The world's most popular digital channels center on intuitive search and chat functionality: Amazon, Google, ChatGPT. Biopharmas can harness this same functionality in their digital experiences, increasing conversations with, and insights from, patients and HCPs. Here’s why and how.
How patients and HCPs are already using AI
Brand websites optimize for storage rather than retrieval. When patients have a specific question, the burden falls on them to find the answer. However, 88% of consumers lack the reading comprehension skills to parse the average piece of pharma branded content, meaning they might not get their answer even when they find the right source material. This, combined with the rise of general-purpose AI LLMs, has fundamentally changed user behavior and expectations for how they gather healthcare information.
HCPs are similarly turning to AI to learn about treatment and therapies. More than 60% report feeling overwhelmed by pharma’s digital engagement, largely because it is too promotional or irrelevant.2
Brands have an opportunity to use conversational AI to deliver clear, personalized information to customers. But they must do so within compliance guardrails for communicating branded content. That means there is no tolerance for hallucinations or mismanagement of adverse events.
From digital dead-ends to personalized outcomes
Although pharma’s engagement model spans many channels, the outcome is usually the same. If a patient or an HCP has a question for a brand, their only options are to hunt for the answer themselves or be escalated to a live agent, which is likely only available in a few business days or by phone call. What they need is a faster, more specific answer.
Veeva Ostro, the leading conversational AI platform for life sciences brands, enables two-way, personalized engagement – giving patients and HCPs the ability to search brand websites, ask questions, and get tailored answers.
Two-way engagement with Veeva Ostro
Through Veeva Ostro’s Sites for Patients and Sites for HCPs, visitors can find the exact information they need, personalized based on their query.
Imagine a patient sees a targeted ad and lands on a brand website. Rather than hunting through static pages and PDFs, they ask their question directly in Veeva Ostro’s AI engine, embedded within the brand.com. Veeva Ostro interprets their intent and surfaces the right approved content instantly. The experience continues: the recommendation agent surfaces the next most relevant approved resources, guiding the patient on a personalized journey.
This same experience extends to HCPs. When an HCP lands on brand.com, they ask a question using medical acronyms and get an immediate answer drawn from approved materials. When the HCP is ready to speak with a rep to learn more, Veeva Ostro’s Request a Rep executes this request seamlessly. Email for HCPs extends this personalized experience, enabling the HCP to respond directly to emails and get AI-powered answers in their inbox before the rep meeting.
Across these touchpoints, Veeva Ostro delivers 100% compliant, two-way conversations that help patients and HCPs get relevant answers and move to the next step. At the same time, brands gain deep user insights from the exact questions that patients and HCPs ask, creating Commercial Evidence that reveals unmet needs, treatment barriers, and content gaps invisible to conventional analytics like page views.
For example, Pacira BioSciences leveraged Veeva Ostro to identify a surge in HCP requests for surgical wristbands. “Veeva Ostro delivers the Commercial Evidence needed to uncover hidden friction points,” says Stacy Stone, the company’s Executive Director of Omnichannel and Customer Experience. “For us, it revealed that HCPs required better access to surgical wristbands used to ensure safer administration of our drug, an unmet need a traditional brand website would have missed.”
Built-in compliance, better outcomes
For commercial teams, the natural question about any AI-powered solution is whether it can operate compliantly at scale.
With Veeva Ostro, compliance is built into the product architecture from the start. Every response is grounded in existing MLR-approved materials. And when sensitive clinical, safety, or adverse event questions arise, Veeva Ostro flags and triages them.
The result is 24/7 patient and HCP engagement with MLR-approved content. Biopharma brand teams working with Veeva Ostro have seen:
Conversational AI built for life sciences makes two-way communication possible. For patients and HCPs, this new model offers something biopharma digital touchpoints have long lacked: personalized answers to important healthcare questions. At the same time, brands get stronger engagement and better insight into what their customers need.
To learn more, see how Veeva Ostro works.
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1 “Health Literacy Reports and Publications," U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, April 2019.
2 “The Digitally-Savvy HCP,” Indegene, Accessed Aug. 2026.
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