IQVIA Digital has introduced new technology designed to help pharmaceutical marketers better identify nurse practitioners (NPs) and physician associates (PAs) who prescribe medicines, using insights obtained from POCN Group, the social and professional community for NPs and PAs that the company acquired in 2024. According to POCN data, NPs and PAs account for 35% of all U.S. prescription claims. However, IQVIA maintains that prescriptions written by these clinicians are often undercounted when they are billed under supervising physicians, potentially causing marketers to miss a significant group of healthcare professionals involved in prescribing decisions. Through IQVIA AI, the company aims to provide a more complete view of these prescribers and their role in patient care.
To support more accurate targeting, IQVIA Digital applies artificial intelligence to evaluate a healthcare professional’s affiliation, education, prescriptions, diagnoses, practice and behavioral data. The analyses are used to infer each clinician’s clinical focus. By linking NPs and PAs with their supervising physicians, the technology creates an overview of how care is delivered across healthcare settings. IQVIA said this broader perspective can help marketing teams align engagement efforts with real-world care delivery, reach the full care team, identify clinicians who may otherwise be overlooked, understand prescribing influence and map collaborations among healthcare professionals.
The company said traditional approaches have struggled to accurately categorize these clinicians because of the variety of roles they perform. “NPs and PAs often practice across multiple therapeutic areas and care settings, making them difficult to classify using traditional data,” Eric Lloyd, chief revenue officer at IQVIA Digital, said in a statement. He added that the company’s approach reflects a view that static data and physician-reported information do not reliably capture roles that evolve and extend across multiple care environments. As a result, IQVIA AI is being positioned as a tool to improve visibility into prescribing activity and healthcare team dynamics.
Although IQVIA highlighted challenges in identifying and reaching NPs and PAs, existing payment data indicate that many advanced practice clinicians already engage with pharmaceutical and medical technology companies through various channels. Researchers reported that 35.8% of advanced practice clinicians received payments from pharma or medtech companies in 2021, compared with 35% of physicians. NPs and PAs are included within the advanced practice clinician category.
