MACH Architecture: Powering Next-Gen CX for Pharma Brands

Websites have become one of the most critical digital channels for healthcare professionals (HCPs) and patients to engage with pharmaceutical brands. According to a survey by Indegene, websites rank among the top three channels that HCPs prefer for their pharma interactions. A well-architected, user-friendly website can significantly improve customer engagement, stickiness, and conversions. Yet, the window to leave a lasting impression is short: credibility is often judged instantly based on content, design, cross-device compatibility, and responsiveness.

To meet these expectations, pharma companies need websites that are fit-for-purpose, industry-compliant, and built on modern foundations like MACH: Microservices-based, API-first, Cloud-native, and Headless. MACH architecture approaches, coupled with marketing automation, enable greater agility, scalability, and faster release cycles compared to traditional setups.

With the rise of Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs) and the explosion of engagement channels, legacy web experience management tools and traditional content management systems for life sciences are no longer sufficient for today’s tech-savvy marketers.

The old monolith content management system (CMS) model that bundled content, analytics, and targeting under one platform is giving way to more flexible, best-of-breed strategies. Increasingly, pharma brands are adopting MACH headless solutions that integrate the best technologies across categories into a secure, scalable, and future-ready ecosystem.

A traditional CMS or WCM (Web Content Management) has two parts: the back end, where content is created and stored, and the front end, where that content is displayed to users through templates, themes, and layouts.

The “head” refers to the front-end part of a solution.

A “headless” CMS doesn’t concern itself with the presentation of content. It allows users to select their choice of solution for displaying content and communicates with these front-end solutions via APIs (application programming interface). In other words, it exposes the content only via a set of pre-built plug-ins, and the architecture is separated from the broader user experience. Thus, a headless CMS provides the freedom to create an outstanding front-end experience using advanced front-end technologies by decoupling the technology architecture and the user experience. This helps life sciences brands to focus on customer experience (CX) first and use technology only as a means to deliver experience.

The need for decoupled implementation and advancements in cloud-based solutions led to the advent of MACH architecture. MACH architecture is a collection of technology principles that allows building composable, pluggable, scalable, and replaceable best-of-breed solutions.

Let’s explore these 4 components in a little more detail below:

A microservices-based architecture enables to build applications using small, independently developed, deployable, and scalable services. These services are built to provide a single specific service that is independent and loosely coupled with other services. They communicate with each other via APIs, allowing users to create an application using these “composable” services that meet their needs. For example, sign-on and user authentication or product details are all microservices architecture based.

Although APIs are an integral part of microservices and headless architecture, the principle of API-first approach finds a very important place in MACH architecture. Traditionally, all web applications were developed using the approach of “code first” or building the core functionality first. The API-first approach deals with this exact problem. The idea is to develop the APIs first and then have all the consuming applications test the APIs using a “mock service” or a dummy web application. Once this is successful, the entire toolkit of API and design tools is implemented to deliver the actual features. For example, social media pages within brand websites are API-first.

A major disadvantage of a monolith CMS is the need to accommodate frequent version upgrades. Failure to upgrade leads to a risk of exposure to vulnerabilities or losing out on the latest features. A cloud-native application built on SaaS or PaaS (Software as a Service or Platform as a Service) solves this problem. Most traditional CMS solutions now offer cloud services, but it’s not the same as being cloud-native. These vendors have merely deployed their applications from their data centers to the cloud infrastructure without many changes. Cloud-native means the applications were “born and raised” in the cloud. These applications are kept up-to-date with all upgrades, break fixes, service packs, and so on, and it’s mostly transparent to the users. For example, Google Analytics to monitor web performance is a cloud-native technology.

Headless is the defining feature of a MACH architecture. With headless architecture, developers use APIs to display code, content, design, app, and other kinds of functionality in whatever configuration that makes the most sense to their customers. By “decoupling” marketing content from the structure or style in which it’s displayed, an API-first headless CMS grants the flexibility to use any technology to craft user experience based on the consumer channel being used to drive engagement.

Life sciences marketers and brand teams are now being under pressure to focus on personalized and relevant experiences – and the web is a vital starting point. By leveraging MACH architecture, life sciences brands can achieve the following.