[00:03] Whether you’re a rep or a marketer or whatever, you’re part of the care team. And the care team involves lots of different people, lots of different places. We can’t sit for an hour to talk to you every time, but you are part of the care team and what is the thing that you’re going to do that’s going to actually make my patient’s life better? Having something that’s bite sized that tells me what I need to know and helps the patient at the end would be kind of my my main criteria for something that I would be over the moon to do.

[00:28] At the end of the day It’s about signal, it’s about getting the right data to the right physician, it’s about getting out of the way then and letting patient care happen. Being available at the right time is the most important to me. And as things are moving more towards kind of remote resources, it makes most sense to me to have it in that kind of capacity. I do think that Pharma overall has a desire to move in that direction.

[00:53] I think there’s a little bit of limitations in terms of way things are structured right now as well as the current tool kit, but I think we’re moving in the right way.

[01:08] Hello and welcome to the MM+M podcast. I’m managing editor Jack O’Brien. Today we’re going to explore how artificial intelligence is transforming the way healthcare professionals connect with pharmaceutical resources. We’ll dive into how Impiricus and the Life Sciences companies they work with are building and leveraging the first and only AI-powered field force enhancement tool designed to streamline real-time communication between HCPs and pharmareps.

[01:32] From clinical decision support to on-demand access to drug information, this conversation unpacks how technology can bridge long-standing gaps and care delivery and engagement. With all that said, let me introduce our guests. My name is Dr. Osama Hashimi. I’m a practicing dermatologist in Atlanta, Georgia. I’ve been in healthcare technology for 12 years, I started my first company out of college, building patient engagement solutions for hospital systems.

[01:55] And then four years ago, co-founded Impiricus around this strong need to bring signal to noise, the idea that there’s a lot of value that pharma can create for physicians. The challenge right now is just all the noise that’s around it. So, how can we as a company, we as an industry move forward with more signal that can have direct impact to patients? My name is Dr. Bilal Ahmed. I’m a practicing interventional and structural cardiologist.

[02:18] Also, co-founder and CSO of a company called Lyla that’s based on essentially taking the microbiome space and help prevent heart artery atherosclerosis disease through targeted therapies.

[02:40] It’s great to have you both on the show and I know this is no stranger to our audience but I’ve been really fascinated with the evolution of AI in healthcare over the past couple of years in terms of going from experimentation to actual practical business use cases. So I’m really looking forward to having this conversation. But before we get into all that, Osama, I want to go back to you. You talked about having your medical background and obviously that has led you into creating Imperica. Talk a little bit about that process and how this company came to be over a decade ago. Yeah, for sure.

[03:07] So we started back in 2021 and this was kind of the beginnings of COVID. I was in my first years in clinical practice working at our community hospital system. At that time we would have patients come in very very sick. We would get them better but in order to actually get them home they would need home oxygen tanks. And it was something where their insurance was really difficult. Our social workers are slammed. So our senses of patients just keep kind of getting bigger and bigger.

[03:32] Eventually, one of my senior residents was telling me, “Hey, you just need to talk to Alex.” I had no idea who Alex was, but reached out to her and now suddenly patients were getting discharged. Turns out that Alex was a rep for an oxygen company. So even though us as physicians we knew how to get people better, the company actually understood sampling, how to get insurance approvals through, how to get bridge bridge programs through. And for me this was just kind of like a little bit of a light bulb moment. I’m on LinkedIn, I’m on other sources, I get banner ads for things I don’t prescribe.

[03:59] I know how how much time PharmaSpend’s trying to get in front of me, but at the same time there is a real patient need here and the ability to kind of quickly connect that was a really interesting problem to try to solve. And so in 2021 met my co-founder who was on the PharmaSide of things. So he was head of Global Omnichannel UCB Pharma and we decided to come together and build Empiricus really focusing on this idea of how do we bring signal from all the noise. We really have pioneered the channel around SMS which is the ability to text the largest opt in network of physicians in the United States.

[04:29] But underneath that lies an intense data platform, a lot of use cases around AI, a lot of questions around what is signal, what is noise, and how do we bring that to the right physician at the right time. So excited to have this conversation. It’s great to hear the background on Empiricus and I’ve been fascinated in terms of your ability to try and bridge that gap when it comes to pharma and HCPs. And that kind of leads into my next question, which is what are some of the biggest obstacles as we sit here in the middle of 2025 in terms of being able to have that communication?

[04:58] Yeah, I’ll talk a about a couple of kind of structural things that we’ve seen just working in this space for the past 5 years, me personally and then our team, decades of experience. Structurally, I find that there’s a couple of things. One is physicians oftentimes are viewed as numbers for pharmaceutical companies. Physicians are in tier lists. They’re This doctor is this MPI number on this tier. And in reality, each physician is very unique in terms of their practice patterns, who they like to see, the way they like to get information.

[05:26] Um the second piece is a lot of times when we’re talking to pharmaceutical companies, I was surprised at how little physicians are in that room, right? You have kind of KOLs who are used to pharma, but the practicing physician, um the day-to-day community physician that is represents, you know, 90% of care that happens in the United States, they usually are a unheard voice in those conversations.

[05:47] And so I think those two things are really really important in terms of structural things that need to change within pharma around viewing physicians at number and as numbers and trying to bring physicians into the room. The third thing and this is probably the most exciting thing especially from Empiricus is that there actually is an opportunity for collaboration, right? It’s not just around hey I need to get a dinner and my value as a pharmaceutical company is just giving dinner to doctors, there actually is patient impact. There actually is ways that they can help patients. And I’d love to pass Dr. Ahmed to get his thoughts as well.

[06:16] Yeah, I agree wholeheartedly. I mean, this kind of dovetails into what has happened or how things have changed in terms of relationships between healthcare providers and the pharmaceutical company over the last, let’s say, 5 or 10 years when I’ve been mainly in my practice. In person, pharmaceutical interactions are few and far between. It really depends on the institution as well. So I’ve been in Boston at a few academic institutions.

[06:41] I know that uh at Tufts where I did my general cardiology fellowship, it was kind of a no-no to have pharmaceutical reps in the office.

[06:49] I’m currently at Lady Clinic up in Burlington Mass and it’s a little bit looser in that sense that pharma reps are welcome to come but there’s just not as much face-to-face interaction and the the dinners are few and far between and you can make a case that there’s good behind that in the sense that you know maybe going to those dinners is not the best way to disseminate information and certainly there’s the the transactional nature of that.

[07:17] But having some sort of substantive interaction that doesn’t just involve text space like hey check out our product or here’s our website. That’s not really a solution to me and certainly doesn’t give me the information that I want. So having some channel which I think is is built in and ready. For example something that I think of or have thought of in the past is EMR wise Epic is something that most people are familiar with or most healthcare providers.

[07:46] Uh you prescribe a medication, let’s say I’m prescribing intrusto, that’s costly for patients. And I may have questions and I may go to up-to-date or my resource of of choice.

[07:57] If there was some immediate plug-and-play where you’re prescribing intrusto, it’s a pop-up box that says, “Would you like to be connected to a pharmaceutical rep?” Maybe real time in that limited space that I have with the patient, if I can get information information that I need from the clinical aspect and then also perhaps pricing information like hey we’ve got this coupon going on for Intrester that will make it X amount of dollars less out of your pocket a month for the patient.

[08:24] That’s a great way in my mind and an easy solution to getting that interaction without having to have the resources of a dinner or have boots on the ground in every every office in Boston. Yeah, like you said it may not be the most practical solution in terms of being able to bridge that gap.

[08:40] I did want to ask you just as it relates to your data today, you know, what does that look like in terms of where you’re running into obstacles and where you could have your needs met by a pharma brand and I I guess another question I have out of that is kind of like what you know what kind of clinical support can they offer? Because they they’ll throw the kitchen sink at you but it’s like sometimes you just need specific things at specific times.

[09:02] Yeah, you know, I don’t need the whole slew of information that hey you know this is you know to you piggyback off Intresto uh there was one encounter that is is very memorable in my mind for unfortunately the wrong reasons.

[09:15] I think the Paragon HF trial had just come out and I’m I’m getting all these kind of quoted secondary analyses and we know the data as clinicians or should know the data at least and having that period to us when it’s not you know exactly what we’re looking for is is not the best use of time and so you know I’m being polite I’m like yeah you know it’s great it’s great it’s it’s wonderful and I’m really glad you’re here but really having the meat of that information and having it in a distilled format and also with the patient in mind, kind of like Asama talked about at the beginning.

[09:47] How does this help the patient? How can we make it so that it’s affordable to the patient? Because a lot of these things that are being brought to the office are kind of the latest and greatest and come with a price tag. And I could go to GoodRx or I could go to some similar type of resource, but having it directly from the pharma rep not only enables me and engenders a sense of trust that is not engendered in the day-to-day interaction. It also helps with the patient. You know, I tell the patient, hey, you know, this this company’s great.

[10:16] They’ve They’ve really done a great job not only with the medication that they’re putting out or the product, but they do a good job in making sure you can afford it so that your therapy is not just taking away from food in the table or something else into the world that you need to live. And I guess that kind of brings you back in the conversation here, Osama, in terms of where Empiricus fits into this equation with what Balal has outlined there from the HCP perspective. Yeah, for sure. I mean, exactly to what Balal is saying, we’re talking about signal, we’re talking about noise, right?

[10:44] And how do you get to signal and what is what is noise? Physicians don’t need you know unnecessary amounts of information. We need to know what exactly is going to help get our patient on that medicine at that time. it’s going to be very dependent on the type of patient I’m seeing, their insurance status, the type of drug that I’m trying to give them, their education, their understanding of what that medicine is, my understanding on that medicine. So there’s a bunch of different pieces of signal that are oftentimes very disparate between you know different different drugs. I’ll give you a good example.

[11:13] You know when we first started Empiricus, a lot of our initial people that we talk to from a pharma marketing perspective, their number one objective was how can we get more doctors to see our logo. And so that that move from an industry of saying, hey, it’s not just about seeing the logo, it’s about actually delivering something valuable to to the physicians has been a big push of of something that we’ve driven with our physician council and with our partners and our best partners understand, there’s going to be something valuable for the physician that’s important to get there. From a product perspective, we’ve been really excited.

[11:43] So we have a network of over a million HCPs. We work with all of the top 30 pharma companies today. And we’ve seen amazing results when you can get the signal correct for the right group of physicians. A good example is we were working with the DermaHol. brand late last year. They had an amazing product that can be used by a wide patient population, but even though they had a lot of resources, reps were really focusing on Tier 1, Tier 2 physicians that they know that they can they can make an impact with.

[12:09] And there’s this huge squabble of physicians that just weren’t getting seen by reps, weren’t getting information sent to them. They were in academic centers, things like that. And so we work with this brand and basically said, “Hey, let’s take over. Let’s try to figure out what the signal is. Let’s try to figure out what the experience for these physicians will be. Let’s allow them to have two conversations. Let’s allow them to be doing things in their point of care. And we’ve got tremendous results. 8,000 dermatologists who started engaging with this brand that weren’t engaged with before. Obviously, the the script lift comes in of itself.

[12:37] But for me, the most exciting thing is just that rural dermatologists in Idaho who is never being able to be seen by a rep or is just getting emails about things that isn’t that aren’t important to them is now being able to understand, “All right, how can I actually prescribe this medicine to my patients?” And the the patients that that rural dermatologists is seeing now is getting better care. That’s been a really, really exciting thing. And it can only happen with a partnership between industry and physicians at the same time. Absolutely. You talked about those trickle down effects and being able to see them in real time is fascinating.

[13:06] I I don’t want to pop anybody’s bubble that’s in our audience, but below I need to ask you a kind of two-party question here, which is how frequently do you want to hear from pharma reps and in what way, what capacity can that conversation happen? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think the answer answer is as much as necessary in a helpful way.

[13:28] You know, it’s it’s kind of a nebulous answer, but to kind of give you a hyperbole, I don’t want between every time slot a farmer up waiting for me and and having something to say. I’d like it to be distilled and in a way that’s always accessible if that makes sense. So, to me what makes the most sense is not necessarily face-to-face interaction. There’s a role for that.

[13:49] If there’s a brand new product that’s coming out that’s got a lot of asterisk next to it that you can’t use it and yeah certain kidney function, or there’s a lot of education that needs to happen, then sure face-to-face interaction makes sense.

[14:01] But to me, having some sort of remote based either through an application or through the EMR if you integrated, and I think they’re kind of tools in the pipeline that are coming out, especially out of Stanford’s AI initiative that they’re they’re working on, being able to interact directly either through a live chat or, you know, through a phone call or through a video call would be the most helpful with the patient in front One disclaimer that I’ll give is, I am involved in terms of prescribing medications, but a lot of my practice and I would say a majority is device-related.

[14:35] And so I can use that as kind of an example that would be analogous, but we’re using a device and often it’s the latest and greatest and I don’t know exactly what every mechanism is. The device rep will come in and not scrub into the case, but we’ll be there voice, face and tell me, hey, you have to ratchet the stent three times and in order for it to to expand and be deployed. That same thing can be done remotely as long as I have a a Wi-Fi connection and I have speakers and I have ears.

[15:04] Thankfully, we have all three of those in most most medical facilities. So, I think being available at the right time is the most important to me. And as things are moving more towards kind of remote resources, it makes most sense to me to have it in that kind of capacity. And I think it kind of leads to a follow-up question here and I’ll have you lead off and I want your thoughts too. Just in terms of what makes an interaction with a pharma brand or a rep valuable.

[15:31] Like I know that’s also hard to quantify but like how do you evaluate it? Yeah, you know, I think having the least fluff possible and the most substance is is the shortest way I can put it. The best interactions that I’ve had are PharmaRep comes in and and says, “Hey, you know, I know you don’t want to hear my spiel.

[15:53] So, tell me if there’s anything that you want to hear, but here’s the meat of what you need to know in order to use my product and this is how it can be helpful to your patient in the shortest bite possible. And those people are people that I I maintain relationships with and that’s that’s kind of a great way to continue that relationship with that brand and that specific representative. Picking back on his comment, it’s really like you should be thinking yourself whether you’re a rep or a marketer or whatever.

[16:22] You’re you’re part of the care team. And the care team involves lots of different people, lots of different places. We can’t sit for an hour to talk to you every time, but you are part of the care team and what is the thing that you’re going to do that’s going to actually make my patients life better? And it might be one sentence, it might be hand sentences, but those are the things that you should be thinking about focusing on. And then and then also the resources, the bridge programs, the hub services programs, all those things are really things that impact our patients.

[16:46] So I think that the framing should be we’re part of the care team together versus you’re trying to get a logo out and get an impression and a visit kind of checked off the list to hit some sort of metric for the quarter quarter. Amen. Absolutely. And Osama, I want to ask you a follow-up question because like you said, you interact with all these top 30 really large drug makers. And I’m curious from your perspective how you evaluate their interactions with HCPs. Is it as transparent and forthright as it could be? Is there room for improvement?

[17:15] Like how how does that look from your perspective? And again, how does Empiricus try and and make it better and more valuable for both sides in the equation rather than pharma saying like oh we need to go and get this HCP and kind of going back to what you said about them looking like a number rather than a person in the story of patient population. Overall, I do feel like people in pharma, the people that have interacted by and for or bound to this mission that we’re here to advance patient care, right? We’re trying to do the right thing.

[17:42] I think the challenge has always been the tools that have been available to do the right thing, right? Like so many times we work with the pharma company, they have a target list and there’s some significant portion whether it’s 1% or 8% of the physicians that are on their target list that are either dead or not clinically active, right? And so like I I actually feel a lot of sympathy for my colleagues on the pharma side, right?

[18:04] There’s limitations and tools and to that point that’s really where and I’m just trying to build a better toolkit that pharma can use in terms of understanding the physicians, reaching out to them, being able to have that two-way interaction, being able to extend that real relationship that Dr. Ahmed’s talking about. At the end of the day, it’s about signal, it’s about getting the right data to the right physician, it’s about getting out of the way then and letting patient care happen. And I do think that pharma overall has a desire to move in that direction.

[18:31] I think there’s a little bit of limitations in terms of way things are structured right now as well as the current tool kit, but I think we’re moving in the right right way. And you talk about the current toolkit and I said it during my introduction, it comes up in most conversations I have with healthcare executives these days is how AI can really impact that. And I guess I’m curious, Asama, if you want to start there, is how that’s really kind of changing the dynamic at play and and kind of supercharging a lot of different initiatives that you see from drug makers on that front. Yeah, for sure. A couple of things.

[18:59] One is AI is new and innovative and I’ve seen for pharma uh overall acceptance of AI and desire to work with AI, which For anyone who’s worked with Pharma for some time, it’s hard to get new things through, but I think there’s buying from the top down around really understanding AI and moving it forward, which is which is great. I think the other piece that’s been really, really important around AI, especially around our mission.

[19:22] So a good example is as we worked with Empiricus, the beginning days, every interaction that we had with an HCP, we hand coded, we then took that and put that into these really complex algorithms. Now with these foundation models, we’ve tuned those models to now be able to spin out, hey, for this brand and these are the most important things that HCP would want to say. Let’s engage with HCPs dynamically from that engagement. We can then adjust the content and get it through MLR and now send send a new message out.

[19:48] So there’s a lot of dynamicism that can now happen with AI, a lot of what I call personalization, but really every physician has different signal to the noise ratios that AI has really been able to to accelerate. And I think the other piece that I think is really, really exciting is we’re entering into the world in which people are now getting to operate at the top of their license, right? right?

[20:08] If you think about the job of a rep or the job of a pharma marketer, it’s not to go and manage the ordering the lunch for this day or all these different vendors, people are getting to think more strategically about how do I manage relationship. And so I really do think that the AI tools are getting built, especially some of the things that we’re building with Empiricus really enable more strategic level thinking, getting faster results, getting better data back, which is really exciting. I do have to say, I’m glad that we record this after lunch because the amount of times that food has been brought up in this conversation, I’m I’m starting to get hungry.

[20:37] So, uh and the interest in kind of pivoting off that a little bit. I want to ask you, Dr. um Matt, you know, what would make you trust and adopt a solution from pharma? You know, obviously there’s not an antagonistic relationship with pharma, but there’s also kind of like, okay, like, how much trust and faith do I put in this offering? Like, what does that look like for you? Yeah, yeah, I think this pivot’s or or doesn’t pivot, but gels nicely with kind of what we talked about in multiple questions before.

[21:07] Is it useful? Is it reliable? Is it time intensive, which would kind of be a a negative or a detractor? And does it help my patients? Which is the end goal that we should all have. Dr. Hashimi put it perfectly that uh Pharma is part of the care team and it’s like you said Jack not an antagonistic relationship. We would like it to be as seamless as possible.

[21:30] We’re all working in that direction and so having something that’s bite size that tells me what I need to know and helps the patient at the end would be kind of my my main criteria for something that I would be over the moon to adopt. I appreciate that response Bilal. Osama, is there anything you want to add onto that front in terms of like how an ACP should good trust in offering that comes from a farmer company and what really, you know, what check marks they have to hit to be able to get that? Yeah, exactly.

[21:57] I mean, we we see a lot of solutions coming out and since I’m on the technology and product side as well as a practicing physician, there’s there’s one more thing that I would add is AI isn’t perfect. Technology isn’t perfect. It’s really important to have a human in the loop on this process. It’s really important for things that potentially could fall through the cracks, which things will to be able to have quick fall up with the human in place.

[22:18] And so, I think there’s some things from organizational standpoint that’re important to think about as a pharma company, which is how do you think about the physician user experience, doing that user experience testing, figuring out all the all the nuances, all the things that potentially could go wrong, but then also making sure that there’s support on under those things, that’s a really big thing. I mean, it’s it’s one thing from a simplest level, when a pharma company has a resource and it’s not acting the way that it’s doing and you put in a support request and nobody answers it for two to three weeks, that’s that’s that’s tough. Absolutely.

[22:47] It’s been wonderful having both of you on the show here. It’s been very very insightful being able to hear again from both sides of the equation here and where there is room for improvement, where there has been a lot of progress too and being able to really kind of evaluate the state of play in mid-2025.

[23:00] I have one more question for you which is what an optimal and ethical HCP farmer relationship looks like and how it could evolve over the next 5 years or so and I know that none of us have a crystal ball in front of us but like in your mind what could that look like in an ideal world and Balal maybe you can start us off there and Osama you can bring us home. Yeah, I think uh Dr.

[23:20] Ashmere put a lot of great points out there that AI is a tool to help free us all up in order to make relationships and make more strategic level thinking. So I think that integrating AI and being more focused on what is the end goal here, which is delivering the best experience and the most cost-effective experience for the patient is a way forward.

[23:44] That’s the optimal and most ethical way that both pharmaceutical companies as a whole and healthcare providers can kind of team together to help the end result, which is making the patient need less visits with us. For sure. And I’ll just add to that. I think we live in a world right now, especially on the marketing and sales side when it comes to pharma where you get a target list of 100 physicians and then you go and you try to hit that 100 physicians as many times as possible without as many messages as possible.

[24:14] I think when you think about how do you do this in a way that actually affects patient care, I think there’s a couple of components the first is obviously, what are the things that are actually going to influence patients. Once again, less logos, less, you know, random kind of metrics that don’t affect patient care, really how do you align your metrics and organization towards metrics that measure how how much impact you’re having for for patients. The second is actually just this refining of the physicians that you talk to and who is it that you’re going to send a message to.

[24:42] Um, I’d like to say that, you know, if you’re a company right now and you’re reaching 20 doctors, you can reach 60 doctors But if 10 of those doctors are the wrong doctors, are you really accomplishing something, right? And I think this idea of, hey, how do we make sure that every physician that we’re talking to, we’re actually being a partner with, we understand their practice, we understand their needs, we understand their time constraints, we understand their channel preferences, how do we do that to an end of one level? I think that’s going to have the most impact.

[25:08] And ideally, with AI, with the data that we’re getting, with all the excitement that we’re having from a product development standpoint, I think we’ll hopefully be able to get there, if not in the next 5 years, but maybe 10 to 15. It’s been wonderful having you on the show here. I hope we can have another follow-up conversation somewhere down the line because again, it is something that’s so interesting to see how the dynamic is evolving in real time and how technology is really affecting what have been these kind of traditional long-standing tenants of the relationship.

[25:35] So, I appreciate you coming on here and unpacking it for our audience and wish you the best of luck going forward with everything you got going on. Thanks for having us. Yeah, thank you.