Today’s consumer is accustomed to a seamless, user-centric experience online when researching and making purchasing decisions.  In the last decade, the rise of consumerization in industries outside medicine – in transportation, entertainment, food delivery, fashion & beauty, even certain prescription products like eyewear – has pushed brands to adapt their customer experience and innovate their marketing over and over, and to offer an organized, aesthetically appealing, and informative journey through product selection and sale. Every single time.  

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Behind the scenes, brands’ marketers and analysts apply rigorous and continuous tests to improve the consumer’s journey, using real-time data to derive the most intuitive, convenient presentation yielding highest engagement.  This is happening up and down the consumer goods & services market: thanks to inexpensive software tools, everyone from solo entrepreneurs to multibillion-dollar organizations can pore over their marketing analytics and design something to attract, engage, and serve their buyer.  

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Yet somehow, the life sciences industry has lagged, and even now remains ripe for similar innovation. 

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The Lag in Life Sciences 

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Global economic and public health conditions are frustrating many Americans’ efforts to timely obtain required medical treatment. For example, Gallup researchers found a 12% increase in the share of Americans reporting that they or a family member had postponed medical treatment between 2022 and the year before, bringing the latest figure (2022) to 38% – the highest recorded since 2001.  In this survey, lower-income adults, women and children were more likely than other respondents to report delaying care.  Cost may be the primary driver, but it is not the only one:  in a report studying those patients with employer-provided insurance, respondents also cited workplace and time-related constraints.  

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Aside from rising costs, the existing model in life sciences is one of high friction and complexity. Both current and would-be patients often feel they are navigating a labyrinth of medical information, treatment options, uncertain costs, and logistical hurdles. This complexity deters engagement and hinders optimal care.

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That’s not to say that this complexity is intended, desirable, or unnoticed. Brands are increasingly attuned to the challenges of marrying consumerization and life sciences commercialization. “We speak a lot about the consumerization of healthcare,” notes Kelly Price, Managing Director at ESTEVE. “However, first we need to deeply know our consumer. Each healthcare journey elicits different consumer characteristics at different stages of the journey. Being able to get to know healthcare consumers as deeply as possible is essential, and it then empowers us to meet these consumers where they are with the tools and information that they need to further their healthcare journey."

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And brands have made real progress in healthcare consumerization, including in areas like telehealth. Numerous brands are now several years into a cycle of pushing forward with consumer-friendly healthcare capabilities, like direct integrations with telehealth providers, a practice that boomed during COVID but has persisted in the years since. Ronen Jashek, Co-Founder and COO of Theranica is quick to highlight his company’s “direct-to-consumer model, exemplified by our partnership with telemedicine providers.” As Jashek explains, accessibility and convenience – particularly via telemedicine – have been a strategic priority from Theranica’s inception. “The goal is to bridge the gap between patients and innovative therapies, making healthcare more personalized and efficient.”

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But our industry does face unique constraints that account, in part, for our slower uptake when it comes to deeply knowing consumers in the way that ESTEVE’s Price describes, and enabling the innovations found elsewhere. The regulatory framework in which life science and pharmaceutical companies operate is onerous by design, ensuring that products are marketed in a way that doesn’t mislead or harm patients or their providers, and that appropriately protects sensitive personal health data. This can make it difficult for brands to be both legally compliant and suitably prolific with marketing content, including through consumerization tactics common to other industries, like highly personalized marketing and rapid A/B testing.

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For example, if a car company wants to test whether an emphasis on safety or performance in their marketing will drive stronger consumer engagement, they can work with their agency to rapidly iterate on different media strategies and supportive content, putting them together in many different permutations across different geographic and demographic subsets to see what resonates. But for life sciences brands, time-consuming and detailed internal review and external regulatory submission of every permutation of marketing material renders such an approach prohibitively costly in terms of both dollars and time. Even scaled-down ambitions require long lead times and expansive budgets before they reach the hands of actual consumers and clinicians. 

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The result, too often, is a “one size fits all” approach to marketing and materials that leaves the consumerization – the personalization, the tailoring, the “right information through the right channel at the right time” – largely in the hands of the consumer herself. Consumers and clinicians seeking to navigate an increasingly complicated and fragmented healthcare landscape are offered only a self-guided tour. 

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Take another example: the woefully underserved rare disease sector.  Educating these patient and provider communities may actually be simpler than for mainstream products: many rare diseases exhibit heightened, specific symptoms which, if the context is known, are easy to identify and in many cases treatable. But understanding that context is critical in the rare disease space.  “We often see that patients with rare diseases have unique experiences as they navigate through the healthcare system,” notes Andrea Zide, Director of Ominchannel and Digital Strategy at Springworks Therapeutics. “The complexity these patients face requires a greater need for personalized content that better reflects their individual context. To meet their needs, we must find a path forward that allows for personalization and content scalability, while working within the promotional approvals process that is required in our industry.”

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One challenge of delivering on this vision in the rare disease space: a smaller patient population translates to a smaller overall commercial market, often with correspondingly reduced attention and funding put toward essential brand assets like disease state awareness and other patient and provider education tools.  Add in the regulatory approval process, as Zide notes, and its associated complexity and cost, and a brand may simply not have the resources to undertake more than basic marketing, let alone what is needed to fully optimize their consumers’ journey.

Marrying Consumer Technology with Life Sciences

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Since no single market player can solve the high healthcare costs that impact so many, what are the other barriers to pursuing the right treatment at the right time that are ripe for change, and that might make a difference to a patient-consumer who is already pressed for time and money, but who has yet still gone online in search of information, convenience, and, ultimately, treatment?

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At Ostro, we have a unique approach to address this lag in the consumerization of life sciences. We’ve taken deep product and engineering talent from the consumer technology sector and married it with life sciences agency and compliance expertise. This fusion has enabled us to create products that not only comply with stringent life sciences regulations, but also deliver a superior user experience.

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For example, while AI-powered consumerization is all the rage across multiple sectors – it’s getting harder and harder to avoid interacting with AI chatbots as a digital consumer – the use of generative AI in front-line consumer and clinician interactions is fundamentally incompatible with a life science regulatory regime that requires prior submission of static marketing materials. 

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While the regulatory environment is likely to ultimately adapt and evolve to accommodate the rise of AI, we cannot afford to wait passively for that change to arrive. It’s down to all of us across the life sciences marketing community to innovate around it, while remaining compliant.  

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At Ostro, we solve this by embedding AI and LLM technology into our products, developing tools that allow both consumers and clinicians to more easily and intuitively navigate and personalize their journeys, while leveraging PRC-approved materials and processes to ensure that brands remain fully compliant.     

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Specific Use Cases & Findings

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Our data show that creating a better consumer-patient experience can achieve the same outcome for a brand as tinkering with top-of-funnel targeting. Our experience here underscore the power of combining intuitive design, sophisticated and empathetic personnel, and robust technology. More practically, we have found that brands don’t always have to increase media spend to expand their market.

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For instance, one rare disease brand we work with received ~30,000 visitors / month to its site. However, only 150 of those were completing the intended consumer flow. This stark abandonment rate indicated a significant issue with user experience and engagement.  We asked ourselves, "Is it possible that the right audience is being reached, but the experience isn't intuitive enough to drive action?" By partnering with the brand and their agency, we drove improvements from 2x to as much as 17x across a range of HVAs, and saw an overall increases of 150% and 40% for CTA starts and completion, respectively.

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We’ve also demonstrated how the inclusion of live nurse navigators, part of our Navigate product, can improve consumer engagement and, in turn, drive more valuable journeys for both consumers and brands. Using third-party sentiment analysis, we found that Ostro nurse navigators were able to turn 97% of calls which started as negative interactions into positive interactions by the end of the exchange. Navigate also demonstrated that empathetic engagement could drive tangible results for brands, with a third party study showing a +200% impact on conversation for Ostro-supported consumers against control consumers across all sources of business (including new to brand, market naïve, and those on competitive therapies).

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Similarly, Tailor, our compliant and safe AI-powered search tool, uses only five lines of javascript and, yet, has dramatically improved user engagement metrics.  After adding Tailor to its user experience, one brand demonstrated a 66% increase in their top HVA conversion rate (comparing pre- and post-Tailor launch metrics).

Conclusion

The future of life sciences may never look like the glossy, frictionless, consumerized cutting edge of a Netflix, Apple, Zappos or Warby Parker.  But neither must we be satisfied with the status quo.  As an industry, we owe it to our stakeholders – and most importantly to the patients and providers that we support – to innovate and to improve, while remaining legally compliant.  Our regulatory environment will – and should - remain cautious and protective of patients’ health and data, particularly in the face of new technologies; there is too much at stake for it to be otherwise.  But there yet remains space – and for some forward-thinking brands’ appetite – to experiment and think creatively, to revisit and retool traditional approaches, and to learn and borrow from the best examples outside the life sciences on how to thoughtfully, safely, and effectively engage.  

At Ostro, we lead patients out of the unnavigable online territory of overcrowded websites and poorly-organized materials and into brand spaces which look, feel and respond to their queries with the speed, quality and aesthetics they have come to expect, and therefore are apt to trust. 

We give doctors back valuable time and mental energy, so it’s easier for them to care for their individual patients, and to illuminate more quickly what might be wrong – a particular benefit in treating diseases whose symptoms and treatments remain under-publicized.

And lastly, we help brands to develop their own version of bedside manner – a skilled, tested, empathetic way to connect – and to earn more trust and goodwill, allowing them to enjoy the bottom-line benefits that come from a positive brand association for both consumers and clinicians. In short, at Ostro, we make medicine make sense. 

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How have you personalized engagement with your target audience?    Drop us a note or join the conversation on X (@ostrohealth).‍Ahmed Elsayyad is President & Co-Founder of Ostro, and leads multiple cross-functional teams—including commercial, product, and consumer success—that work together to create more personalized and impactful consumer experiences.

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