The changing global landscape is driving more and more patients to seek options for remote care. For Epiduo® Forte Gel, the changing healthcare environment opened up an opportunity to create a compelling, digital way for them to understand their acne treatment options. In order to strategically position Epiduo Forte Gel ahead of its competitors, a chatbot was implemented on the brand’s website that encourages patient engagement and prescription adherence through medically and legally compliant content.
Goals
- Motivate patients to ask their doctor for a first-time Epiduo Forte Gel prescription
- Encourage prescription adherence
- Cultivate increased web audience engagement with the target audience: teens that suffer from acne
- Differentiate Epiduo Forte Gel in the competitive acne market
Chatbots in Healthcare
Chatbots present an excellent opportunity for healthcare brands to maintain healthy communication with patients. Market-wide, there are just over 1 billion searches for health information performed on Google daily, and 20 million patient and HCP digital conversation sessions per day, according to Google Health. Put simply, there is a growing market to provide patients a digital avenue for quick text conversations to understand vital information about their options. Furthermore, chatbots allow patients to quickly get the information they need and greatly reduces the time needed for a human to handle any given query, saving countless hours and thousands of dollars year over year.
Our Role
Beyond implementing the new chatbot, we also provide ongoing chatbot metrics (or measurement) to gain better patient insights that help us better communicate with patients. By monitoring chatbot engagement, we are able to personalize the patient experience, improve the conversation streams and identify more opportunities to increase patient engagement.
The Conversation Tree of Conversion
When we began developing the Epiduo Forte Gel chatbot, we knew that it had to maintain compliance before it would ever get off the ground. So, we partnered with Conversation Health, a conversational AI platform that is purpose-built for the life sciences industry and sets the standard in terms of accuracy and compliance with medically-trained taxonomies, data sets, NLP and technical stack. Together, we worked to create a button-driven chatbot that adhered to appropriate parameters, a challenge many free text-based bots face when it’s time for legal/compliance review.
We designed the in-bot conversation around two key paths of the prospect funnel. At the top, general acne education and awareness. At the bottom, Epiduo Forte Gel education and follow-up consultation with a healthcare provider. This allowed us to gently move a prospect down the funnel from awareness to action regardless of their stage in the lead nurturing process.
Results
- 5,000+ engagements in Q4
- More than 1,100+ unique sessions in Q4
- A majority of users opted in to provide feedback via a survey following bot usage
- Most users rated the app usefulness as 5 out of 5
- More than 72% of users indicated they would speak with their doctor about Epiduo Forte Gel
Looking Ahead
Chatbots are here to stay – in healthcare, entertainment and countless other industries. As utilization continues to grow, they will play a vital role in lead generation. This mechanism will also facilitate important doctor-patient conversations and shift valuable time that would otherwise be spent in patient care. The Epiduo Forte Gel chatbot continues to engage more patients with acne education and encourages prescription compliance and adherence every single day.
