Ryan King, Director, Medical Strategy
Angela Searles, Vice President Client Services, Medical Communications
As advances in medicine have become ever more rapid and complex, healthcare professionals (HCPs) have traditionally looked to their peers to parse new information and identify the innovations worth incorporating into their practices. Pharmaceutical companies support this by providing disease state and product-focused education through peer-to-peer (P2P) promotional education delivered by HCP experts. Yet, experts alone do not make for an engaging presentation and often presentations feel far too didactic. Today, innovative technologies and formats can change that.
HCPs are navigating a sea of competing demands, digital distractions, and educational fatigue. The challenge is no longer just sharing great science. It’s delivering that science in ways that break through the noise, without becoming noise themselves. While the core mission of P2P medical education remains the same — delivering credible, clinically relevant information that improves patient outcomes — how that content is delivered matters more than ever.
New tools and technologies offer unprecedented opportunities to elevate traditional educational formats. But simply adding “shiny objects” won’t suffice. In fact, misused or poorly integrated enhancements can dilute, confuse, or overshadow your key message. The solution lies in intentional innovation. Carefully choosing the right tools for the right moments encourages HCPs to engage with content and data in new ways. Technology then truly supports the educational goals of the program, amplifying scientific messaging without compromising clarity or clinical focus.
At its core, P2P education is about the meaningful transfer of clinical knowledge between medical experts and other practitioners. The purpose is to close gaps in care, inform decision-making, and improve patient outcomes. That mission hasn’t changed — but the environment around it has.
With the rise of omnichannel communications, HCPs are bombarded with content from every direction: emails, portals, CME activities, webinars, congresses, and industry reps. These competing educational offerings come both from the broader scientific community and from pharma companies of all sizes. All that noise makes it difficult for any one message to stand out; it’s no wonder that, according to multiple studies, HCPs only engage with a small fraction of the content available to them. As such, every opportunity to connect must count. It is no longer enough for P2P speaker programs to rely on PowerPoint slides and a credentialed speaker, even if that speaker is a respected key opinion leader (KOL).
The industry agrees that there is a need for innovation in P2P programs. At Precision AQ, we have found that nearly every recent request for proposal (RFP) for P2P initiatives includes a mandate to deliver content in new and engaging ways. However, novelty alone does not equate to value. The bar for success is higher: when harnessing innovative tools, technologies, and formats to educate, the results must be compelling, accessible, easy to use, and deeply engaging, as well as clinically meaningful.
Technology offers a vast array of tools to enrich P2P learning. Interactive content accessed on attendee devices can include additional information or data, dynamic data exploration tools, augmented or mixed reality tools, and gamified learning experiences. HCPs themselves are showing increasing openness to engaging with technology-enhanced education, particularly when the tools are intuitive and provide clinically relevant information.
Yet innovation must serve the message, not the other way around. Educational enhancements that are implemented without a clear strategy or clinical rationale can easily become distracting. Just because you can use a flashy tool doesn’t mean you should. Every technological element must earn its place in the program. By giving attendees ways to engage with the content and supporting data, you can elevate comprehension, foster interaction, and strengthen retention of the core messages.
Fortunately, this does not require wholesale reinvention of your entire educational strategy. Instead, consider how to incorporate new technologies, tools, and formats that serve your message. We have found that micro-innovations — tactical, intentional, manageable enhancements that enrich the educational experience without overwhelming it — can have major impacts.
Having applied these principles across multiple situations, we’ve seen just how effective they can be. For example, Precision recently incorporated a novel AI-enabled activity into a speaker program focused on a disease state that is often under-recognized and whose impact on patients is often under-appreciated. To bring to life this complex and real-world patient journey, we collaborated with a technology partner to incorporate an AI-enabled conversational patient avatar into P2P presentations.
Rather than passively receiving information, attendees were invited to interact verbally with the avatar around a variety of topics. For example, attendees explored how subtle variations in questioning could yield drastically different responses. They experienced how asking general questions like “How have you been doing?” failed to elicit relevant information. Instead, more specific questions about the manifestations and impacts of disease helped uncover information that patients may not think to mention or even associate with their disease. HCPs experienced how the right combination of questions could reveal the patient’s symptoms, level of disease control, and disease-related quality of life.
This experience didn’t just impress the audience, it changed how they thought about patient interactions. Speakers reported heightened engagement, and attendees walked away with deeper empathy and a better understanding of the impact of uncontrolled disease on patients’ lives. Technology didn’t replace the story. It enhanced it.
In another recent example, we used an augmented reality tool to highlight the systemic manifestations of a chronic disease. These manifestations can have a direct impact on patient quality of life and are important for HCPs to assess.
Using this augmented reality tool (accessed via their smartphones), program attendees could explore and visualize the systemic manifestations of disease. The tool also illustrated how symptom severity correlates with the score of disease activity measures that are used in clinical trials but not in daily clinical practice.
This isn’t a “tech-first” solution. It is a message-driven solution supported by the right tool, one we’re actively exploring opportunities to use in congress booths and other HCP touchpoints. Here again, the innovation isn’t just cool, it is clinically impactful and aligned with educational strategy.
So how do you innovate with intention? It starts with understanding your audience, not just their clinical focus, but their learning preferences, digital behaviors, and operational realities. Designing an innovative program without knowing how (or if) your audience can and will engage with it is an exercise in futility. Then ensure that your innovations move the message forward; otherwise, they are simply distractions.
At Precision AQ, our approach is built on four principles:
Audience Understanding: We begin with a 360° view of your target HCPs — what they believe, how they learn, and what they need clinically.
Message Clarity: Innovation should never muddle the message. If it doesn’t make your key point clearer or more memorable, it doesn’t belong.
Right-Sized Technology: Not every program needs cutting-edge tech, but every program needs engaging delivery. Whether that’s interactive polling, short, animated videos, or fully immersive AR, the solution must match the goal.
Execution Focus: We don’t just ideate. We build and implement. We help you overcome internal hurdles, secure approvals, and train presenters to deliver with confidence.
When done right, the results speak for themselves. Clinicians are more engaged, remember more, and are more likely to change behavior. Speakers feel empowered, not encumbered. And your program stands out for all the right reasons.
At Precision AQ, our P2P programs are grounded in research, tailored to your brand, and optimized for execution. Get in touch to find out more about our successes in this area and how we can help amplify your brand communications.