#PractitionerLevelConfidence
Share this blog
19 Nov 2025
Life sciences commercial teams are under constant pressure to engage healthcare professionals (HCPs) and patients in ways that feel personal, efficient, and genuinely valuable. Traditional tactics in pharma commercialization like static campaigns, siloed planning, and one-size-fits-all call plans cannot deliver the relevance today’s HCPs and patients expect.
That’s where Next Best Action (NBA) comes in. Next best action in pharma leverages data and analytics to recommend the most relevant next step for each customer, whether it’s sending an email, scheduling a rep visit, inviting them to a webinar, or sometimes, choosing not to act at all. By replacing gut instinct with data-driven intelligence, NBA helps commercial teams make smarter, more contextually aware decisions in real time.
But as powerful as NBA can be, its real impact depends on the strength of the decision engine, which is the technology platform that powers NBA recommendations. This orchestration layer bridges insights, workflows, and teams, turning data-driven intelligence into actions that are both scalable and meaningful.
What Effective NBA Looks Like in Action
When implemented effectively, next best action transforms how life sciences companies engage with HCPs and patients, and the kind of impact those interactions create.
Personalized engagement at scale: Every user receives the right message through the right channel at the right time.
Sharper field focus: Reps gain clear guidance on where to spend their time, driving higher productivity and stronger relationships.
Measurable business impact: Companies that embed NBA deeply within their operations report faster campaign cycles, lower activation costs, and tangible sales uplift from timely, relevant engagement.
In short, NBA turns analytics into action. It enables organizations to evolve from “launch and forget” campaigns to always-on engagement that continuously learns, adapts, and delivers measurable outcomes.
The Untapped Potential of Next Best Action Orchestration in Pharma
Across the life sciences industry, commercial teams are doubling down on NBA strategies to enhance engagement and enable truly omnichannel campaigns. Yet, despite increasingly sophisticated decision engines, many organizations find that their return on investment still falls short.
The reason is simple: technology alone doesn’t drive transformation. Real impact comes from strategic orchestration, the capability to turn intelligent recommendations into consistent, scalable actions across markets and teams.
Next best action orchestration is more than generating smart suggestions. It’s about embedding those insights into daily workflows so commercial teams can act on them seamlessly, campaign after campaign, market after market. And this is where many pharma companies struggle to make the leap from pilot success to enterprise-scale execution.
The Five Pitfalls That Derail Next Best Action Execution
There are five recurring barriers that prevent NBA programs from scaling successfully:
01
Fragmented campaign planning
Brand teams often run omnichannel initiatives in silos, making it hard to embed dynamic NBA recommendations into their activations.
02
Limited understanding of NBA workflows
Commercial teams, especially at the affiliate level, lack clarity on how to leverage data to generate NBA insights or articulate needs to data, IT, and product teams.
03
Rigid MarTech processes
Existing SOPs, MLR workflows, and channel handoffs are rarely aligned with the new processes required to activate NBA at scale.
04
Cross-functional disconnects
Sales, marketing, medical, IT, and data teams often operate with different metrics, tools, and timelines, slowing down decision-making and delaying implementation.
05
Lack of governance
Without defined ownership and governance, orchestration becomes ad hoc, reactive, and inconsistent.
Despite investing heavily in technology, these organizational and operational challenges often lead to stalled pilots, fragmented insights, and growing frustration among commercial leaders who feel their next best action investments aren’t yielding the promised value.
Unlocking the True Potential of Next Best Action Through Strong Orchestration
For most life sciences organizations, the real challenge with next best action isn’t the analytics, it’s the activation. Even the smartest recommendations fall flat if commercial teams can’t operationalize them through the right workflows, governance, and collaboration models.
That’s where orchestration plays a critical role. It ensures that insights don’t stay confined to dashboards but translate into meaningful, coordinated actions across sales, marketing, and medical teams. Strong orchestration connects data-driven intelligence with everyday execution, so teams can act with confidence, speed, and consistency.
Drawing on this understanding, Indegene developed its Decision Engine Integrated Orchestration (DEIO) approach to help life sciences companies bridge the gap between insight and impact. Rather than starting with technology, DEIO begins with people and processes and working closely with commercial and digital leaders to:
Clarify next best action goals
Identify where execution breaks down
Define a clear roadmap to embed NBA seamlessly into day-to-day operations
It is important to note that investment in technology alone is not enough. Without orchestration, even the most advanced decision engine struggles to scale or sustain impact.
Driving Next Best Action at Scale: A Pharma Case Study
When a leading global life sciences company rolled out an NBA program integrated into its omnichannel campaigns across Europe and Canada, early pilots showed promise, but scaling proved difficult. Adoption varied across affiliates, workflows lacked structure, and local teams struggled to translate insights from decision engines into actionable campaigns.
This experience reflects a broader industry challenge. Many pharma organizations invest heavily in NBA technology but underestimate the operational orchestration needed to make it work at scale.
Drawing from our experience supporting several such transformations, Indegene developed the Orient-Learn-Lead model which is a structured approach that helps organizations move their NBA programs from promising pilots to enterprise-wide success.
Orient: Aligning Understanding and Expectations
Success starts with clarity. Teams across markets must share a common understanding of how NBA works, what good looks like, and how outcomes will be measured. In this case, targeted enablement sessions for marketers, medical leads, and field teams helped establish a shared language around NBA concepts and activation methods. Practical playbooks and use cases ensured teams could interpret decision engine outputs and apply them effectively in campaign planning.
Learn: Embedding NBA into Real Campaign Workflows
Awareness must translate into action. Many organizations struggle here, as processes and briefs often aren’t designed to accommodate dynamic NBA inputs. Embedding NBA into live campaigns such as designing email sequences triggered by HCP engagement data, proved critical. This hands-on approach brought clarity to how decision engine outputs flow into CRM systems, how targeting rules are defined, and how performance is measured.
Lead: Governing and Scaling What Works
Finally, scalability requires structure. Without governance, teams risk reverting to old practices under delivery pressure. Establishing cross-functional governance routines, clear ownership, and regular performance reviews helped ensure learnings were captured and replicated across markets.
The Business Impact
By embedding these orchestration practices through Indegene’s DEIO model, the organization achieved measurable gains in both efficiency and scale. NBA programs expanded from pilot markets to more than eight countries, campaign lead times dropped by 50%, and activation costs per campaign fell by 75%.
The lesson for commercial leaders is clear: NBA transformation depends as much on orchestration as on technology. When people, processes, and decision engines work in sync, organizations can deliver smarter, faster, and more personalized engagement at scale.
Experiment to Advantage: Making Next Best Action Truly Scalable
The success stories emerging across the industry make one thing clear that next best action is no longer a pilot initiative; it’s a competitive differentiator for pharma organizations that master orchestration. When technology, teams, and processes move in sync, insights transform decisions completely.
At its core, NBA success doesn’t come from algorithms alone. It comes from aligning people, processes, and platforms through a unified orchestration framework. With the right enablement model, commercial teams can shift from reactive execution to real-time, adaptive engagement, driving smarter, faster, and more personalized interactions at scale.
Talk to us to learn more.
Share this blog
Recommended
