For years, healthcare marketers have accepted fragmentation as the cost of doing business. Data lived in separate systems. Insights arrived too late. Teams spent more time stitching together answers than acting on them.
At AdLab 2026, William Veltre, Chief Media Officer at The Deerfield Group, showed what happens when that assumption disappears.
What he laid out was a fundamental shift in how a growing agency approaches its craft, when empowered by a connected, insight-driven workflow powered by DeepIntent Helix™, our health marketing cloud.
The Problem: Fragmentation at Every Turn
Anyone who has sat at the intersection of planning, buying, activation, optimization, and measurement in pharma knows the same question looms over every meeting: do we have the data to back that up? Veltre has spent 20 years asking it. For Deerfield, the answer required bridging HCP and DTC insights, eliminating manual processes, and tapping proprietary data that had previously gone unused. Helix became the foundation.
Veltre walked through five live case studies spanning a range of therapeutic challenges.
Turning Data Into Better Targeting
A fourth-line breast cancer brand struggling with scripts used ICD-10, CPT, and J codes to define the treated patient population, then layered in NPI prescribing patterns and competitive writing behavior to surface a small but highly productive physician sub-segment. Activating against that group reversed years of stagnant script growth.
And in another highly competitive category, Deerfield mined open claims data spanning over a year to segment HCPs by diagnostic volume, diversity, recency, and consistency. In turn, they identified high-potential activators and refined messaging at the sub-segment level.
Turning Insights Into Smarter Strategy
A large pharma brand with plateauing HCP segments, Veltre explained, validated its target list through micro-segment analysis, tracking high, medium, and low writing tiers month over month. The result was a partner-level plan normalized by PLD performance that drove meaningful diagnostic behavior change.
Next, a neurology brand broke free from generic creative by using indication data from its target list to develop a differentiated messaging strategy tailored to individual HCP tiers, driving above-benchmark engagement across all channels, including, for the first time, dedicated outreach to tier two and tier three physicians.
Connecting HCP and DTC Planning
Finally, a brand launching its first-ever DTC campaign used historical HCP diagnostic patterns to model a high-value patient population, identify 350 key physicians, and translate those insights into a consumer audience currently in market.
The Numbers Behind the Workflow
The operational impact matched the clinical results. Deerfield's workflows are now 50% faster. The team delivers data to answer client strategic questions at eight times the previous rate, and reports arrive five times faster, because the data is already structured for storytelling.
What It Means for the Industry
What Deerfield is demonstrating is an entirely different operating model for our industry.
Instead of moving between disconnected planning, audience, activation, and measurement tools, teams worked from a connected data foundation. Questions that previously required weeks of analysis could be answered in hours.
The healthcare ecosystem isn’t getting less complex. More data sources, more channels, and more pressure to prove outcomes will only increase the challenge. The agencies that win will be the ones turning data into decisions faster than everyone else.
That’s the shift Deerfield showcased at AdLab and the opportunity Helix was built to unlock.
Learn more about DeepIntent Helix here.
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