Rethinking pharma engagement with health systems
Editor’s note: Darwin Research Group are finalists of the 2026 Healthcare/Pharmaceutical Research Project award, a category in the Quirk’s Awards. The winners of the awards will be announced on November 17 during a virtual celebration. To find out more about the awards, visit QuirksAwards.com.
Darwin Research Group and the Roadmap for Pharmaceutical Marketers (RPM) teamed up for a project examining how pharmaceutical marketers can better navigate influence of Integrated Delivery Networks (IDNs) on prescribing pathways, formulary access and care delivery. This project is the reason the team is a finalist for the 2026 Healthcare/Pharmaceutical Research Project, a category in the Quirk’s Awards.
The research program combined a large-scale survey of 125 health system leaders with 50 executive interviews, secondary research and proprietary IDN intelligence to understand which pharma engagement tactics health system leaders value most and why. The team developed archetypes and sentiment scoring to help marketers move beyond one-size-fits-all engagement strategies and tailor their approach to different health system environments.
The Darwin team answered a few questions about the project and the challenges involved, including how they designed the mixed-methods approach and ensured they captured perspectives from the wide range of clinical, financial and operational stakeholders involved in health system decision-making.
Describe the project and the effect it had on pharmaceutical marketers' understanding of IDNs’ influence.
Health systems are increasingly shaping formulary access, prescribing pathways and where patients receive care. As that influence grows, traditional rep-driven engagement models are losing ground, yet few studies measure what Integrated Delivery Network (IDN) leaders actually value from pharma.
The Roadmap for Pharmaceutical Marketers (RPM) fills that gap. It is a three-part syndicated study covering the IDN environment and trends, reimbursement and system control and customer engagement strategies. Through 125 survey responses and 50 executive interviews, we measured how health system leaders view common pharma tactics and why.
The immediate result for marketers is a ranked view of which tactics IDN leaders value most and least, and how that varies by health system type. Our archetype segmentation and sentiment scoring let teams tailor engagement to each system instead of using one message for every account.
The longer-term value is in how RPM gets used. The frameworks are reusable as IDNs continue to consolidate, and our tailored workshops let marketers work through the findings with our team in the context of their own therapeutic area and organization. RPM becomes an ongoing planning resource, not a report that sits on a shelf.
How did you determine which methods were best to use for this project?
Above-brand engagement is usually studied through qualitative methods, which explain behavior but can't rank one tactic against another. Marketers needed both.
That led us to a sequential mixed-methods design. The survey came first to measure sentiment at scale and form hypotheses. Executive interviews followed to test those hypotheses and uncover the governance and decision-making dynamics behind the numbers.
Our analytical tools came from the same thinking. IDNs vary widely in integration, risk management and contracting experience, so findings averaged across all systems would mislead. Our archetype framework segments systems on those dimensions. We built the sentiment scoring metric because marketers needed a simple way to compare and prioritize tactics.
Finally, we checked primary findings against secondary research and Darwin's proprietary IDN intelligence to confirm they reflected what we see in the market.
How did your team make sure you captured perspectives from the different stakeholders involved in health system decisions?
Health system decisions involve executives and committees across pharmacy, medicine, finance, quality and operations. A study that only reached pharmacy directors would miss most of the picture.
Our recruitment model is built for this. We recruited entirely in-house, drawing on an internal database of more than 5,000 healthcare leaders, some of whom are on our panel of healthcare executives we can call on for research. Darwin can reach the C-suite, director and service-line decision makers that general panels rarely supply.
Before fieldwork, we built target lists defining the mix we needed: title distribution across pharmacy, clinical and medical, quality, financial and operational roles, plus health system targets mapped to our archetypes and market segments. We recruited against those targets, producing a sample spread across system sizes, geographies and levels of sophistication, large enough to compare perspectives by role and by archetype.