before media is secured. Rotating messages can help while testing and learning, but without a plan it can lead to confusion. Messaging should also be revisited regularly as the point-of-care landscape evolves, and everyone involved in the plan should stay aligned and transparent about the approach. 

Measuring engagement 

Measurement is where point of care earns—or loses—its seat at the table. Delivery, engagement and outcomes are three different questions, and too many marketing strategies oversimplify and evaluate delivery alone.  

Brands must first confirm the objective, because awareness, conversation and action each need different metrics for proper analysis. Engagement comes next, such as check-in tool completions, QR scans and whether the message prompted a question for the HCP. 

Outcomes are where it gets harder. Test-and-control design and script lift are the standard, but lift results can vary widely by vendor and methodology. This is why independent, third-party analysis matters, as it adds credibility to the results. Brands can also ask how lift was measured: control group, time window and matching. Programmatic buying and digital out-of-home are also bringing point-of-care screens into the same buying interfaces as other media, so ask how impressions on a broadcast screen tie to individual outcomes. 

This is why point of care can feel slower to evolve than digital. It isn’t as instant as a click-through, but it pays off in long-term ROI, and it needs its own benchmarks rather than a paid search yardstick. 

A marketer’s checklist for point of care 

Before your next meeting with a point-of-care partner, ask a handful of questions:  

• Who is actually in the audience, and how is that verified?  
• Where in the visit does the message appear, and what job is it meant to do?  
• What clinical context and content surround the message?  
• How is engagement measured beyond impressions?  
• How was lift calculated, and can you see it for a comparable brand?  
• Does the program connect to what happens before and after the visit, including the pharmacy? 

If point of care is to earn a bigger role in the plan, it has to be evaluated with the same rigor as any other channel. Reach tells you where the screen is. Context, timing and measurement tell you whether the conversation changes. 

For more on HCP and Patient Engagement,  click here.

This guest commentary piece was written by Christine Mormile, an HCP and consumer marketing consultant with more than 19 years of agency experience, including the last 11 working exclusively with pharmaceutical clients to build omnichannel media plans that reach both HCPs and patients. She is a member of the Industry Advisory Council for the Point of Care Marketing Association (POCMA) and was a founding member of CMI Media Group’s Point of Care Center of Excellence.