The Importance of Preventive Care
How many HCPs who attended your latest event, symposium, or congress are still on your field team’s radar?
Most marketing teams have no real way of knowing — and that has a direct impact on omnichannel metric tracking, segmentation, and easy reporting.
Congresses, symposia, product launches, advisory boards, scientific webinars: there are countless events, and each one is planned for months, brings together the right HCPs, runs successfully… and then fades into an attendance file no one ever opens again.
The problem? The infrastructure supporting execution.
Most marketing teams manage an intense calendar of scientific and promotional activities without a CRM that includes event management, without real visibility into what happened with each HCP after the activity, and without a systematic way to connect “attended the event” with “moved forward in their relationship with the pharmaceutical company” — whether through product interest, sample requests, or a follow-up visit from the field force.
This is not a coincidence, and it is not unique to pharma. Globally, 4 in 10 event organizers still struggle to consistently demonstrate ROI (Source: Bizzabo, via Wave Connect, 2026).
We have seen the same pattern in other sectors. In research we conducted at Paisanos for Halketon — a hackathon focused on helping NGOs through technology — we found that more than 90% of the organizations we interviewed were unable to demonstrate the real impact of their work.
The pattern repeats across industries: a lot gets done, but very little gets measured.
In pharma specifically, the challenge lies in creating an organic, dynamic connection between what happens in the field, the activities carried out, and the ability to properly segment and engage physicians through other channels.
Yet this same gap becomes especially costly because it usually only becomes visible at two very specific points in the planning cycle:
→ When it is time to justify next year’s budget allocation for in-person activities and define both the field force strategy and the omnichannel plan — and there is no way to show which events actually moved the needle with priority HCPs or which next best action makes the most sense.
→ When headquarters asks for impact reporting and regional comparability, and all that is available is an attendee list and a few event photos, with no data to substantiate the investment.
Here is a quick checklist to see whether this is happening to you:
You know how many HCPs confirmed attendance, but not how many actually attended or what the sales rep did afterwards.
Post-congress follow-up depends on someone manually cross-referencing the event agency’s spreadsheet with the medical visit database.
There is no way to compare one symposium with another, or to understand which format — in-person, hybrid, or webinar — generates more meaningful engagement with KOLs.
When someone asks, “What impact did this have on prescribing behavior or HCP engagement?”, the answer is based on perception rather than traceable data.
HCP interactions are not documented thoroughly enough to support transparency or compliance requirements during an audit.
If several of these sound familiar, here is what you can do.
The goal is to strengthen the backend of what you are already doing, so that every event generates usable and traceable data for marketing, the field force, and compliance.
For example:
→ Automated HCP registration connected directly to the CRM, without intermediary spreadsheets. Dynamic, personalized registration flows convert at nearly twice the rate of generic static forms — 24.4% vs. 11.6%, according to Wave Connect.
→ Tracking the profiles of HCPs who actually attended — not just those who registered — so you can connect specialty, real attendance, and product interest.
→ A documented handoff between the event and the field visit, ensuring that no HCP with genuine interest gets lost between marketing and the sales force.
One example shows what this can look like in practice: Natcofarma, in Brazil, activated omnichannel communication segmented by HCP profile for its oncology and hematology congresses and achieved a 30% increase in booth traffic simply by personalizing invitations and follow-up based on physician profiles, according to Proxima Cloud CRM.
Before planning more large-scale events, it is worth understanding where your current process stands.