Digital transformation in life sciences has been underway for years, and the post-COVID landscape marked a steep decline in traditional engagement strategies—face-to-face rep visits chief among them. But while pharma companies have been busy optimizing omnichannel journeys and refining their digital affinity scores, something more fundamental has shifted: the physicians they’re trying to reach have started building their own information infrastructure.
Who Are the New HCPs?
Millennials (born 1981–1996) now make up the majority of practicing physicians. Gen Z (born 1997–2012) are entering residency and early-career roles. The 'digital native' label gets thrown around loosely (older millennials came of age before smartphones; Gen Z can't remember a world without them), but both cohorts share an expectation that professional tools should work as smoothly as consumer ones.
Their engagement preferences differ from older generations in ways that matter. PwC’s 2025 US Healthcare Consumer Insights Survey found that only 57% of Gen Z trust primary care physicians, compared to 85% of boomers. On the surface, that's a consumer stat. But it reflects a generation that validates information across multiple sources rather than deferring to a single authority. For pharma, that means the traditional model of rep-delivered messaging landing with automatic credibility is under pressure.
According to Indegene’s HCP Digital Affinity Report, around 80% of HCPs show low affinity for virtual rep-led interactions. Meanwhile, 33% show strong or established digital affinity, with another 40% classified as “digital explorers” engaging intermittently. Notably, the report challenges the assumption that younger physicians are inherently more digitally engaged—HCPs aged 50–70 actually showed the highest rates of digital enthusiasm, suggesting that affinity is driven more by specialty, practice setting, and content relevance than by age alone. The takeaway isn’t that digital wins—it’s that preferences are highly variable by specialty, setting, and use case.
The Platforms They Actually Use
Here’s where the ground has shifted most dramatically. While pharma has been refining its owned channels, a parallel ecosystem of AI-powered clinical tools has exploded, and younger HCPs are adopting them fast.
Enter, OpenEvidence, a clinical decision support platform that now claims daily use by over 40% of US physicians. In December 2025 alone, it supported 18 million clinical consultations. At JPM 2026, the company announced a $12 billion valuation and outlined a vision for “medical super-intelligence” via subspecialist AI agents. Whether or not you buy the pitch, the adoption numbers are hard to ignore.
Then there’s Doximity, long the dominant professional network for US physicians (80%+ penetration), has pivoted hard into AI. Its 2025 acquisition of Pathway Medical ($63M) added a clinical reference layer to its existing GPT and Scribe tools. The suite is free to physicians—funded by Doximity’s pharma advertising business—which removes the friction that slows enterprise software adoption.
Meanwhile, on the consumer side, platforms like YouTube and TikTok are reshaping how younger patients find health information before they ever reach a clinician. McKinsey’s 2024 Consumer Health Insights Survey found that 38% of Gen Z turn to social media for health and wellness content—making it nearly as influential as their own doctors (42%). The most popular health content on TikTok clusters around general wellness and mental health awareness, while YouTube draws viewers to everything from dermatology treatment animations to chiropractor demonstrations. There’s a lesson here for HCP engagement too: if the consumer world has taught us anything, it’s that people gravitate toward content that’s accessible, on-demand, and tailored to their context—and physicians, for all their clinical training, are no different when it comes to how they prefer to consume information. The platforms winning physician attention (OpenEvidence, Doximity’s AI tools) succeed for exactly the same reasons TikTok wins consumer attention: they’re frictionless, relevant, and meet users in their existing workflow.
And anecdotally, communities like Reddit’s r/medicine have become informal peer sounding boards where physicians swap clinical perspectives outside industry-sponsored channels.
These platforms aren’t replacing pharma engagement so much as intermediating it. When a physician’s first instinct is to ask an AI for clinical guidance—and their patient has already watched three TikToks on their condition—the traditional detail conversation starts further downstream. The question for pharma becomes: how do you show up in these environments?
What Younger HCPs Actually Want
The clichés have some truth to them. Younger HCPs do prefer shorter content—microlearning modules, peer case discussions, high-value clinical insights delivered on their schedule. They’re skeptical of overt promotion and more receptive to content that supports clinical decision-making rather than selling a product.
But the picture is more nuanced than “digital good, reps bad.” ZS Associates’ 2025 Biopharma Commercialization Report notes that in-person interactions remain roughly twice as effective at driving prescriptions as any other channel. The issue isn’t that reps don’t work—it’s that access is harder to get, and the threshold for perceived value has risen. ZS’s data shows HCP willingness to frequently engage with pharma sales reps is near historic lows, and that physicians prefer reps who bring practice knowledge—how a product fits into their workflow and patient dynamics—at twice the rate they want to hear product-centric messaging.
What younger HCPs seem to want is relevance and respect for their time. They’ll engage with a rep who brings genuine clinical insight or helps solve a workflow problem. They’ll tune out a polished boilerplate slide deck that doesn’t address their specific context. It’s widely recognised across industry research that a significant majority of HCPs globally feel pharma reps don’t fully understand their needs—with the gap appearing even wider in markets like the UK and Germany. And ZS found that HCPs who received 12 emails per month from a single brand would opt out entirely, no matter how useful or insightful the content was.
From Promotion to Partnership
The shift in messaging philosophy is real, even if execution lags. The companies getting traction are moving from product-centric outreach to what might be called clinical enablement: workflow support, decision tools, co-created resources that benefit both physicians and patients.
AI is accelerating this. Pharma companies are embedding AI into engagement strategies—using preference data, clinical interests, and engagement history to personalize outreach, recommend optimal channels and timing, and automate follow-ups. ZS’s ZAIDYN platform, Indegene’s Digital Affinity scoring, and similar tools are designed to operationalize this at scale. Yet ZS’s own research found that even in 2024, only 40–50% of launches leveraged segmented or subnational personalization, and just 10–15% attempted individual-level targeting. The tools exist; the adoption gap is still wide.
But there’s a risk of over-engineering. The reality is that many HCPs feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of pharma content, and promotional fatigue is a growing concern across the industry. More sophisticated targeting doesn’t help if the underlying content isn’t valuable.
The Broader Lesson
Focusing on millennial and Gen Z physicians is necessary, but the deeper insight from years of HCP engagement experimentation is adaptive listening across all cohorts. What works for one segment may fail for another. Specialty matters. Health system context matters. National regulatory environment matters.
The most effective engagement strategies share a common trait: they start with understanding what the physician actually needs, then work backward to channel and format. That sounds obvious, but it’s the opposite of how most pharma commercial models were built—starting with the message and optimizing delivery. As ZS frames it, the industry needs to move beyond knowing what customers do—their affinities, engagement patterns, prescribing behaviour—and get deeper into understanding why. When you uncover the why, you can meet them with relevance rather than just reach.
The AI clinical tools now gaining traction among younger HCPs succeeded precisely because they solved a real problem (information overload, time pressure) in a way that fit physician workflows. Pharma engagement that wants to stay relevant will need to meet a similar bar: not just reaching HCPs, but genuinely helping them.