A doctor community platform is a website and app made for doctors, where they read medical news, discuss cases and take courses. Drug companies pay to reach doctors on it, with information about their medicines, with surveys and with invitations to take part in trials. In the industry, doctors, nurses and pharmacists are called healthcare professionals (HCPs), so these platforms are also called HCP networks.
Doctors use the platform for their own work. They read news about new studies and treatment guidelines. They discuss difficult cases with other doctors. They earn continuing medical education credits through courses, and they find conferences through CME conference listings. The platform is usually free for doctors. Drug companies, research firms and trial sponsors pay for it.
Only doctors may join, because companies may show information about prescription medicines only to doctors. So when a doctor signs up, the platform checks the doctor's medical registration number against the official register. In India, doctors are registered with the National Medical Commission and the state medical councils.
Say a chest physician in Guwahati opens the app one evening. She reads an article on updated guidelines for treating asthma. Beside it is a sponsored article about a new inhaler, clearly marked as sponsored, as the platform's rules require. Next, she sees an invitation to a 10-minute paid survey about how she prescribes inhalers. Finally, she sees a notice from a trial sponsor that is looking for doctors who can refer patients with severe asthma to a trial. She opens the notice and asks for details.
The drug company learns which doctors read its article, and for how long. These results go back to pharma commercial analytics, which uses them to decide which doctors to reach next. The trial enquiry goes to the sponsor's team. The sponsor may run the trial as a decentralised clinical trial (DCT), in which patients take part from home. A doctor's reading history is personal data. Under India's Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, the platform needs the doctor's consent before it shares that history with a company.
Doctor community platforms run in many countries, including India and the United States. They are different from a customer engagement platform, which a company uses to send messages to its own customers. A doctor community platform is a place where doctors already spend time, and many companies reach them there. Sponsored content is labelled with the company that paid for it.