I recently spoke with Chris Paquette, Co Founder & Chief Executive Officer of DeepIntent, about the company’s efforts to improve care and wellness by facilitating better communication between brands, patients, and healthcare professionals. We also discussed DeepIntent’s healthcare technology platform, MarketMatch, which connects advertisers, data providers, and publishers to operate a unified, programmatic marketplace for healthcare marketers.
The abbreviated interview was posted on our blog. The full text of our conversation is below.
What is the DeepIntent mission/vision?
DeepIntent strives to improve care and wellness by facilitating better communication between brands, patients, and healthcare professionals. We believe media can drive real health outcomes. Each day, our teams are designing and building new ways to plan, activate, and measure healthcare marketing by eliminating data silos and media fragmentation. We intend to reshape the future of healthcare marketing by building a marketplace that combines offline health data with online identity, allowing media buyers and sellers to transact within a single privacy-safe, data-rich environment.
With a background in advertising and data science, what was your inspiration for creating DeepIntent?
Having had ample experience in both healthcare and advertising, I saw a gap in the marketplace between ad technology and healthcare. My work at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center focused on building systems with AI that mined insights from big data and quickly surface the right information to patients and providers. It was during this time that I saw the opportunity to combine the scale and speed of programmatic advertising with healthcare data to drive better health outcomes for patient populations. Over the course of our development, DeepIntent was built to deliver health information to relevant patients and providers through a similar methodology, except this time for a different set of stakeholders (pharma, payers, and providers). We believe in the power that media has to build awareness of new treatments and trials, and ultimately better outcomes for patients.
What trends do you see among your clients in managing and leveraging information in their digital channels?
The rise of first-party data is playing an important role in marketing across all industries, and the healthcare industry is no different. DeepIntent was built to allow clients (healthcare agencies and brands) to quickly deploy their first-party assets to design, plan, and launch highly efficient audience-based marketing to patients and healthcare providers. For example, DeepIntent’s MarketMatch™ Planner gives our clients the ability to quickly upload an HCP target list or curate a list of targeted providers using specific diagnoses, script writing behaviors, or procedures; calculate match rates and impression forecasts in real-time; and send audiences to our DSP for immediate activation. This is in stark contrast to the current approach to do the same, which takes multiple weeks, various vendors, and results in missed opportunities to influence customers.
Can you explain how AI plays a critical role in analytics, more specifically how AI captures data that helps healthcare marketers?
AI/Machine Learning (ML) sits at the core of how we do what we do for our clients. The ability to build and deploy health predictors into programmatic advertising using a mix of demographic and behavioral data requires massive data, computational infrastructure, and domain expertise. However, AI/ML and human experts have a symbiotic relationship. Ultimately, it is a human patient or provider, not a computer, who ultimately receives our communications. Creating human-level connectivity to a marketing message must begin with how we design a message to resonate with the target audience. Mining clinical and media data to measure and quantify the “resonance” and effectiveness of any ad within an audience is an active area of development for us and requires the use of machine learning to distill the right insights about the drivers/motivations of a patient’s or provider’s intent pertaining to their health.
What types of conversations and topics are you hearing in the industry regarding the convergence of adtech and martech?
I believe that healthcare is uniquely poised to take advantage of the adtech/martech convergence, given the data “footprint” that intrinsically exists around the point of care. I believe that we’re entering a renaissance period of what we do with the data at our fingertips. It’s exciting to see that many companies who would’ve traditionally shunned the use of their health data for non-healthcare use cases such as finance and advertising are beginning to warm up and test the waters. Interestingly, most HCP advertising today revolves around matching an offline, known list of providers to digital identities (a process called “onboarding”). Depending on the vendor you advertise with, these provider advertisements can be synched with other sales and marketing activities (sales reps, offline promotional activity, event sponsorships, etc.). Online advertising can now even be correlated back to offline events such as new prescription starts. This is the holy grail of “adtech/martech convergence” and, somewhat ironically, we’re seeing this from one of the most regulated industries in the world. While patient advertising must adhere to HIPAA (and for good reason), I believe that the companies who are developing the foundational infrastructure for how PHI/PII is de-identified and shared between parties are pushing the ball forward for the rest of us to develop innovative solutions around this data.
As more information is shared online, there are more opportunities for breaches in security. How has DeepIntent ensured their commitment to protecting their customers’ private information?
Large-scale data breaches are hitting the headlines more than ever. What we’re seeing is the rampant cyber-assailment of governments and large and small businesses. This threat will only increase over time. These breaches serve as constant reminders that our business depends on the trust of our customers to work with us. Trust starts with caring for our customer’s data. DeepIntent just completed work on developing a HIPAA-compliant, secured computing environment where we’ve implemented state-of-the-art methodologies for analyzing and processing data in a digital “data cleanroom.” We’ve also implemented GDPR-style controls and systems in our ad serving platform, anticipating further state and federal regulation. Back during the investigation into the Russian political interference campaign during the 2016 U.S. Presidential Elections, DeepIntent was the first ad technology company to announce a new tool designed to bring transparency to political advertisements. Google and Facebook followed our lead months later. Ultimately, I believe that it is investments like this that demonstrate that we subscribe to the notion that our customer’s fundamental rights include owning and controlling their personal data.
In a nutshell, can you explain DeepIntent’s integrated programmatic marketing platform?
We’ve observed an industry full of young and old companies fragment and cast themselves into ever-changing technology labels like “DSPs,” “SSPs,” and “DMPs.”
When we first started building DeepIntent, we consciously weaved tech ownership, data control, and efficient scalability into the fabric of our company’s DNA. Instead of white-labeling a DSP, we built it. Instead of renting a natural language processing engine, we built it. We wanted to offer our clients a better way to buy medical claims-based audiences, so we integrated our own data processing and modeling engine directly into our DSP to do so.
The outcome is our holistic healthcare technology platform, MarketMatch™, which connects advertisers, data providers, and publishers to operate the first unified, programmatic marketplace for healthcare marketers. The platform’s built-in identity solution matches digital IDs with clinical, behavioral, and contextual data in real-time so marketers can qualify 1.6M+ verified HCPs and 250M+ patients to find their most clinically-relevant audiences, and message them on a one-to-one basis in a privacy compliant way. Healthcare marketers use MarketMatch to plan, activate, and measure digital campaigns in ways that best suit their business, from managed service engagements to technical integration or self-service solutions.
Chris Paquette is the co-founder and CEO of DeepIntent, a marketing technology company that operates a specialized programmatic marketplace to improve communication between healthcare brands, patients, and verified healthcare professionals.
Chris draws on his multifaceted expertise to bring a uniquely valuable perspective to healthcare marketing. After graduating from Binghamton University with a bioengineering degree, Chris launched his martech career. Prior to founding DeepIntent, Chris was a Data Scientist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where he developed systems that leveraged bleeding-edge machine learning and artificial intelligence to improve patient experiences and outcomes. Chris co-founded DeepIntent in 2015; under his leadership, the company has grown from a mere idea to a global operation that proudly serves several major pharmaceutical and Fortune 500 companies out of its offices in New York, California, and India.
Outside of the office, Chris is an avid traveler and enjoys the outdoors; some of his favorite hikes were in Southeast Asia and Chilean Patagonia. Chris currently resides in New York City with his fiancé, Kelly.
