On April 16, 2026, Pharma Forward 2026 brought senior pharma marketers, physicians, Google leaders, and technology builders together at St. John's Terminal in New York City for a day of direct conversation about what is working, what is breaking, and where the next decade of healthcare engagement is heading.
The central message: the walls between clinical tools and marketing infrastructure are coming down. The brands that win from here will be those that stop treating HCP targeting, DTC engagement, data infrastructure, and consumer access as separate problems and start building them as one connected capability.
Here are the five takeaways that defined the day, and where PulsePoint's platform maps directly to each one.
1. AI Is Changing HCP Engagement
Three in five physicians now use AI for clinical decision support or staying current on treatment guidelines. Nearly half (48%) give AI equal or greater weight to their own clinical judgment on specific recommendations.
The implications extend well beyond the exam room. AI is reshaping the full care continuum: clinical reasoning, chart summaries, patient triaging, treatment authorization, billing, and workflow management. An OB/GYN speaking at the summit reported a 60% workload reduction from AI transcription tools, with an unexpected secondary benefit: more time and presence with patients.
The reframe for pharma marketers: HCPs don't want promotional noise. They want to be better at their jobs. The brands that earn HCP attention in this environment are those that show up with useful, evidence-aligned information at the right moment in the clinical workflow. That requires knowing who the HCP is, where they are in their decision process, and what they are looking for right now.
Plus, 83% of patients trust their healthcare provider above all other sources. That makes reaching the right HCP with the right message the highest-leverage action in DTC pharma marketing as well.
How PulsePoint’s Platform Delivers on Evolving HCP Engagement
PulsePoint's Authenticated NPI™ identity graph connects marketers to over 4 million active, verified and permissioned HCPs . Our identity graph is built on first-party data verified by Medscape. Identity resolves deterministically so every impression is attributable to a real, verified provider.
Additionally PulsePoint’s EHR marketing solution reaches over 700,000 prescribers across ambulatory and health system settings, which means brands can reach HCPs directly inside their clinical workflow, with evidence-aligned information during highly-influential moments. PulsePoint’s EHR solution has also proven to amplify HCP reach by up to 25x and reduce cost per NPI by up to 18x.
What this means for your HCP marketing strategy:
- Find the right HCP data provider. Permissioned, authenticated NPI identity is the minimum standard for compliant, effective HCP targeting.
- Integrate point-of-care activation. EHR advertising places your brand in the clinical workflow where prescribing decisions are actually made. If this is not in your channel mix, you are missing the most contextually relevant moment in the physician's day.
- Invest in NPI-level measurement. Knowing HCPs were reached is not the same as knowing which HCPs, what they engaged with, and whether it changed their behavior. NPI-level attribution closes this gap.
2. The HCP–DTC Integration Gap Is Costing Conversions
The session on bridging HCP and DTC marketing made one thing clear: siloed budgets and siloed teams are a revenue problem, not just an organizational inconvenience. When HCP and DTC programs run independently, they create fragmented experiences that cost conversions at every step.
Results do not come from running HCP and DTC campaigns in parallel. They come from starting with the HCP, understanding physician readiness to prescribe, and using those signals to determine where and how DTC audiences can also be reached. When a consumer's ad exposure is informed by the prescribing readiness of nearby physicians, the conversion path closes dramatically.
The measurement operational gap is just as significant as the targeting challenge. Shared KPIs between HCP and DTC teams must be defined and aligned before campaign launch, not in the post-campaign review.
How PulsePoint Delivers on Closing the HCP-DTC Gap
PulsePoint’s technology, HCP2DTC Influence™, directly connects physician readiness signals to consumer campaign targeting solutions. Instead of building DTC audiences in a vacuum, they are modeled using your first-party understanding of HCP behavior with PulsePoint's real-time signals of physician prescribing readiness. From there, this technology uses those signals to inform how and where health-interested DTC audiences are best reached.
The result: demand generated by your DTC campaign arrives at the moment the HCP is most ready to act on it. This is the infrastructure that turns parallel HCP and DTC campaigns into a synchronized, outcomes-driven system within PulsePoint’s ecosystem.
What this means for your DTC marketing strategy:
- Break down the organizational silo first. Technology can synchronize messaging, but it requires shared KPIs and shared accountability between HCP and DTC teams.
- Start with HCP readiness, not DTC audience demographics. The most efficient path to conversion is aligning DTC demand with physician capacity to prescribe. Reaching the largest DTC audience possible is not the same thing.
- Measure at the point of care. Script lift, NRx, and DTC-to-HCP connection rates are the downstream outcomes that prove the strategy is working.
3. AI Search Is Booming and NPI Targeting on the Channel is Expanding
The Google and CMI Media Group session revealed 74% of healthcare consumers still rely on search as their primary source of health information. Traditional search is not dying. But it is changing in ways that demand a new approach to campaign architecture.
More than half of health queries are now long-tail queries consisting of five or more words. Consumers are no longer searching for "cancer treatment options." They are searching "what are the treatment options for cancer for someone over 65 who has already had chemotherapy." Voice search and conversational AI tools are accelerating this shift, making keyword-level targeting an increasingly blunt instrument for capturing actual intent.
The concern that AI Overviews will cut into brand traffic? The data says otherwise. A high percentage of users who engage with an AI search summary still click through to a source website, and top pharma brand sites grew 15% year-over-year, with organic traffic also rising. Your content strategy is how your brand gets cited as a trusted source inside AI-generated answers. Brand websites and SEO are more valuable in the AI search era, not less.
Google also announced that NPI-based Customer Match is now live on Search, YouTube, and Display, allowing pharma advertisers to upload NPI identifiers and target specific HCPs across channels. While this launch is a meaningful step forward for pharma targeting, reporting is available at an aggregate level only. Individual-level HCP attribution is not available, meaning advertisers can reach NPI-matched audiences but cannot confirm which specific providers engaged, what they searched, or how that engagement connects to downstream prescribing behavior.
How PulsePoint delivers on the changing search landscape:
Google's announcement validated what PulsePoint has been building toward: the ability to reach AND measure verified HCPs at the moment of intent, with NPI-level precision. PulsePoint’s Audience Manager, which enables HCP audience activation and PLD measurement for Social and Search (beta), enables users to build, activate, and analyze NPI-verified audiences using a brand’s first-party NPI data, alongside PulsePoint’s extensive 4.2M HCP database.
PulsePoint's HCP search audience solution (in beta), is among the first in the market to operationalize this capability for pharma advertisers. What makes this even more meaningful in the context of the shift toward long-tail, intent-driven search is that PulsePoint's HCP search audiences are built around real behavioral and clinical signals, not static list uploads.
As Google expands its HCP targeting roadmap toward behavioral lookalikes and predictive engagement models, PulsePoint's Audience Manager is positioned as the complementary layer, giving pharma marketers the precision of NPI-level HCP targeting with the workflow simplicity needed to activate at speed.
For brands navigating the transition from keyword targeting to theme- and intent-based campaign architecture, Audience Manager provides the infrastructure to move faster: verified HCP segments that map to therapeutic intent, activation across PulsePoint's omnichannel network, and the measurement framework to close the loop between search and social advertising and brand engagement.
Audience Manager’s built-in PLD dashboard surfaces individual NPI engagement data so teams can optimize in-flight, connect search performance to script-level outcomes, and bring NPI-attributed reporting back to field teams and brand stakeholders.
For brands that need the full picture across every channel an HCP touches, HCP365 unifies NPI-level omnichannel engagement data from search, social, display, CTV, EHR, and email, into a single view. This means you’ll know which keywords your HCPs are actually using, which channels are driving engagement, and exactly when to follow up and how.
Together, Audience Manager and HCP365 give pharma marketers something the market has not had before: NPI-verified HCP search activation with prescriber-level attribution built in, and the option to expand that view across the full omnichannel journey.
What this means for your pharma marketing search and NPI targeting strategy
- Focus on showing up. What matters is whether you are showing up when an HCP is in a high-intent state, regardless of the exact phrasing they use.
- Invest in your brand website as an AI citation source. Authoritative, well-structured content on your brand site is what gets cited inside AI Overviews. SEO and content strategy are now foundational to AI-era discoverability.
- Unify search data with your media mix. NPI-level search data should feed audience creation, CRM triggers, and field team coordination, not live in a separate analytics dashboard. The brands winning are those who treat search intent as a real-time signal across all channels.
4. You’re At Risk if Your Vendor Can’t Prove Identity Resolution and Data Infrastructure
The session "Strengthening the Backbone of Digital Healthcare" addressed the foundational question that sits beneath every targeting and measurement challenge: who, exactly, are you reaching, and can you prove it?
Every audience activation, every media buy, and every attribution outcome rests on identity resolution: the process of translating fragmented signals into a coherent, persistent identity. The panel was direct: with the right CDP, DSP, and data provider partnerships, fragmentation can be stitched into omnichannel consistency. But it requires intentional architecture, and vendor flexibility.
Vendors who don't proactively address emerging state-level privacy laws, for example, are quietly transferring compliance risk to their clients. What is compliant in one state today may require active audience scrubbing, suppression logic, or consent rearchitecting in another state next quarter. If a vendor cannot clearly articulate, upfront and unprompted, how they are handling the emerging state privacy frameworks, that is not a gap to remediate later. It is a disqualifying signal at the vendor selection stage.
Finally, one of the most pointed moments of the session came when a panelist from a major pharma organization confirmed what many in the room suspected but rarely say publicly: internal vendor blacklists exist, they are actively maintained, and they apply across the entire enterprise. The standard is simple: if a vendor comes through the door without a credible answer to how they handle HIPAA-adjacent data, state privacy regulations, or compliance infrastructure, the answer is no.
What makes this consequential is the permanence. A vendor who gets blacklisted at the brand level does not get a second conversation at the enterprise level. The path back requires a documented change to the vendor's business model or compliance posture, not just a better sales pitch. The practical implication for anyone evaluating data, identity, or media partners: compliance fluency is not a checkbox question for procurement. It is the first question, and the answer determines whether the conversation continues.
How PulsePoint delivers on identity resolution and data infrastructure
There is a meaningful difference between vendors who have adapted general digital infrastructure for healthcare, and those who built specifically for healthcare's privacy requirements from the start. PulsePoint’s architecture reflects this at every layer.
Pharma Identity Resolution
PulsePoint's Authenticated NPI™ delivers deterministic, people-based HCP targeting by validating each healthcare professional against their National Provider Identifier using Direct Match™ methodology that extends scale. Every identity in PulsePoint's graph carries permission from first-party data through Medscape.
For DTC, PulsePoint's targeting is built on privacy-protective clinical and behavioral data, modeled without using personally identifiable information. Plus, our platform's cookieless approach has already demonstrated a performance advantage in the market.
Privacy Compliance
This is where the "built for healthcare" distinction becomes operationally concrete. As a longstanding member of the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI), PulsePoint adheres to the NAI’s Framework Principles and has continued to honor the legacy NAI health guidance of prohibiting consumer retargeting based on interest in content that may pertain to sensitive health conditions. PulsePoint is also a signatory to the IAB Multi-State Privacy Agreement (MSPA), providing a strong contractual foundation for programmatic data flows, and maintains stringent platform-level guardrails, including, for example, a minimum geofencing radius that stays above "precise geolocation" thresholds under state laws. On the HIPAA side, our use cases for modeling audiences are performed on de-identified data within a clean room environment, and validated under a HIPAA Expert Determination in order to ensure the data remain de-identified.
Vendor Accountability
PulsePoint's unified health graph integrates first-party data with billions of real-time digital and clinical signals, and is continuously refined as the identity landscape evolves. This matters in the blacklist conversation, because the vendors who end up on those lists are typically those whose compliance posture is reactive: they patch problems as regulations arrive rather than building ahead of them. PulsePoint’s compliance is built into our healthcare business foundation not as a bolted on capability.
What this means for your strategy:
- Audit your identity foundation now. Ask every data partner what their approach is to emerging state privacy regulations. If they can't answer clearly, they are transferring risk to you.
- Prioritize permissioned, first-party data. Syndicated and third-party identity solutions are increasingly fragile.
- Demand interoperability. Your CDP, DSP, and measurement solution need to speak the same identity language. Fragmentation at the data layer makes every campaign less efficient and every measurement less credible.
5. Consumers Actively Want Personalized Information About Treatment Options
Two-thirds of U.S. adults using AI for health explicitly want tools for symptom and condition support. But the research presented at Pharma Forward 2026 went further — it showed how DTC audiences respond to pharma brand engagement when it is designed around utility rather than promotion.
82% of patients feel comfortable sharing medical information to receive personalized health brand messages. Two-thirds believe a digitally modern healthcare practice would improve their experience. These are not passive consumers waiting to be reached. They are active participants in their own healthcare decisions who are explicitly asking for better tools and more relevant information.
The brands seeing the highest engagement are those treating DTC not as a reach problem but as a utility problem: what do relevant consumer audiences need right now, and are we the brand that provides it? Pharma content in clinical waiting rooms was described by physicians at the summit as an icebreaker — content that inspires patients to ask questions they otherwise would not have raised. That is not advertising as an intrusion. That is advertising as clinical enablement.
Cultural context matters too. Backgrounds, socioeconomic factors, and lived experience meaningfully shape healthcare decisions, and campaigns that account for that move people to act in ways that campaigns built only on demographics do not. Real alignment between HCPs and healthcare marketers, the session argued, is what creates the moment where a patient says: "Maybe I should ask about this."
How PulsePoint delivers a better DTC engagement strategy
Patients are actively looking for brands that show up with the right information, in the right context, at the moment they are most receptive to acting. That requires a different kind of DTC infrastructure than traditional reach-and-frequency thinking provides.
Because PulsePoint’s ecosystem enables direct alignment between HCP and DTC campaigns and targeting strategies, when first-party HCP signals are used to inform how and where health-interested DTC audiences are best reached, it not only results in higher engagement, but it is a literal synchronized demand-and-supply moment a session argued is the highest-value outcome in pharma marketing.
PulsePoint also enables clients to build health-specific DTC segments using real-world clinical, contextual, and demographic signals, enabling DTC health advertising to show up as useful to the right audience at the right time.
PulsePoint's DTC Clinical Insights dashboard takes this further, connecting media exposure to near-real-time prescribing behavior so marketers can see in aggregate how influenced consumers moved toward clinical action.
Adaptive Optimization™ continuously refines delivery using these real-time behavioral and clinical signals, ensuring audiences aren't just reached efficiently but engaged at the moments when they are most ready to respond — the equivalent of the waiting room icebreaker the physician panel described, delivered at scale across digital channels.
The result: demand generated by your DTC campaign arrives at the point of care at the moment the HCP is most ready to act on it. This is the infrastructure that turns parallel HCP and DTC spending into a synchronized, outcomes-driven system within PulsePoint’s ecosystem.
What this means for your DTC marketing strategy
- Design for utility, not just reach. Consumers who feel in control of their healthcare journey are more likely to initiate therapy and stay on it. Content that helps earns trust in a way that content that only promotes cannot.
- Personalize around health signals, not demographics alone. Age and gender are proxies. Real-world clinical signals are what enable the relevance consumers are explicitly asking for.
- Connect DTC performance to clinical outcomes. Reach, impressions, and CTR describe activity. Script lift, new prescriptions, and access program enrollments describe outcomes. Build measurement that connects the two from campaign launch.
One Platform. Every Signal. The Entire Journey.
Pharma Forward 2026 surfaced a consistent message: the brands that lead the next decade are those that stop treating HCP targeting, DTC engagement, data infrastructure, and consumer access as separate workstreams, and start building them as a single, connected capability.
PulsePoint was built for exactly this. As the only healthcare marketing platform purpose-built to optimize both HCP and DTC engagement simultaneously — connecting an exclusive data foundation, AI-driven intelligence, and omnichannel execution in a single platform — PulsePoint is not catching up to where the industry is going. It is where the industry is going.
Ready to see how PulsePoint maps to your 2026 priorities?
Talk to our team about how PulsePoint's platform connects HCP precision, DTC performance, and identity infrastructure into a single, outcomes-driven system.
