In episode six of Pharma Decrypted, Sabine Louët is in conversation with Nicolas Rosen, founder of Exaris, about a question which came up whilst building ScioWire, SciencePOD’s news feed for digital-native HCPs:
What is the best way to find the healthcare professionals you want to reach? Facing the exact problem Rosen works on, his argument is that most pharma organisations target clinicians on assumptions they’ve never tested.
Here are the key takeaways.
Here are the key points from the conversation:
1. Pharma’s massive data gap
Five years ago, Rosen and his co-founders compared: A) What pharmaceutical companies said they wanted to know about HCPs against B) what their CRM systems actually held. On average, pharma CRM systems only held:
– Name
– Specialty group
– Segmentation letter,
– Date of the last field force visit
– Email open timestamp.
This gap became the backbone of the business. Why? Because traditional targeting in European markets compounds the problem. Companies buy bulk cluster volume data showing prescription activity by geographic area.
Then, they try to infer which clinicians are responsible. Unlike the US – where prescriptions are attributable to named physicians – Europe offers no direct connection. The process has always involved a heavy amount of educated guessing.
This is where Rosen inverts it. Rather than starting from a hypothesis, and narrows it down. The Exaris team queries the publicly available data space and asks which HCPs are actively communicating about an indication or being mentioned in connection with it.
To answer the obvious objection that “anyone can claim anything online”, there are more than 130 patterns to separate an HCP from a non-HCP, drawing on specialty, content type, and corroborating presence across sources tied to a verified affiliation.
2. Pharma’s structure makes this harder than it looks
The siloed nature of pharma organisations is a particular challenge. R&D and clinical teams research generate knowledge upstream. Medical affairs and commercial teams need to use it downstream. Making that flow work has always been a persistent problem.
Kearney was direct about the limits of the conventional fix: The narrative around breaking down silos and building a single source of truth has been circulating for years, but achieving it across an enterprise is a very difficult task. What has improved is the ability to bridge silos rather than dissolve them, using semantic layers to connect systems and provide the context that allows the right information to surface when it is needed.
But he pointed to a deeper problem that bridging doesn’t solve. What happens when five systems hold five different versions of the truth? Claims libraries illustrate the issue well. A claim is signed off in one vault, then disseminated across many channels. When that claim changes, the risk isn’t the change itself. The risk is the legacy content sitting across the organisation that no longer aligns with it.
3. GDPR Isn’t the blocker you think it is
When asked about regulation by Sabine, Rosen was blunt. He suggested an industry has grown up around treating GDPR as a reason not to act, and that actually reading the regulation gives a different impression from the one commonly circulated.
His case rested on two points: pharmaceutical companies have a legitimate interest in presenting physicians with information about new drug developments, and the data in question is public, either published by clinicians or about them.
He also argued that better targeting is data minimisation in practice. A company with a GP-facing objective in Germany could engage 50,000 general practitioners, or ask which GPs are relevant to vaccination content and find roughly 2,380. Consent for CRM purposes remains a separate and non-negotiable obligation, but it exists regardless of how you identify who matters.
4. Culture is the constraint, not capability
Rosen predicted a split in the industry. Some companies will use AI at the edges, preparing for meetings and summarising notes, which in his view isn’t really leveraging AI. Others will apply it across the chain, from drug development through brand planning and field preparation, right up to the face-to-face conversation. That meeting isn’t going anywhere, particularly for important prescribers. However, everything leading up to it changes.
What holds organisations back is rarely the technology itself. Rosen pointed to change, culture, and internal politics, and was sceptical of pilots as usually run: without an internal champion, a pilot becomes a nice-to-have that gets deferred in favour of whatever the company already pays Microsoft for.
Louët offered a first-hand example, where a commercial team were interested and the digital team were supportive, but the project ended at the legal team, who had no AI policy in place. Her broader point was that most digital roles in pharma now consist of change management rather than implementing the tool best suited to the problem.
5. Preparation changes the conversation
The closing audience question asked whether better targeting means less outreach or better outreach at the same volume. Rosen’s answer was both. Reaching 30,000 GPs when only a fraction are relevant is wasted effort, so asking the question first cuts the number substantially.
On quality, he contrasted two opening lines. One representative mentions a physician’s recent podcast on a specific indication and asks to discuss a point raised, because it bears directly on their product. Another introduces themselves cold. Same physician, same target, same planned interaction. The difference is all in the preparation.
Louët added the content perspective: once you understand what a clinician is concerned about, you can create the stories and digital assets that address it. That principle sits behind ScioWire, which delivers personalised clinical news to healthcare professionals.
The Key Takeaways
- Start with evidence, not inference. Asking who is actively engaging with an indication gives a different answer from inferring it backwards from aggregated prescription data.
- Your definition determines your answer. Pre-filtering introduces bias before the search begins. Clinicians outside the definition never appear.
- In rare disease, the referrer may matter more than the prescriber. Finding the clinicians who need awareness is the harder and more valuable task.
- Treat GDPR as a framework, not a blocker. Legitimate interest and narrower targeting can be more data-minimising than broad outreach, though CRM consent remains separate.
- Culture is the constraint. The technology exists. What stops organisations adopting it is change management, internal politics, and the absence of an internal champion.
The views expressed in this interview are the speaker’s own.
Interview conducted by Sabine Louët. Edited from the interview transcript for clarity and length.