Why HCPs Struggle to Find Drug Information Online
When a physician can't find what they need on a pharma-provided resource, the usual assumption is that the content wasn't good enough. The research says otherwise. In a survey of 511 U.S. healthcare professionals, when physicians did make it to a pharmaceutical company's medical information website, they rated it thorough or complete 60% of the time. The content held up. The problem was almost everyone getting there in the first place: only 5% of HCPs used pharma company resources frequently or very frequently, compared to 70% who frequently used general medical websites or apps. This is the pattern worth sitting with before touching a single word of copy. For a lot of HCP-facing work, the fix isn't better content. It's better access to the content that already exists.
Why do so few HCPs use pharma-provided resources at all?
The same 511-HCP survey asked people directly why they avoid a resource, and the top answer wasn't distrust or irrelevance. It was unfamiliarity. Nearly half of respondents, 48.3%, said they rarely or never use a pharma company's website simply because they didn't know it existed or what it offered. Excessive time required was the second most common reason, at 29.6%. A parallel pattern showed up for pharma medical information call centers, where "takes too long" was the single largest complaint, cited by 57.5% of those who avoided it.
Across every information source in the study, general search engines, medical literature databases, prescribing labels, pharma company resources, two factors consistently decided whether HCPs used something or not: ease of use and accuracy. For general search engines specifically, 87.3% of frequent users cited ease of use as their reason. That's a strong signal about where the actual leverage sits. A resource can be accurate and still lose, if it's harder to reach than the alternative.
Is this a content-quality problem or an access problem?
It's overwhelmingly an access problem, and it's worth being precise about that distinction, because the two call for very different fixes. If HCPs were unhappy with the content on branded sites, the answer would be to rewrite it. But the data shows something closer to the opposite: good material sitting behind a door most physicians never open.
Trade coverage of the industry backs this up from a different angle. A 2025 piece on pharma digital strategy quoted a digital marketer describing branded HCP sites directly: the volume of information on them is, in their words, staggering enough that a physician can't easily find the specific thing they came for. That's not a writing problem. It's an information-architecture problem, and it shows up as low traffic. Brand-owned HCP sites reportedly draw only a small fraction of the visits their consumer-facing counterparts get on the same domain (a source estimate, not an independently verified figure, but one that lines up with the usage numbers from the peer-reviewed survey).
Why don't portal-style fixes solve this?
The conventional response, build a comprehensive HCP portal and put everything in one place, assumes physicians have the time and motivation to seek out a single company's destination site. Industry trade press has pointed out that this assumption doesn't hold up in practice, citing the average physician portal getting fewer than five visits per doctor per year (treat this as a widely-cited industry estimate rather than a controlled measurement; no methodology behind it has been published, but directionally it matches everything above).
There's also a trust dimension layered on top of the access problem. Physicians in some specialties have reported skepticism toward pharma-provided content specifically because it reads as promotional rather than clinically useful, even when there's real unmet demand for the non-promotional resources those same physicians say they want. A resource that's hard to find and perceived as an advertisement is fighting two headwinds at once before a physician has read a single line.
What actually moves the needle?
A few patterns repeat across this research clearly enough to act on:
Meet HCPs where they're already searching, rather than building a destination they have to seek out. The unfamiliarity problem, not knowing a resource exists, is bigger than the quality problem. Discoverability inside existing workflows (search engines, EHR integrations, third-party aggregator platforms) does more work than a beautifully built site nobody finds.
Design for speed, not comprehensiveness. "Takes too long" was one of the most common reasons HCPs gave for avoiding both websites and call centers. A resource built to answer one specific question fast will outperform one built to contain everything, even if the comprehensive one is more accurate.
Build for mobile and point-of-care moments. Physicians increasingly need information in the room with a patient, not at a desktop later. Content that only works well on a full-size screen loses relevance exactly when it would matter most.
Lead with non-promotional value. Where physicians perceive branded content as advertising first, they discount it before evaluating whether it's actually useful, even when they say they want more of exactly that kind of resource. Framing and tone aren't cosmetic here; they determine whether the content gets read at all.
None of this requires more content. In most cases, it requires less friction between the HCP and the content that already exists, and a more honest read of the fact that "we have good information" and "HCPs are getting the information they need" are two different claims.
A few common questions
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No. Accuracy remains one of the two consistent decision factors across the research, alongside ease of use. The finding isn't that quality doesn't matter; it's that quality alone doesn't compensate for poor discoverability. Both have to be true at once.
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Not necessarily. The research points more toward rethinking where content lives, inside the tools and workflows HCPs already use, than toward redesigning a single destination site. A well-designed portal that HCPs still don't know exists solves half the problem at most.
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The specific numbers above come from a broad, cross-specialty U.S. survey, and specialty-level nuance exists; some fields report stronger reliance on video content, for instance, or sharper skepticism toward pharma-provided materials specifically. The underlying pattern of ease-of-use mattering more than raw content volume tends to hold, but the right channel and format still depend on how a given specialty actually works.
The uncomfortable version of this finding, for anyone building HCP-facing resources, is that the industry may be over-investing in content and under-investing in the much less glamorous work of making that content findable, fast, and honest about what it is. The research is fairly consistent on this point across a peer-reviewed survey, trade journalism, and industry commentary alike. The question worth asking isn't "is our content good enough." It's "how many steps stand between a physician's question and our answer, and would we tolerate that many steps ourselves."