Digital Marketing Emerges as Core Growth Engine: Innovative Models Empower Pharma Companies in Omnichannel Engagement — Exclusive Interview with Zhang Xinyan, Founder of Huimei Data Science

As the founder and CEO of Huimei Digital Technology, Zhang Xinyan has been very busy recently.

Although the pre-pandemic routine of frequent in-person client meetings has faded, she remains overwhelmingly busy in the online sphere.

Her Tencent Meeting schedule was already packed to the brim, and even this exclusive interview was squeezed in against the clock—having just concluded a client meeting, she seamlessly transitioned into the interview with VCBeat.

Her daily busy schedule with Huimei Shuke also serves as a footnote, offering us a glimpse into the world of digital pharmaceutical marketing.

With the implementation of healthcare reform policies such as volume-based procurement and medical insurance cost containment, pharmaceutical companies’ kickback-driven sales practices have gradually faded into history. This February, Chen Jinfu, Deputy Director of the National Healthcare Security Administration, further pointed out that “the average price reduction across the first six batches of centralized drug procurement was 53%.” While centralized procurement has helped restore reasonable pricing margins for pharmaceuticals, it has also posed new challenges for pharmaceutical companies—How to identify new avenues for market growth and how to adjust the cost structure of pharmaceutical companies to ensure profitability are challenges that pharmaceutical companies must confront.

In fact, with the outflow of pharmaceutical prescriptions and the penetration of the healthcare market into lower-tier regions, a large number of pharmaceutical companies have set their sights on the out-of-hospital market and the primary healthcare market. ButTraditional pharmaceutical marketing approaches face constraints, whether in the out-of-hospital market, which differs fundamentally from the in-hospital market, or in the more isolated and fragmented primary healthcare market.The offline barriers caused by the pandemic have further heightened the awareness among numerous pharmaceutical companies, which primarily rely on traditional offline marketing, of the importance of building integrated online-to-offline (O2O) digital marketing solutions.

Digital marketing is gaining further favor among pharmaceutical companies due to its "low cost and high efficiency."The rise of Huimei Digital Technology has also benefited from the surge in digital pharmaceutical marketing.As pharmaceutical companies race to expand their digital marketing solutions, how does Huimei Digital empower them to achieve omnichannel digital marketing, and what are the unique advantages of its solutions? Through an exclusive interview with CEO Zhang Xinyan, we seek to uncover the answers behind this success.

In 2019, the market was already crowded with numerous companies establishing their presence in digital pharmaceutical marketing. Zhang Xinyan, who had years of experience in the healthcare sector and previously worked at IQVIA and Ping An Health Insurance Technology, chose to join Huimei Medical Group at that time. She led its subsidiary, “Huimei Digital Tech,” into this highly competitive market.

On one hand, she is optimistic about the prospects of digital marketing in the pharmaceutical industry.As an increasing number of innovative pharmaceutical companies enter the window period for drug commercialization, traditional pharmaceutical firms are also undergoing transformation, making digital marketing a field with significant growth potential.On the other hand, it stems from her recognition of Huimei Medical Group and its strengths.Huimei Medical Group was jointly established by Hillhouse Capital and Mayo Clinic (formerly known as the Mayo Clinic). Hillhouse Capital has built an investment ecosystem in the field of innovative drugs, while Mayo Clinic offers a systematic suite of top-tier patient and physician education content. Together, they have not only laid a solid foundation for Huimei Digital Technology to rapidly build a digital pharmaceutical marketing system, but also paved the way for its business expansion.

Amidst fierce industry competition, what sets Huimei Digital Technology apart?

“Huimei Shuke is the industry’s first doctor-centric, omnichannel marketing solution. We provide an integrated marketing platform, operational services, and digital products to create a new ecosystem that empowers end-to-end digital transformation in pharmaceutical marketing, meeting pharmaceutical companies’ needs for omnichannel digital marketing from pre-launch to post-launch stages,” said Zhang Xinyan.

The core advantages of the systematic solutions provided by Huimei Shuke can be broadly understood as follows:

Huimei leverages Mayo Clinic’s comprehensive knowledge system, providing a foundation for corporate academic marketing, clinical research and practice, and digital medical services.

Huimei Digital Technology, leveraging the Mayo Clinic knowledge system, encompasses 12 million Chinese documents, 1.7 million English documents, data from 2.5 million national and regional large-scale academic conferences, 500,000 National Natural Science Foundation of China project records, and 400,000 domestic and international multi-center clinical study datasets. This comprehensive resource not only attracts physicians to remain on the platform but also provides pharmaceutical companies with tools for academic promotion. Furthermore, Huimei Digital Technology is constructing the Huimei Physician Database based on the Mayo Clinic knowledge system, which has accumulated over 19 million various physician data entries. The physician database covers more than 3.3 million physicians across China.

Accurate physician profiling is the foundation of digital applications.Historically, the lack of digitalization and precision in physician profiling made it difficult for pharmaceutical companies to identify suitable physicians for academic promotion. Leveraging comprehensive and accurate physician data along with AI algorithm technologies, Huimei Digital Technology has developed a 360° Healthcare Professional (HCP) profile. This solution enables practical applications such as academic characteristic mining, professional network mapping, assessment of physician perceptions, and intelligent visit management.

Currently, Huimei Digital Technology has established collaborations with multiple pharmaceutical companies. The 360° HCP physician profile already covers nearly 30% of foreign-invested pharmaceutical enterprises.Among them, its customer data matching engine is currently the industry leader.Huimei Digital Technology’s customer data matching engine stands out for its large-scale processing capacity. Enhanced by advanced algorithms, it is compatible with multiple heterogeneous data sources and enables efficient consolidation of physician data.

Huimei Digital Technology has integrated and built a comprehensive omni-channel marketing service system.At every stage, Huimei Digital Technology can provide pharmaceutical companies with compliant, high-quality solutions.We can understand the role played by Huimei Digital Technology in this process by examining the stages a pharmaceutical product goes through to reach the market.

Prior to drug market launch, Huimei Shuke can provide patient recruitment services to pharmaceutical companies.

Huimei Digital Technology leverages its database of 3.3 million physicians to enable its online team to rapidly and precisely reach prefecture-level and county-level markets for patient recruitment in clinical trials. During Phase III trials of target drugs, the company can identify eligible patients through telephone communications with physicians in these extensive lower-tier markets. Currently, it has established collaborations with multiple pharmaceutical companies.

Post-launch, Huimei Shuke can provide pharmaceutical companies with digital marketing services for their drugs.

For example, Huimei Digital Technology first creates 360° physician profiles by aggregating data from omni-channel platforms across the entire domain, and then transmits this data to the virtual representative workbench. Within the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system, virtual representatives engage with physicians to identify leads and business opportunities, which are then passed on to pharmaceutical company representatives. These representatives can invite physicians to participate in conferences, seminars, and other activities on the Xiaomei SCRM platform, thereby addressing the challenges pharmaceutical companies face in academic promotion.

In fact, the demands of different pharmaceutical companies may vary significantly. According to Zhang Xinyan,They also offer tailored products for innovative pharmaceutical companies, established domestic pharmaceutical firms, and multinational pharmaceutical corporations.These products are often designed to address the specific pain points of pharmaceutical companies. For instance, providers of digital marketing tools for the pharmaceutical industry tend to prioritize expansion in public-domain channels while overlooking the need for private-domain development within the pharmaceutical companies themselves. Based on this insight, Huimei Digital Technology has developed Xiao Mei SCRM—a solution that helps pharmaceutical companies build their private-domain ecosystems, unify their external brand image, and efficiently empower internal marketing execution and performance monitoring. By offering one-stop services for physician education, academic support, and case-based exchanges, and by integrating with physicians’ studios to deliver patient education and follow-up consultations, Xiao Mei SCRM enables precise engagement with both physicians and patients.

In the primary healthcare market, both established pharmaceutical companies and innovative drug developers may face a shortage of offline medical representatives.Huimei Digital Technology is inherently data-driven. While its competitors were building offline sales teams, Huimei chose not to establish its own offline team but instead collaborated with offline Contract Sales Organizations (CSOs) to help pharmaceutical companies achieve digital marketing.

Huimei Digital Health’s online team, in collaboration with over 6,000 offline “Dandelion” teams, leverages CRM 3.0 and the Virtual Representative Workbench to enable efficient online-offline coordination and mutual task assignment. This integration streamlines collaboration among virtual representatives, marketing operations, and offline teams, breaking down inter-departmental barriers and establishing a comprehensive omni-channel cross-team collaboration system for pharmaceutical and medical device companies. Through an integrated online-offline omnichannel marketing framework, Huimei Digital Health has further enhanced the precision of customer outreach and communication efficiency, enabling joint market expansion efforts with offline teams.

As Huimei’s pioneering sales digital marketing system, CRM 3.0 breaks away from conventional perceptions of CRM as merely a sales team management tool. It integrates highly acclaimed features by frontline representatives, including physician profiling, intelligent visit recommendations, invitation tracking, content forwarding lists, diagnostic and treatment knowledge bases, and clinical case repositories. This truly empowers offline sales representatives with corporate marketing resources to boost performance, helping enterprises achieve a transformation in digital sales management. Huimei Digital Technology believes that CRM 3.0 will become the foundational infrastructure for future digital marketing management and is currently delivering superior product and operational capabilities to enterprises, driving digital transformation across the industry.

For Luo Rushu, CEO of Huimei Medical Group, a broader vision lies in the digitalization of the healthcare value chain.Huimei Technology, a subsidiary of Huimei Medical Group, focuses on providing digital tools to hospitals, enhancing medical quality and strengthening refined hospital management through Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS) technology; Huimei Digital Science provides pharmaceutical companies with precise and comprehensive digital marketing solutions. The two entities develop synergistically, forming a larger business ecosystem.

Furthermore, the majority of Huimei Digital Technology’s team consists of practitioners with years of deep experience in the healthcare industry, possessing extensive familiarity with pharmaceutical enterprise clients and maintaining professional acumen regarding industry trends. Meanwhile, Huimei Digital Technology has also introduced technical and product-oriented entrepreneurial partners with R&D capabilities from the internet sector.Built the core “Medicine” + “Technology” team at Huimei Digital Tech, embodying both “technology” and “pharmaceuticals” DNA.

After three years of development, Huimei Digital Technology has established partnerships with more than 30 renowned domestic and international pharmaceutical companies. Its digital products have also received widespread acclaim.

In Zhang Xinyan’s view, Huimei Digital Technology has already taken the critical step from 0 to 1. What will determine the company’s future growth is the phase from 1 to 10—a stage that tests the enterprise’s capacity and scalability. She is fully confident that Huimei Digital Technology will certainly be capable of collaborating with more pharmaceutical companies in the future.By leveraging the solutions provided by Huimei Digital Technology, pharmaceutical companies can integrate daily management and marketing capabilities, achieving precise cost reduction and efficiency improvement.

A question may arise in our minds: How can the industry currently verify the effectiveness of digital marketing solutions provided by enterprises?

Zhang Xinyan stated,The effectiveness of digital marketing in the pharmaceutical industry may need to be analyzed from the perspectives of different types of stakeholders.: For innovative pharmaceutical companies, building a marketing system that they lack in-house offers high cost-effectiveness compared to developing one from scratch. For traditional pharmaceutical companies, achieving more precise reach and coverage through digital marketing, while reducing costs and improving efficiency, demonstrates its effectiveness. For multinational pharmaceutical companies, establishing cross-departmental digital collaboration to help build more agile systems is an essential component.

This also relates to the assessment of the development trends in the digital marketing industry.

In her view,Pharmaceutical companies can be categorized into two growth models: organic growth and inorganic growth.Endogenous growth involves cross-functional collaboration among departments such as marketing and medical affairs within pharmaceutical companies to achieve integrated marketing; exogenous growth refers to pharmaceutical companies partnering with third parties to expand ecosystem collaborations through digitalization and other means.Digital operational systems and platforms that support both organic and inorganic growth of pharmaceutical companies will serve as a critical foundation for digital marketing.

Huimei Shuke will also integrate into the wave of digital development as a “builder” of digital marketing infrastructure, empowering the growth of the industry ecosystem while helping pharmaceutical companies achieve precise market coverage.