Virtual Care and Pharma: A Roadmap for Brands, Marketers, and Leadership

The pandemic accelerated virtual care adoption. What followed was a pivotal learning moment — and the data now provides a clear view of where virtual care has landed, how durable patient demand has become, and what commercial opportunity remains on the table for brands ready to act.

DHC Group’s new research report, Virtual Care and Pharma: A Roadmap for Brands, Marketers, and Leadership, draws on three distinct research streams — a patient survey of more than 1,000 U.S. adults, an HCP survey of 125 physicians, and a pharma marketer survey — to map the real state of virtual care adoption and its commercial implications for pharma brands.

The findings reframe the conversation. Patient trust in virtual care is no longer a barrier: 87% of patients report satisfaction with their last virtual visit, 88% feel safe, and 89% say they would use it again. Critically, that confidence holds across generations — including older cohorts historically assumed to be resistant. The demand is real, durable, and demographically broad.

The more urgent signal is on the commercial side. Eighty-two percent of physicians report that virtual care increases prescribing. Yet 57% of those same physicians say they rarely or never encounter pharma messaging in virtual care environments. The channel access exists. The execution does not — and that gap represents a compounding first-mover opportunity for brands willing to move now.

The report also addresses the internal barriers that matter most. Regulatory hesitancy ranks fourth among the obstacles pharma marketers cite — behind budget constraints, insufficient measurement capabilities, and unclear ROI. The real work is organizational: dismantling data silos, aligning cross-functional teams, and building the commercial infrastructure to act within the latitude that already exists.

Rounding out the roadmap are a therapeutic-area fit framework, a five-stage virtual care maturity model, and a set of diagnostic questions designed to help brand and marketing teams assess where they stand — and what to prioritize next.

Virtual Care and Pharma is essential reading for anyone working to align commercial strategy with where patients and physicians already are.