Questions? We got Answers.
What is the conversationHEALTH VirtualRep?
Powered by conversational AI, which is comprised of medically-trained natural language processing, contextual artificial intelligence and supervised machine learning, the conversationHEALTH VirtualRep empowers healthcare and life sciences companies to engage prescribers with dynamic, human-like interactions that are 100% compliant when a live resource is not available or required, and provides digital-first, on demand push/pull conversations covering condition, diagnostic and therapy, as well as self-services including remote detailing, adverse events reporting and escalation to a human sales representative or medical science liaison.
Why did conversationHEALTH create the VirtualRep?
We created the conversationHEALTH Virtual Rep because in today’s post-Covid environment, 54% of health care providers refuse to take meetings with field sales reps and even those who do average a 64-second interaction. With 69% of prescribers using non-brand affiliated websites, social media platforms and other digital mechanisms to find medical information, conversationHEALTH desired to create a better way for healthcare and life sciences companies to reach their prescribers, rebuild trust with their health care provider community and regain authority as the primary information authority for their treatments.
What are some examples of how the conversationHEALTH VirtualRep can be used?
Virtually indistinguishable from human interaction, the conversationHEALTH VirtualRep provides health care providers with information, resources and data surrounding disease interception and diagnostics; drug use, dosage, administration and contraindications; safety, efficacy and side effects; toxicology, interactions, storage and stability; clinical studies and pharmacology; on/off- label indications and usage recommendations; monitoring and laboratory tests; adverse events and sample requests.
What are the benefits of the conversationHEALTH VirtualRep?
The conversationHEALTH VirtualRep increases the reach, frequency and engagement of health care providers who accept field sales rep visits at their practices (also known as “See HCPs”) as well as those who do not (also known as “No See HCPs”). In addition, healthcare and life sciences commercial organizations use the conversationHEALTH VirtualRep to cover open territories and/or unsupported brands where field sales teams don’t exist due to budget constraints or reallocations, as well as expand interactions beyond their current target health care provider universe. Benefits include an increase in HCP reach that can establish a brand as the treatment of choice via on demand access to medical information, programs and self-service tools through a differentiated experience; improvement in patient outcomes through medical education and scientific communications on disease interception, diagnostic practices, treatment protocols and off-label use and improvement in conversion and rX lift by optimizing personal and virtual promotional cadences with both analog and digital-first HCPs to drive message uptake, relationship development and behavior.
Does the conversationHEALTH VirtualRep replace my field sales reps?
The conversationHEATH VirtualRep does not replace humans. It’s an augmented solution, meaning it works best in tandem with field sales reps to supplement or scale their personal promotion efforts with health care providers. VirtualRep answers routine questions and fulfills common requests much more effectively and efficiently at a health care provider’s moment of need regardless of day or time. Field sales representatives are then freed-up to address requests that are complex, exceptional, and require bona-fide escalation.
What are the typical client results when using the conversationHEALTH VirtualRep?
The average conversationHEALTH VirtualRep client experiences greater than a 20x return on investment, double digit rX lift and millions in cost savings as measured and validated by our exclusive Rapid Value Assessment Platform.
Isn’t the conversationHEALTH VirtualRep really a chatbot?
When interacting with a chatbot, a health care provider must follow a scripted conversation path, with basic if/then logic that retrieves automated answers from predefined scenarios with stringent rules. Normally, a chatbot is a button-driven experience that is frustrating, ignorant and questionable in authority. Users frequently plead to be connected to a human representative because their questions are never answered and requests are never fulfilled. With the conversationHEALTH VirtualRep, a health care provider simply asks a question or requests a service and, powered by conversational AI, VirtualRep answers dynamically with the efficiency and accuracy of a human. Users describe the experience as engaging and over 97% of health care providers find it credible.
What is conversational AI?
Conversational AI combines natural language processing (NLP) with machine learning to process, understand, and generate responses to questions or requests in a natural way and continuously “learns” to create near-human experiences. The process is straightforward. First, users provide input through a website or an app; the format of the input can either be voice or text. If the input is text-based, natural language understanding (NLU) is used to decipher the meaning of the input and derive its intention. If the input is speech -based, a combination of automatic speech recognition (ASR) and NLU is used to analyze the data. Natural Language Generation (NLG), a component of NLP, then formulates a response and ultimately machine learning algorithms refine these responses over time to ensure accuracy.
What is so special about the conversational AI used in the conversationHEALTH VirtualRep?
The conversationHEALTH VirtualRep utilizes learnings from over 190+ brand engagements and 1 billion+ conversational signals in 45 therapeutic areas to understand complex, nuanced medical language and user intent, recognize and differentiate between on and off-label queries, and engage health care providers with contextual responses, self services and resources on demand governed by a policy engine that knows when to escalate to a human. No other technology provider has the depth and breadth of experience necessary to effectively virtualize, augment and extend the field sales function of healthcare and life sciences organizations. As a result, we can deploy a quick start package of over 400+ predefined interactions that are easily modified/expanded to deliver 98% accuracy.
Does the conversationHEALTH VirtualRep use generative AI?
All commercial activities in the healthcare and life sciences industry are governed by stringent medical, legal and regulatory controls. As such, unsupervised generative AI is not a deployment option for interacting with health care providers. The conversationHEALTH VirtualRep utilizes medically-trained natural language understanding, computational linguistics and supervised generative AI. It can never become sentient, go “off the rails” or behave abnormally.
I’ve read that conversational AI is not always accurate. Is this the case?
The secret is in the data used to train a supervised generative AI engine. The conversationHEALTH VirtualRep is up to 98% accurate because we have the world’s foremost library of training data curated from over 1 billion conversations from 200 brand engagements in 45 therapeutic areas. This training data continues to grow and become more refined with every implementation of our platform.
I’ve been told that generative AI has severe shortcomings.
Generative AI’s shortcomings are primary rooted in large language models (LLMs) such as those which are foundational to ChatGPT. LLMs are trained (in part) to give convincing answers, but these answers can also be untrue and unsubstantiated. Inevitably, some people will try to rely on these answers, with potentially disastrous consequences. On the other hand, the conversationHEALTH VirtualRep utilizes a fine-tuned language model that allows it to pre-train to solve the specialized queries of healthcare providers using our comprehensive healthcare and life sciences domain-specific data universe and then continuously adapts to real-world prescriber interactions.
What if a question or request by a health care provider can’t be addressed by the conversationHEALTH VirtualRep?
The conversationHEALTH VirtualRep utilizes a powerful policy engine to detect an exception, propose a next-best action and, if deemed necessary, escalate it to a human representative, whether a call center, field sales rep or medical liaison.
Is medical, legal and regulatory approval for using the conversationHEALTH VirtualRep difficult to obtain?
To ensure all oversight, guidelines and governance requirements are met, Medical, Legal and Regulatory (MLR) teams are involved upfront in our conversational design process, and our medical writers work closely with these teams to ensure only approved language is utilized. 99% of the time proposed conversations, services and requests are approved by MLR teams after initial submission for review. In addition, the conversationHEALTH VirtualRep is 100% compliant compared to a human. For example, VirtualRep will never recommend a drug for off-label use without previous MLR approval. In addition, because all interactions, their transcripts and follow-on actions are captured, clients maintain tighter controls and are never exposed to the potential risks commonly associated with humans.
Do healthcare providers trust the conversationHEALTH VirtualRep?
Historically, 96% of all healthcare provider questions and requests of our clients have been successfully managed by the conversationHEALTH VirtualRep, while 97% of healthcare providers that have utilized our platform confirm they trust its accuracy. In fact, almost 75% of healthcare providers that have experiences our platform prefer engaging pharmaceutical companies via the conversationHEALTH VirtualRep over live-in person office visits by sales personnel.
How can you possibly build a digital relationship with a healthcare provider?
The conversationHEALTH VirtualRep augments interpersonal relationship development, nurturing and growth. And with 55% of native analog and 80% of digital- first healthcare providers refusing to see pharmaceutical sales reps in their office, answering typical questions and fulfilling routine requests for both on and off label use via a near-human conversational experience has been shown to increase the reach, frequency and recency of prescriber interaction, thus driving high levels of customer satisfaction and ultimately leading to rX lift.
Does the conversationHEALTH VirtualRep account for differences across countries?
VirtualRep capabilities are adapted from market to market and re-approved through local MLR and regulatory bodies, however, the underlying conversation blueprint and training data sets are virtually the same. Localized conversation flows are always layered onto the global platform to reduce costs and improve accuracy. Our out of the box regions include North America, the United Kingdom, Spain, France, Germany, Italy and Japan, with other countries addressed on a case by case basis.
How do I enable my health care provider community to adopt the ConversationHEALTH VirtualRep?
We create an exclusive omnichannel HCP onboarding program using machine learning in conjunction with our data lake of 1.6M+ healthcare provider profiles, propensities and affinities to pinpoint and onboard your highest value known and unknown prescribers. Utilized by 44 out of the top 50 pharmaceutical companies, our system of engagement is the de-facto industry standard for successful “see/no-see” HCP activation, conversion and rX lift
Can’t I just build this myself? Isn’t that more cost effective?
Building a virtual sales rep requires a significant investment in technology, training data and high-skilled employees, including NLP experts, full stack engineers, data scientists and medical professionals. We’ve found that such an approach commonly takes 2 years, costs 4x as much as licensing the conversationHEALTH VirtualRep and results in an inferior product and user experience. In fact, several of our clients abandoned their internally-developed efforts and turned to conversationHEALTH for an off-the-shelf solution that can still be customized to address their unique needs and requirements.
Is the ConversationHEALTH VirtualRep expensive to license and implement?
In head to head comparisons, the conversationHEALTH VirtualRep is about 50% less to license and implement as well as 75% less in ongoing cost of ownership than the most basic of chatbots, which require significant custom development, the addition of several third-party solutions and specialized internal support to equal our capabilities.