Point of Care marketing now represents over $1 billion* in annual U.S. healthcare advertising spend— yet most Marketing Mix Models (MMM) are measuring it wrong. The culprit? Binary “on/off” indicators that treat a small practice seeing 65 patients per day the same as a large practice seeing 250+. This oversimplification creates systematic bias: high-traffic environments are dramatically undervalued while low-traffic ones are overvalued, leading to misallocated budgets and eroded confidence in POC as a channel.

POC measurement starts with a framework that aligns what we measure with the brand and business outcomes the campaign aims to achieve. This approach must address three essential questions:

1. What are the brand’s marketing objectives?
2. What campaign-specific goals is the POC tasked to deliver?
3. What metrics best represent these goals, and which measurement solutions can accurately quantify them?

By answering these questions, we ensure that MMM optimizations directly connect to meaningful brand outcomes.

Because only a small fraction of marketers attempt to factor variables like patient traffic into their inputs, there’s an industry-wide opportunity to improve accuracy and relevance in POC measurement.

With a measurement framework in place, the next critical step is ensuring your MMM inputs accurately reflect POC audience reach. Without this, MMM models cannot properly calibrate POC’s true impact, creating persistent misalignment with Test vs. Control studies.

The Solution: Patient-Centric Measurement

MedFuse, a company supplying and analyzing real-world data, partnered with Trinity, a strategic, techenabled commercialization company that empowers pharma, biotech and medtech to advance the development, launch, and optimization of new medical innovations, to advise and test a new input in a MMM for POC.

This study introduces and validates the Patient Reach Index—a metric that combines breadth (number of Healthcare Provider (HCP) offices with POC placements) with depth (patient traffic per office). In a rigorous comparison against traditional binary models, the Patient Reach Index demonstrated a 4.4x higher POC campaign lift estimate.

Most importantly, the Patient Reach Index aligned closely with independent Test vs. Control studies, while binary models significantly underestimated true impact.

What This Means for You

With this improved measurement approach, pharma marketers can achieve greater confidence in POC investment decisions, optimize budget allocation to high-performing HCP segments, and transform MMM from a retrospective scorecard into a forward-looking strategic planning tool.