
The Situation
A top 10 pharmaceutical company wanted to launch a direct-to-consumer (DTC) campaign to promote its drugs directly to patients in three therapy areas (obesity, diabetes and migraine). The client realized that telehealth is an important and emerging channel for health services delivery to patients in the post-COVID era.
The client’s primary objective was to assess how telehealth is being used by patients and healthcare providers (HCPs), assess the drivers of and barriers to telehealth and identify telehealth user segments (patients and HCPs) within each of the three therapy areas of interest.

The Solution
Factors influencing a patient’s use of telehealth can be difficult to assess. There are personal factors (preferences, inability to travel) and external, systemic factors. Additionally, the drivers of and barriers to telehealth use in patients are unlikely to be identified from administrative claims data alone and require an in-depth understanding and consolidation of social determinants of health. Each of these factors may also differ between various therapy areas.
EVERSANA collaborated with the client to develop a detailed understanding of the telehealth landscape and key factors that predict telehealth use. EVERSANA assessed historical telehealth use (from open claims data) and built predictive models, utilizing claims data as well as social determinants of health, to identify key factors driving telehealth use. We also leveraged our proprietary machine learning (ML) models to score and cluster patients, deriving personas based on two distinct models: one designed to identify the likelihood that a patient will choose telehealth services and one designed to measure a patient’s access to telehealth services. Finally, HCPs were identified based on their propensity to use telehealth and their predicted volume of telehealth patients.

The Results
EVERSANA identified five distinct consumer segments per therapy area based on two key dimensions: propensity to use telehealth and access to telehealth. We also identified 2,000 high-value HCPs responsible for treating 40% of high-value patients, as well as the health systems more likely to drive telehealth use among patients.
Patient segments were identified using telehealth proactivity and telehealth accessibility as the two major axes.