DeepIntent: Built With Empathy and Connecting Advertisers to Healthcare Pros

Patients often spoke about how difficult it was for them to learn about disease diagnoses and treatments, which resonated with Paquette. "I connected deeply with their perspective because when I was 12, my father was misdiagnosed with the wrong type of cancer," he says. "His gut told him something was off, so he got a second and third opinion, which ultimately saved his life."

Paquette understood how powerful machine learning could be in getting the right information to people. This was ultimately his inspiration for DeepIntent, the company that built the first demand-side platform (DSP) purposefully for the healthcare industry.

"Everything we do is driven by a core belief that advertising technology can measurably improve the lives of patients," Paquette asserts.

The DeepIntent Healthcare Advertising Platform is built on three pillars: Plan, Activate, and Measure & Optimize.

• First marketers "plan" their campaigns by building unique healthcare provider (HCP) and patient audiences based on real-world clinical data.
• Next, they "activate" the campaigns within the proprietary healthcare DSP across digital channels including connected TV, display, video, native, audio, and e-newsletter.
• Lastly, they "measure and optimize" the campaign in real-time toward audience quality and script performance.

DeepIntent reaches 1.8 million verified HCPs across the digital landscape. By tying offline data -- such as medical and pharmacy claims, specialty and practicing location -- to online identities, marketers can create unique HCP audiences. For example, marketers can use claims data to understand physicians diagnosing or prescribing patterns, and eligibility data to reach a physician prior to a clinically relevant patient visit.

"This type of unique targeting utilizing eligibility data adds value [for advertisers focused on rare diseases], where patients may only see a specialist once or twice a year," explains Jen Werther, Chief Strategy Officer at DeepIntent.

On the patient side, DeepIntent creates custom audiences that leverage real-world clinical data in a privacy-safe way. Using demographic data, this patented modeling process determines whether someone is likely to have a particular condition -- Type 2 diabetes, for example.

For DeepIntent, accurate data matched with privacy compliance is paramount. Getting the right information to people requires a degree of personalization, which is inherently challenging in the healthcare space. DeepIntent strictly abides by regulations like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), which prohibits one-to-one targeting based on health data.

"All of DeepIntent's technology is built purposefully for healthcare marketers. Everything we build is with their unique needs in mind," Paquette explains.

After ads are served to HCP and patient audiences, their performance is measured and optimized in real-time toward audience quality and script performance rather than typical media KPIs such as clicks and impressions. DeepIntent is then able to answer questions for pharmaceutical brands like, "Did I reach a verified patient based on diagnosis?" and "Did I reach a physician whose patient filled the script?"

Prior to joining the company, Werther spent the majority of her career on the agency side, doing strategic media planning within the pharma landscape. This gives her insight into the challenges media agencies face when planning and optimizing campaigns. Third-party measurement solutions typically provide insights on a monthly or quarterly basis, which causes a delay that leaves agencies unable to make timely optimizations. What may have been actionable insights become "nice-to-know" learnings.

Technology is constantly evolving, which means that tech companies like DeepIntent need to evolve in lockstep. Though DeepIntent has indeed evolved over the past six years, its mission has remained the same, contributing to the company's strong retention. Paquette would like to see DeepIntent continue to do what it's already doing but on a much larger scale.

"When we surveyed patients last year, we found that 50% are more likely to take a treatment recommendation for something they recognize from advertising," he says. "Getting the right information to people drives awareness and fosters more open conversations with their healthcare providers, which leads to a healthier population. Contributing to that is DeepIntent's ultimate goal, always."

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