Ajit Kumar
All experience

Software Development Engineer · Docquity · Oct 8, 2024

HCP Groups & Content Targeting

A reusable audience segmentation platform for healthcare professionals — defining targetable groups across surveys, CMEs, polls, and webinars — built during a migration from a MySQL monolith to Neo4j-powered microservices.

Targeting filters
6 dimensions
Architecture
MySQL monolith → Neo4j services
Reuse
Across all content types
Access model
Public / private groups

Problem

Every content type — surveys, CMEs, polls, webinars — reinvented its own audience logic for choosing which healthcare professionals to reach. There was no reusable notion of "this group of HCPs," so targeting was repetitive, inconsistent, and hard to maintain as the relationships between professionals, pharma companies, associations, and communities grew.

Approach

I worked on a group-based segmentation and content-targeting platform that makes audiences a reusable, first-class concept:

  • Angular administration modules for community and group management — public/private groups, role-based memberships, dynamic user enrollment, and configurable access policies.
  • Reusable audience segments defined with six filter dimensions: pharma, community, association, country, segment, and user role — eliminating repeated targeting logic across content types.
  • Contributed to the migration from a MySQL-based monolith to a Neo4j-powered microservices architecture, so relationship-heavy queries became efficient graph traversals and enabled personalized content recommendations.
  • Dynamic audience targeting spanning HCPs, pharma companies, associations, communities, programs, and countries.

Trade-offs

  • Graph vs. relational. Modeling HCP relationships in Neo4j fits traversal- heavy segmentation far better than join-heavy SQL, at the cost of running graph infrastructure alongside the system of record.
  • Reusable groups vs. per-use targeting. A shared audience model adds a layer of abstraction, but it removed duplicated targeting logic and kept segments consistent everywhere they're used.

Impact

  • Audience definitions that are defined once and reused across surveys, CMEs, polls, and webinars.
  • Six-dimension targeting (pharma, community, association, country, segment, role) giving operations teams flexible, consistent segmentation.
  • Part of the architectural shift to graph-backed microservices that made relationship queries and personalized recommendations practical.