Case studies

The ambition

A pharmaceutical manufacturer’s medical and marketing teams wanted a direct relationship with the clinicians who prescribe their products — not advertising, but accredited education those clinicians would actively choose to spend an hour on, and count towards their professional development.

That is a high bar. A healthcare professional’s time is scarce and their scepticism of pharmaceutical marketing is well earned. Anything short of genuinely useful gets one visit and no return.

What we built

NeuralSpark designed and built the platform end to end: a public marketing site, a portal for verified professionals, a staff admin system, and a single API behind all three. It runs on Azure — ASP.NET, Cosmos DB, Azure Functions for asynchronous work, Service Bus for messaging between systems, AD B2C for identity — with integrations into the client’s Salesforce instance, Zoom for live sessions, and Mailchimp and Mandrill for campaign and transactional email.

Professionals register, are verified as clinicians, attend live webinars or watch recorded sessions on demand, and receive a certificate towards their continuing professional development. The client’s team runs all of it themselves: creating events, publishing content, managing registrations and seeing who attended.

The constraints shaped the architecture more than the features did. Access is gated on professional verification. Regulatory job codes have to appear in the correct places on every piece of content and be maintained by the compliance team without a developer involved. Certification has to produce a document a professional body will accept.

What it does now

The platform is live across four therapeutic areas and has been extended repeatedly as the client’s brand portfolio has grown, including brands arriving through acquisition. That was a data model decision made early — the platform treats the brand and the therapeutic area as data rather than as structure, so adding one is configuration rather than a rebuild.

NeuralSpark continues to maintain and extend it under an ongoing engagement.

The ambition

A manufacturer of branded generic and biosimilar medicines runs a portfolio of consumer health brands, each with its own website, each inviting healthcare professionals to request samples and clinical guides.

Every one of those enquiries is a clinician raising their hand. The client wanted to treat them that way — respond quickly, know the whole picture across the portfolio, and free the team from the mechanics of collecting them.

What we built

NeuralSpark built a mediator service that every brand site posts to. When an enquiry arrives it is stored, checked automatically against a register of licensed healthcare professionals so verification happens before anyone looks at it, forwarded to the client’s CRM, and routed into an enquiry management panel built for the team who actually handle it.

That panel exists because the team was working around the CRM rather than in it. Staff log in, see every brand’s enquiries in one place, act on them, and the correct email goes out automatically based on the action taken.

The design point was the portfolio. A system built for one brand and copied for the next becomes a maintenance problem within a year, so this one treats the brand as data. A new brand joins by being configured, not by being built.

What it does now

The system runs across the client’s brand portfolio. Enquiries route by rule rather than by memory, verification happens up front rather than manually, and the reporting that used to be assembled by hand is simply available.

It also feeds the client’s healthcare professional engagement platform, so a clinician who requests a clinical guide from a brand site is already known to the wider system.

The ambition

A pharmaceutical manufacturer wanted clinicians to have its prescribing guidance available at the point of care — at the bedside, in the clinic, at the moment the decision is actually made rather than afterwards at a desk.

Guidance that is available when the decision is made changes the decision. Guidance in a PDF on a shared drive does not.

What we built

NeuralSpark worked with the client’s clinical team to turn a prescribing pathway for bone health into a short sequence of closed questions leading to a clear recommendation. Getting that sequence right was a clinical exercise as much as a technical one — a pathway a specialist holds in their head has to become something unambiguous enough to answer in under a minute.

Two constraints decided the delivery. Hospital connectivity cannot be relied on, so the tool had to work entirely offline. And app store review would have turned every future content change into a submission and an approval queue, which is a poor fit for guidance that has to stay current.

Building it as an installable web application answered both. Clinicians add it to the home screen from a link, it behaves like any other app on the device, it works without a signal, and the client updates the guidance whenever the evidence moves.

What it does now

The tool sits on clinicians’ devices and works in the parts of a hospital where nothing else does. The client controls its own content, and a change reaches every device without anyone waiting for permission.