What is an Electronic Product Identity?

And Why Does it Need “Management”?

Companies often spend millions to carve out and protect the things that define a product’s brand or physical identity. Logos, colors, packaging, and even fonts are carefully selected, guarded, and promoted. Those elements that help to define the product’s brand are certainly important, but there’s just one problem—the people making decisions of when and how to use those products are almost never looking at the physical product itself.

Think about it: a physician will search for and prescribe a product in their EHR using an electronic (or digital) description of the product, without ever seeing the packaging or branding elements. Instead, this physician will select and prescribe a product based on key characteristics that appear in the EHR, such as the product’s active ingredient, dosage form, strength, and route of administration.

This means that all pharmaceutical and biological products have a separate, fully digital, identity, that may have an even bigger long-term impact than traditional branding elements. We call this the electronic product identity, or ePI.

The ePI is made up of the characteristics used to identify, categorize, differentiate, and position the use of a product, and that ePI is accessed through the all-important tools of health information technology, such as EHRs, pharmacy and payer systems, and clinical reference tools. The electronic product identity shapes the way a company, and the marketplace, defines and views that product in today’s computer, algorithm, and AI-driven world. That’s why the world’s most successful pharmaceutical, biological, and medical device companies are spending as much time and effort on their electronic product identity as they spend on the product’s logo, colors, packaging, and other elements that define the product in the physical world. 

After all, physicians who can’t easily identify, understand, and prescribe a product using their EHR aren’t going to be generating many prescriptions, while those who find those tasks easy are far more likely to become loyal prescribers. Similarly, pharmacists who can’t easily identify a prescribed medication in their pharmacy software may , suggest a more familiar, competing, alternative product to a prescriber, and that can put a real dent in product sales. And payers who lump a new product into a category with several competitors because the product’s electronic categorization didn’t support differentiation can also tank a product’s success. All those things, and more, are a result of a poorly planned electronic product identity. But fortunately, just a bit of planning and forethought can mean the difference between a successful product vs. one we soon forget.