A physician can be exactly the right audience for a drug and still be the wrong audience on Tuesday. The relevant patient may arrive on Thursday. The useful laboratory result may arrive Friday. A media plan arranged months earlier knows the physician’s specialty. It may know very little about that week. PharmaForceIQ has built its business around the distance between those two kinds of knowledge.
- The job: coordinate pharma marketing and field sales around signals of customer need.
- The move: acquire Aktana’s field orchestration capabilities, announced in January 2026.
- The next step: turn performance questions into approved actions through Optichannel 360.
There is something almost comically modest about the ambition beneath the terminology. Pharmaceutical companies already have messages, representatives, websites and data. They need those expensive possessions to cooperate. PharmaForceIQ sells software and strategic services to make the handoffs faster, more personal and more measurable.
The list is only the beginning
Consider Day One Biopharmaceuticals. In a public discussion recapped by PharmaForceIQ in August 2025, its marketing team described a launch in pediatric low-grade glioma. This was a small, specialized population with a surprisingly awkward identification problem: there was no single diagnosis code that neatly captured the patients. Even the beginning of the marketing exercise required combining evidence.
The collaboration used claims-based signals and behavioral clues, including engagement with education and peer programs, to shape outreach. It also needed patience. This tumor can be managed as a chronic condition, with treatment decisions unfolding over variable periods. A useful campaign had to maintain a relationship as well as recognize an opportunity.
PharmaForceIQ calls its approach optichannel: choosing the channel and moment according to the customer’s current context. Its intelligence layer combines provider preferences with a history of field activity. The distinction is practical. A doctor’s interest in efficacy information, preferred publisher and response to a previous interaction can affect what happens next.
The machinery brings together incoming clinical signals, customer-level context and recommendations. Digital content can be deployed while a representative receives guidance inside an existing customer relationship management system. The promised advantage is coordination: the person making the call has some memory of the conversation already happening online.
The customer base extends beyond brand marketers. Medical affairs teams use the platform for scientific education, and the website includes a Merck testimonial about clinical trial recruitment. Those applications have different objectives from selling a medicine. They share a coordination problem: finding relevant professionals, delivering appropriate material and learning which interactions deserve follow-up.
When always-on stalled
A separate, anonymous oncology case published in December 2025 supplies a before-and-after picture. Six months of an always-on launch produced slow uptake. The brand switched to an approach using lab and claims triggers, channel preferences and outreach within 24 to 48 hours. Over the next five months, reported HCP engagement rose from 12% to 52%; monthly new-prescription share moved from 38% to 47%.
The campaign changed gears.
The case suggests a useful diagnosis. Having several channels connected did not ensure that a message arrived when it mattered. The brand changed the decision rule governing outreach. That is a more specific intervention than simply adding another advertisement to the schedule.
These are company-reported observations from an unnamed brand, rather than a controlled experiment. Launch maturity and other commercial activity could also influence results. For a buyer, the sensible next question is how incremental lift will be distinguished from prescriptions that would have happened anyway.
Buying the other half of the conversation
The business began in 2020; an early project concerned a second-to-market targeted lung-cancer therapy. Co-founders Hemal Somaiya and Stephen Onikoro brought experience in pharmaceutical commercialization and consulting. Their backgrounds help explain the company’s service-heavy approach: the software comes with people who work alongside the client on planning and execution.
In September 2024, Eir Partners announced a majority recapitalization. The stated priorities were product development, hiring and data assets. The January 2026 Aktana acquisition then supplied an established field next-best-action engine and a broader international footprint. Product leader Derek Choy came from Aktana, which he co-founded.
Management explained the acquisition as a choice to add field capabilities rather than build them from scratch. That choice matters because a media engine and a sales-planning engine solve different constraints. One can deploy another digital touchpoint; the other must account for a representative’s limited day.
↳ Measurement informs the next decision ↲
The competitive territory is crowded. OptimizeRx offers predictive audience activation, while IQVIA sells next-best-action recommendations. PharmaForceIQ’s pitch bundles digital execution, field orchestration and outcome reporting with strategic support. An unusual commercial detail is its policy of supporting only one product per indication, giving exclusivity a place beside the technical features.
A question should lead somewhere
Optichannel 360, introduced in August 2026, extends the logic to measurement. Its initial packaged workflow lets teams ask performance questions, examine provider-level evidence and route recommended changes to the appropriate owner for approval. The launch announcement stresses a governed path from an answer back into execution.
“What changed, why it changed, and what action should follow.”
Hemal Somaiya / on the problem Optichannel 360 addresses
For buyers, that approval step is consequential. An explanation has to survive the trip from analytics to the person responsible for changing a campaign. A recommendation that lacks an owner can join the growing collection of interesting charts. Assigning responsibility is part of making the system useful, even when the analytical work is automated.
The business model combines SaaS products and strategic services. Its media-buying offer includes execution without a standard agency commission; buyers still need to account for the advertising inventory and contracted work. The company advertises implementation in six to eight weeks, including data assessment, integrations, testing, training and content approvals. Those tasks are the substance behind the appealingly short timetable.
There is a lesson here that travels beyond pharmaceuticals. Start with an event that warrants attention. Make the recommendation usable where someone already works. Decide how the outcome will change tomorrow’s action. Fresh signals, reliable identity matching and approved content are prerequisites. If any of those fail, faster deployment merely accelerates a weak decision. PharmaForceIQ’s proposition ultimately depends on making the next interaction worth having.