Plan and Schedule Visits
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Describe how effective visit planning impacts field outcomes.
- Explain how Visit Management helps a rep schedule visits efficiently.
- Demonstrate how to use tools like recommendations and list filters to build an optimal field visit plan.
Effective Visit Planning Drives Field Success
In life sciences sales, every interaction is an opportunity to provide value and build trust with the HCP. Reps must balance many factors when planning their week: company strategic priorities, individual HCP preferences, regulatory limits on visits or samples, and practical constraints like travel time and geography. Effective visit planning isn’t just about filling a calendar: It’s about thoughtfully aligning all those factors.
LSC4CE streamlines this complex planning and scheduling process. It provides field reps with intuitive, intelligent tools tailored to their workflow. In this unit, you follow Sofia Martin, a field representative for Cumulus Pharma, a global biopharma company using Life Sciences Cloud to power compliant, data-driven engagement.
Cumulus Pharma is launching a new therapy, and Sofia’s territory spans a mix of busy urban hospitals and smaller rural clinics. Her goals are to prioritize high-value accounts, stay compliant with sampling regulations, and make the most of each visit. Let’s see how Visit Management helps Sofia start her week with a clear strategy.
Start Each Week with Clarity and Purpose
At the start of her week, Sofia opens the LSC4CE mobile app on her tablet. After a quick sync, the app refreshes with all the latest information about her territory: recent provider interactions, updates from headquarters, and real-time metrics on her progress toward activity goals.
Her personalized Home Page highlights what’s ahead and where to focus.
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Announcements and Alerts delivers a feed of Home Office messages and notifications, such as product launches, compliance reminders, or training assignments, ensuring Sofia is aware of anything that might affect her visits this week.
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Top 5 Next Best Customers (NBC) highlights a prioritized list of HCPs due for engagement, based on prescribing patterns, visit frequency, and recent interactions. For Sofia, Dr. Aaron Morita rises to the top due to a recent drop in visits and a new patient support program launch that may interest her.
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Up Next Map presents Sofia’s upcoming agenda, including planned visits, time off territory (TOT), and general events. This visual view of her week helps her quickly spot inefficient routing.
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Activity Plan Tracker tracks Sofia’s progress against her visit goals, calling out gaps or areas needing attention.
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Unsubmitted Visits flags any outstanding visit records, prompting Sofia to finalize reports and stay compliant.
With these insights in one place, Sofia can start her week with a clear strategy. Notifications from headquarters remind her of actions to take, and the NBC list helps her prioritize engagements that are likely to deliver the most value.
Segment Accounts with Lists and Filters
Next, Sofia reviews her account list to decide whom to visit. LSC4CE helps her segment accounts using list views and filters so she can focus on the most relevant subset. Sofia applies a few filters to zero in on high-priority targets.
First, she filters her accounts to show specialists in her territory who are heavy prescribers in the therapy area but haven’t been visited recently. She further refines by geography, clustering accounts that are near each other. This will allow her to group visits geographically and minimize travel time. She also checks for any accounts with recent activity: those pending follow-ups or those tagged as high priority leads by marketing, ensuring she includes them in her plans.
By segmenting her accounts this way, Sofia ends up with a focused list of HCPs for the week. One of the names on this list is indeed Dr. Aaron Morita, the immunologist flagged as a Next Best Customer.
Now that Sofia knows who she needs to see, it’s time to get those visits on the calendar.
Schedule Visits Using the Calendar
Planning provider visits isn’t merely about penciling in appointments; it’s a balancing act of priorities, schedules, compliance constraints, and last-minute changes. LSC4CE’s integrated Calendar is built to handle exactly that. Sofia opens the Calendar to start laying out her week’s visits.
The Calendar provides a centralized, calendar view tailored to a field rep’s needs. At a glance, Sofia can see her daily, weekly, and monthly calendar including any pre-scheduled visits, personal time blocks, and team events. She also sees when colleagues have visits scheduled in the same territory, which helps her avoid overlaps or unnecessary duplication.
Using drag-and-drop, Sofia schedules her high-priority HCPs. For example, she pulls Dr. Morita from her target list and drops her into an open slot on Tuesday morning. The Calendar confirms the slot is within clinic hours and doesn’t conflict with existing appointments.
She schedules other key visits in a similar way, balancing her week across different accounts. Because she can view colleagues’ visits in shared calendars, she avoids situations where multiple reps might attempt to see the same HCP. If she does try to book too close to an existing visit, LSC4CE can be configured to validate those conflicts and display a warning, prompting her to reschedule.
The Calendar also provides real-time visual cues:
- Color-coded visit types differentiate confirmed visits, draft plans, general appointments, and team events.
- Closed hours and provider availability constraints appear clearly, preventing accidental bookings at inappropriate times.
- Colleague schedules are visible for shared accounts, so that reps can coordinate visits, foster collaboration, and avoid overwhelming the same HCP.
- Optional validation rules block or warn if a visit is scheduled within a restricted number of days for the same HCP by any rep.
In a short time, Sofia uses the Calendar to map out a week of productive, compliant visits. She balances her schedule across accounts and builds in time for travel as needed. The Calendar works offline too, so even when she’s in rural areas with spotty connectivity, she can review and adjust her calendar. Any updates sync back once she’s online again.
Plan Group Visits
Sometimes, the best use of time is to meet with multiple HCPs together, such as a Lunch & Learn session at a clinic, or when several providers from the same office can attend a single presentation. With LSC4CE, reps can easily create group visit records with multiple attendees.
Sofia decides to organize a lunchtime session at Pinefield Hospital to introduce the new Immunexis Patient Support Program. Using her account list filters, she pulls up all her contacts at Pinefield, selects several physicians, and adds them all to one group visit event. She sets the time and notes the materials she plans to bring so she’s prepared on the day of the event.
Later, when Sofia conducts the group visit, she can record each attendee’s participation directly from the parent visit record. Products, messages, and reactions are carried into each attendee’s record to keep reporting accurate and complete. If she provides samples or other items, she logs those at the attendee level.
By capturing group interactions in this way, Sofia avoids duplicate data entry and ensures that every HCP’s record reflects their engagement with her.
A Smarter Week Starts with Smarter Planning
At the end of her planning session, Sofia has crafted a well-organized week. Let’s recap how LSC4CE’s visit management tools helped her get there.
- She prioritized key accounts using recommendations and filtered lists, focusing on the HCPs who most need attention.
- She managed her schedule using an intuitive drag-and-drop Calendar, complete with real-time availability and compliance checks.
- She booked both individual and group visits, using bulk actions to handle multi-HCP events.
- Throughout the planning process, she integrated insights and alerts directly into her workflow, so her schedule is data-driven and rules-compliant from the start.
Sofia is now set up for success. Her week is aligned with her territory strategy and ready for execution. In the next unit, we’ll join Sofia as she conducts these visits, and see how the app supports her during the actual face-to-face (and virtual) interactions with HCPs.