For Chris Paquette, Founder and CEO of DeepIntent, the creation of his company is the combination of his past experiences in academic research as an engineering student and his work. “Prior to founding DeepIntent, I worked in ad-tech and later as a data scientist at Memorial Sloan Kettering, working on machine learning-based solutions,” he explained. His empathy with the patients there led to a revelation. “I often spoke to patients about how difficult it was for them to learn about disease diagnoses and treatments. I connected deeply with their perspective because when I was 12, my father was misdiagnosed with the wrong type of cancer. His gut told him something was off so he got a second and third opinion, which ultimately saved his life. Realizing how powerful machine learning could be in terms of getting the right information to people,” he noted, “and this was the genesis of DeepIntent, where everything is driven by a core belief that advertising technology can measurably improve the lives of patients.”
His company leverages a range of measurement tools from unique datasets, machine learning and advanced algorithms. All of these are making it possible for advertisers to interact with doctors and patients in a privacy compliant manner according to Jen Werther, Chief Strategy Officer for DeepIntent. For her, DeepIntent is, “A healthcare marketing platform. We serve ads on behalf of pharmaceutical companies to either physicians or to the patients,” with a marketing platform that is built on three pillars. “The first is Plan, where we have unique data sets to create custom audiences for physicians. Then Activate, Measure and Optimize where we use the unique data to plan different audiences for our clients.”
DeepIntent boasts 1.6 million NPIs where, “Every physician in the US has an NPI number that's unique to that identity and we've built out an identity graph of NPI to digital identity cookies and what we do on the patient side is we have unique data to create patient modeled audiences understanding whether this user look to have a high propensity of being a Type two diabetic (for example),” she stated.
Data is used prudently and strategically. “We source a lot of different, unique data sets to plan different audiences. This goes directly into our DSP which has been built in-house. Everything is proprietary to us,” Werther explained and added, “So we serve ads to either physicians or patients across the Web, display, mobile, audio, CTV, native, all of the digital channels, and then what we have is measured and optimized with the ability to optimize in real time towards scripts. Did I reach a patient who ultimately got a script and did I reach a physician who wrote a script whose patient actually got a script?”
Other data sets that hold great information are insurance claims and eligibility data. “We have access to medical and pharmacy claims which we use in a couple of different ways,” Werther shared. “So if I want to understand those diagnosed with Alzheimer's in the last six to 12 months, I could create a custom audience based on an ICD10 code, based on the diagnosis code, to look at medical claims and come up with the list of physicians that have the most patients with that diagnosis. Or I could use pharmacy claims to look at physicians diagnosing either my brand or the competitive set. You could tier them into high medium low. That's what pharmaceutical companies do. Medical and pharmacy claims allow us to create custom audiences using diagnosis codes and procedure codes.” All of these can also be targeted to a specific geo location, state and DMA.
For Parquette, accurate data matched with privacy compliance is paramount. “Getting the right information to people requires a degree of personalization. This is inherently challenging in the healthcare space given that regulations like HIPAA prohibit one-to-one targeting based on health data. Because all of DeepIntent’s technology is built purposefully for healthcare marketers, we build new solutions with those considerations in mind, enabling healthcare and life science companies to reach the right patient audiences in a privacy-safe way,” he stated.
Werther noted that on the patient side, “We model audiences using medical and pharmacy claims. For example, I look at patients who've been diagnosed with Type Two Diabetes and use that to create a predictive model. We’re not targeting patients one-to-one. Maybe I want to find caregivers so we have third party audiences that look at people who have engaged with Alzheimer's content. If I'm an Alzheimer's patient, I'm probably not going to understand if I'm seeing an ad on the web. I want to reach the caregiver who's doing research on Alzheimer's.”
For agencies, DeepIntent offers tools to facilitate measurement and optimization quickly. “We set up business rules to say, I want to understand this set of physicians before they see someone with a rare disease. With claims data, it already happened. Eligibility data looks at the future. I'm identifying physician who are about to see a clinically relevant patient and if you think about rare disease those patients may see that specialist once or twice a year, so it's really important that you get that message in front of the physician prior to that ad being shown,” she added.
In terms of locations, DeepIntent also has access to, “One to one mapping based on a personal email or work email. So we're taking all digital identifiers of an NPI to be able to come up with an identity graph. If I'm a doctor, I could be reached via a display ad, if I'm on CNN or Yahoo. But I also could see a message if I'm on an endemic site like Webmd or Healthline or Health Grades,” and, she noted, “We don't serve inventory on electronic health records. EHR inventory is not part of our inventory today although it could be in the future.”
Optimization is a priority and a game changer because while, “Marketers typically optimize towards clicks and impressions. What we did is build an optimization engine,” that relies on machine learning and proprietary algorithms that enable DeepIntent, “To optimize in-platform versus doing third party measurement posts for that campaign,” she shared.
When it comes to the future, Werther understands the need to innovate. “Our future plans are to continue to innovate, to be the market leader in healthcare and find new data sources. That's really my passion and a lot of the work that I do at DeepIntent is finding unique data sets to help us target either physicians or patients,” she said.
“Technology is constantly evolving, which calls for tech companies to evolve in lockstep. Since I founded DeepIntent six years ago, the company has changed quite a bit, but our core mission has remained the same, which contributes to our strong retention. Clients have the confidence that as we continue to innovate, we’re still fundamentally driven by helping them help patients,” Paquette explained.
“To me, a perfect version of DeepIntent would consist of us doing exactly what we’re doing, just on a much larger scale. When we surveyed patients last year, we found that 50% are more likely to take a treatment recommendation for something they recognize from advertising. Getting the right information to people drives awareness and fosters more open conversations with their healthcare providers, which leads to a healthier population. Contributing to that is DeepIntent’s ultimate goal, always,” he concluded.
This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com
Artwork by Charlene Weisler
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