Policy Desk to Prescribing Pad: Aligning Market Access and Medical Marketing in 2025

Executive Summary

In pharma, market access and medical marketing often work in silos, limiting a therapy’s real-world impact. Aligning these functions through early collaboration, shared data, unified KPIs, and digital-first strategies bridges this gap—ensuring value stories resonate with all stakeholders, accelerating uptake, and improving patient access and outcomes.

Key Takeaways

• Early cross-functional collaboration shapes a unified value narrative.

• Real-world data strengthens payer and HCP engagement.

• Digital-first, personalized campaigns bridge communication gaps.

• Shared KPIs drive mutual accountability and faster uptake.

• Breaking silos ensures therapies reach patients, especially in underserved communities.

Understanding the Divide

In today’s complex pharmaceutical landscape, a curious disconnect persists. While breakthrough therapies make it through the rigors of regulatory approval, many still fail to reach the patients who need them most. The reason? A widening gap between market access strategy and medical marketing execution.

Historically siloed within pharma organizations, these two essential functions are now converging out of necessity. As digital transformation accelerates, companies must align market access and medical marketing to deliver both commercial value and real-world patient impact. Let’s explore how companies can bridge this gap to unlock real-world value.

Market access is about ensuring that regulatory body approved medication is reimbursed, adopted by health systems, and made available to patients. It involves evidence generation, pricing, health economics, payer engagement, and navigation of national and local policies.

Medical marketing, on the other hand, centers on strategic promotional efforts that communicate the health benefits of a product through persuasive messaging. This approach engages healthcare professionals and key stakeholders by emphasizing the drug’s clinical value, often supported by evidence-based content, scientific data, and peer-to-peer exchange.

Both functions are trying to answer one central question:

How do we communicate the value of this drug—to payers, providers, and patients—in a way that accelerates uptake and improves outcomes?

But they often approach this question from different angles, timelines, and datasets.

Why the Disconnect?

Access teams prioritize pricing and reimbursement, while marketers focus on awareness and HCP adoption. Without collaboration, payer needs go unmet, clinical narratives fall flat, and real-world value is lost in translation.

This disconnect can result in great science being undersold or access hurdles being underestimated. Global pharmaceutical sales in 2023 reached $1.6 trillion, with the U.S. accounting for 40%. Meanwhile, healthcare and pharma digital ad spend in the U.S. hit a record $19.6 billion in 2024, reflecting an industry shift toward more personalized, omnichannel outreach.

Medical marketing is now digital-first. Pharma marketers report that more than half their HCP and patient engagement is online, leveraging virtual events, influencer collaborations, and AI-enabled personalization.

Simultaneously, market access strategies are becoming more localized and data-driven. Real-world data (RWD) and AI-powered analytics are critical not just for regulatory approval, but also for building compelling value propositions that resonate with both payers and providers.

Despite these advances, internal misalignment persists. Limited data sharing often prevents early collaboration between access and marketing teams. The result:

• Value messages fall flat: If payer pain points and evidence needs aren’t reflected in HCP-facing messages, the clinical story lacks real-world relevance.
• Slow uptake: Even with strong marketing, patient access is bottlenecked if reimbursement pathways aren’t clear or if providers face administrative hurdles.
• Missed insights: Valuable market access learnings from payers and HTAs often don’t inform the medical story told in the field.

Worse yet, these breakdowns ultimately impact patients, especially those in underserved communities. In 2024 alone, major U.S. retail pharmacy closures (CVS, Walgreens, Rite Aid) intensified access challenges, especially in rural and low-income areas. Digital and telehealth channels are stepping in, but they require coordinated messaging and engagement strategies across functions.

What’s Working: New Models of Collaboration

Digital transformation is proving to be a bridge between market access and medical marketing.

These digital touchpoints offer shared ground where access, messaging, and behavioral insights can meet.

“Social media is at a watershed moment. Pharma representatives should consider it an important channel to strengthen HCP relationships.”

– Gaurav Kapoor, EVP at Indegene

Leading pharmaceutical companies are beginning to bridge the gap through intentional integration. Here’s how:

1. Cross-Functional Launch Teams for Co-Creation of the Value Story

Top firms are forming “value delivery teams” that unite medical affairs, market access, HEOR, and marketing. Market access and marketing teams now collaborate as early as Phase II/III to build a unified value narrative. By selecting endpoints and data that matter to both HCPs and payers equips marketers and MSLs with the ability to speak to economic value and payer-relevant outcomes, not just clinical endpoints. This helps ensure scientific content resonates across the full spectrum of stakeholders.

2. Real-World Data as a Bridge

RWD is being used in patient stories, HCP education, and localized campaigns. In Asia-Pacific, for example, RWD is supporting value-based pricing models and regional reimbursement strategies.

3. Digital Transformation and Personalization

Digital-first campaigns featuring AI-powered targeting, influencer collaborations, and omnichannel touchpoints are now the norm. These allow both access and marketing teams to adapt quickly, measure outcomes, and personalize engagement based on real-time insights.

4. Shared KPIs

Success is increasingly measured with unified metrics: time-to-uptake, patient penetration, digital engagement, and real-world health outcomes. This alignment fosters mutual accountability and dismantles internal silos.

From Parallel Functions to Strategic Partners

As health systems demand more evidence of economic and clinical value, and as patients expect transparency, relevance, and accessibility, pharma must deliver across the entire value chain. In the era of personalized medicine, cell and gene therapies, and AI-driven diagnostics, delivering value requires dynamic collaboration.

The companies that will lead the next era of healthcare innovation will be the ones who can most effectively tell the product’s story to all stakeholders, from payers to patients. They will effectively communicate their value, overcome access barriers, and support real-world impact.

Stop operating in silos. Build integrated teams. Let data flow freely. And start co-creating strategies that deliver it to the people who need it most.

Author:

Rebecca D’souza, PhD.

Associate Content Expert, Enago Academy
Connect with Rebecca on LinkedIn