May21

Don’t Be Fooled: The Core Tenets of Relationship Marketing Are Timeless

Posted by Peter von Bartheld from Ogilvy Healthworld - New York, North America

By Peter von Bartheld from Ogilvy Healthworld - New York, North America | Published: May 21, 2013

DartGoing back to basics on effective communication can lead to a big impact on your audience.

Pharmaceutical marketing at a glance seems unrecognizable compared to a few short years ago: technological advancements, big data, changing sales models, channel fragmentation, mobile marketing, social media…the list goes on. This constant sea of change is enough to overwhelm even the smartest marketers and strategists. Some marketers have followed the whims of change, prioritizing the latest marketing fads over a sound strategy. However, this reprioritization of communication efforts can lead to risky results. Pharmaceutical marketers will be best served by keeping their focus on the following fundamental marketing objective: getting the right message to the right audience at the right time.

Without a doubt, incorporating modern tactics and media channels can strengthen a campaign’s effectiveness, but the core communication objective should be tied to strategic objectives. In other words, the tail should not wag the proverbial dog. These core objectives should drive the decisions behind the channels, the content, the cadence, and the outcomes toward which a campaign is optimized.

The focus on fundamentals is essential across both patient and healthcare professional marketing campaigns. For example, with traditional patient support programs—which educate patients on their disease state, provide them with lifestyle tips, and empower them with condition management tools—the ultimate objective is to increase persistency and adherence. Rather than haphazardly building a program that randomly combines the latest marketing “it” channels, it is imperative to strategically consider the combination of tactics, channels, and content, at the right cadence to achieve the campaign’s goal: increasing adherence and persistency. While a campaign can and should incorporate channels both old and new, it should be the strategy that drives these decisions.

How to Focus on Fundamentals When Determining a Marketing Strategy

So, how can marketers effectively deliver communications in the ever-changing marketing reality? In the era of data integration and two-way marketing, we recommend using these three best practices to guide the process:

1)      Don’t be afraid to ask—so you can know what they are thinking: A behavioral survey can identify how targets would prefer to receive communications, such as by telephone, email or direct mail. Using this information, design a communication strategy that provides relevant information in the way(s) they want to receive it. By simply asking how an individual wants to be communicated with and by fulfilling that basic need, marketers can more successfully deliver the brand’s message and increase conversion.

2)      Observe, adjust, and make them feel special: With the phenomenal growth and availability of campaign response data, marketers have the opportunity to design and cater communications at the individual level. Creating customized communications and educational tools based on a target’s experience can ultimately lead to greater engagement and positive, impactful outcomes.

3)      Think like them—to understand what they need: As marketers, we measure success by driving impact and ultimately changing behavior. With the data at hand, we can now design and adjust strategies, all the while focusing on the brand’s fundamental goals. These metrics and objectives allow us, as marketers, to start thinking like our targets and asking questions that drive stronger campaigns:

A) What do our targets want and need?

B) How can we strategically design a program to meet these wants and needs?

C) How will we know if we met our targets’ wants and needs?

By remembering to follow these three steps when developing a CRM strategy, we can impact behavior by creating custom relationships based on trust, respect, and value…all by delivering the right message in the right way to the right person.

So while the marketing context, customers and channels have changed and will continue to change rapidly for the foreseeable future, we as marketers must keep our focus on our core, timeless tenets of good marketing: sending the right message at the right time and the right place. By applying some of these best practices, you should be well on your way to maintaining a sound strategy amongst the ever-changing marketing landscape.
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May8

Is It “Health Insurance,” or Merely Prepaid Health Care?

Posted by Stephen Lubiak from OCH Payer Marketing- NJ, North America

By Stephen Lubiak from OCH Payer Marketing- NJ, North America | Published: May 8, 2013

PillThe Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) goal is to provide health insurance coverage to those without it now, and it uses 2 main mechanisms to do so. It penalizes individuals without insurance, thereby encouraging them to sign up for health insurance. (In order to support this effort, the law creates state insurance exchanges to offer health plans to consumers.) The law also penalizes employers (with 50 or more employees) that do not offer health insurance to their workers. So, these employers will either need to add insurance if they don’t currently offer it, or maintain or modify what they now offer to their employees…or else pay a fine.

As the ACA proceeds to full implementation, it’s probably polite to say that various “inconsistencies” in the law are emerging. While “self-pay” employers may still exercise some degree of freedom in adding, maintaining, or modifying their health insurance offerings, the law is determining many of the characteristics of health insurance offered to the public via health care exchanges.

It’s interesting to note that 2 key requirements of the law undermine the basics of insurance, which is defined simply as “coverage by contract whereby one party undertakes to indemnify or guarantee another against loss by a specified contingency or peril.”

The first requirement is that all beneficiaries pay essentially identical rates, regardless of their risk factors. One of the few recognitions of varied risk among the population, an individual’s age, is still subject to constraint (older people cannot be charged more than 3 times the premiums charged to younger people). The other requirement is that insurance companies should ignore individuals’ preexisting conditions when writing new policies. While this rule is popular—no one wants to deny health insurance coverage to a cancer survivor—it also could encourage people to wait until they are sick before they purchase insurance.

Additionally, the law’s definition of an insurance plan’s “essential health benefits” may also contribute to an unintended result: a small set of insurance offerings on health care exchanges that are all generally very expensive, due to the fact that the policies are required to cover many things. One possible effect on consumers is that they will pay higher premiums.

Let’s go back to employers. Year-over-year health care cost increases have recently moderated, but over the long term they have traditionally been higher than the rate of overall consumer inflation. Some employers may use the soon-to-be-created state exchanges as an opportunity to withdraw the health insurance they offer to their employees. Employers who still plan to offer health insurance will continue to scrutinize costs and seek ways to mitigate their increases. They may continue to restrict the breadth of offerings in their health plans (a trend that is opposite to the expansion of essential health benefits above). Another mechanism that works is to shift more costs to their employees in the form of higher premiums, copays, coinsurance and deductibles.

So, in the 2 areas that the ACA seeks to create new health insurance opportunities (state-based exchanges and newly regulated employer markets), the individual will most likely pay a greater share of costs and have a greater responsibility to evaluate his insurance policy as well as the health care interventions he receives.

What does this mean for marketing communications?

One question facing employers, employees, payers and consumers will be the role and importance of deductibles, copays, and coinsurance. These patient payments are essentially behavioral-change tools, encouraging the patient to “shop wisely” because he is spending his own money on health care. Will these mechanisms continue to work as they have in the past? It may depend on which segment of the market grows larger: the state-based exchanges or the employer-provided plans.

On the one hand, if the law is encouraging fewer, similar insurance offerings on state exchanges, it will hardly be easy for insurance companies to differentiate one policy from another. If the offerings from health plans become expensive and undifferentiated, with most of their benefits “prepaid” by premiums, how much impact will deductibles, copays, and coinsurance have? Would this also complicate manufacturers’ efforts to differentiate their products to insurers, providers, and patients/members?

On the other hand, if employers are restricting benefits in their heath plans and shifting more and more costs to employees, employees will be using more of their funds to pay for premiums, and there may be less left for deductibles, copays, and coinsurance. With fewer health care dollars available, the employee may respond more to the cost effects of those patient payments.

Readers, what will be the health plan implications for related drug and device issues such as tier placement, contracting terms, and pricing? What marketing efforts are still needed? And to whom should they be directed?

Source:

  1. Merriam-Webster. Definition of “insurance.” http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/insurance. Accessed April 22, 2013.

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Also posted in Access, behavior change, Health & Wellness, Healthcare Communications, Managed Care, Reimbursement | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment
Apr25

When Will Pharmaceutical Companies Embrace Behavioral Retargeting to Drive Adherence?

Posted by James Ruiz from Ogilvy CommonHealth - NJ, North America

By James Ruiz from Ogilvy CommonHealth - NJ, North America | Published: April 25, 2013

Shopping KeyPicture this: You visit a website, add something to your shopping cart, but abandon the transaction. Maybe you are distracted or decide to shop around to get the best deal.

The next day, you’re on a different website. Suddenly an ad pops up on your screen…for that item you had in the shopping cart the day before. In your mind you’re thinking, “Wow, maybe this ad is an omen that I should buy that item?”

You’ll be relieved to learn that the ad is not an omen. It’s just “behavioral retargeting,” one of the tools that a smart marketer is leveraging to capture your attention. They want you back at their site to complete the purchase.

Digital channels can leverage relevancy (based on action and exposure) to deliver highly motivating advertising. If it works well for consumer products, how would this work for pharmaceutical brands?

The Web as a Research Tool
The Internet is used by consumers to compare prices and features. What we find online often influences both online and offline purchasing decisions. In the early days of the Internet, consumers were leery of making significant purchases online and would compare prices on the web then go to a brick-and-mortar store to make their purchase. With improved mobile technology, consumers now see and touch products in stores, only to make the purchase online. Many consumers are now willing to make major purchases online.

The prescription drug buying process is different. Some consumers see advertising for lifestyle drugs on TV and in print, go online for additional information, and ask their doctor for a prescription. If their doctor agrees, they may receive a prescription. A pharmaceutical website for a prescription drug may play a role in initial patient-doctor discussion, but it can really play a much more significant role in influencing medication adherence.

Behavioral Retargeting to Influence Good Behavior
We see many prescription drugs with elaborate, multichannel medication adherence programs that often have minimal impact on the bottom line. The reasons for this are twofold.

  1. Programs that are dependent on patients signing up tend to have very limited reach against the patient base.
  2. They often attract patients who are adherent, so there is little opportunity to increase sales. We also see programs where enrollment is driven by activating a savings card—but too often patients are unaware they joined the program and don’t engage with the communications they receive.

What if we used behavioral retargeting to increase awareness of compliance programs? Imagine if retargeting didn’t just apply to shoes and baby clothes, but also encouraged medication adherence.

Behavioral retargeting provides the ability to extend reach and deliver highly relevant adherence messages contextually, then bring consumers back to your site for deeper content. It provides an additional channel to get key adherence messages to customers who might not sign up for a program.

Then again, even if we can do it, we may not want to deliver behavioral retargeting. After all, some patients have conditions that they’d rather keep private. They may not appreciate a reminder message from a pharma company that manifests as a banner ad on their favorite website. If this is the case, such issues can easily be addressed with a simple opt-out that prevents future retargeting from the ad server.

These days, behavioral retargeting is closely associated with advanced ecommerce websites. Looking forward, it will probably become another tool for communicating with patients and healthcare professionals. Before that happens, industry thought leaders need to think carefully about how patient health information is used and retargeted across different websites, channels, and platforms.

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Mar26

SXSW 2013: Empty Information Calories

Posted by Brad Davidson from OCH Behavioral Insights - NJ, North America

By Brad Davidson from OCH Behavioral Insights - NJ, North America | Published: March 26, 2013

Cloud Image“We are drowning in information and starving for knowledge.”

– Rutherford D. Rogers, Deputy Librarian of Congress

I recently presented at SXSW, and while there attended a number of other talks and presentations. One, given by a Buddhist nun, made me think in a new way about what it is we do as healthcare communicators. We create a lot of materials and services for people to consume, in essence “feeding” them healthcare information—but are we feeding them well?

The presenter used the concept of cheap nutrition as a metaphor for the modern habit of consuming low-value, high-turnover products and services without ever feeling full or knowing why. Everything, according to her, has the potential to become fast food, easily consumed and without real nutritional value:  the things we own, the entertainment we watch, the achievements we rank and catalogue…all of it can be had in a low-cost, transactional way, and it is all empty calories, taken on board without consideration and without satisfaction. The more you eat, the hungrier you get. To be fulfilled, we need to do more than consume—we need to connect, and to engage. I’m not a Buddhist and I like fast food as much as the next person, but as a metaphor for information available on the Internet, especially healthcare information, “empty calories” is as good as any.

Patients and caregivers seeking knowledge find a sea of information, often without context or a frame of reference to know if it is good information or bad, relevant or irrelevant, connected to their immediate need or concern or not. The information is readily available, it is designed to be easily digested, and rarely if ever does it leave us feeling that we know all that we need to know about whatever it is that ails us or a loved one: we sit at a keyboard, finding bite-sized information nuggets, and eat and eat, and remain hungry nonetheless.

The nun was right. Gorging on information will never truly make us full; what we need is information we can use, that can guide our actions in a meaningful way. Knowledge requires that we pay attention in a way that consuming information does not. Knowledge comes through deep interaction, through a relationship between the knower and the thing known.

We are healthcare communicators—what sort of food are we creating? Do we push ourselves to ensure that information is more than just digestible, and even correct, but is also presented so that people want to, have to engage? Do we truly think about the end user and her needs or experiences? Do we create “disposable interactions” that just help feed a need for consumption rather than a need for usable knowledge? Helping people acquire knowledge is our job, not just giving them access to information. I challenge us all, then, to create more than the next informational Twinkie.

Check out OCHWW’s other SXSW 2013 blog posts:

SXSW 2013: Small Data in a World of Big Data

SXSW 2013: How Zombies Are Helping Us Get Fit

SXSW 2013: BIG Data and Personal Technology at SXSW

SXSW 2013: The Mobile Healthcare Revolution

SXSW 2013: Bad Behavior – the Saga of SXSW
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Feb13

Experience-by-Proxy as a Medical Decision Making Tool

Posted by Brad Davidson from OCH Behavioral Insights - NJ, North America

By Brad Davidson from OCH Behavioral Insights - NJ, North America | Published: February 13, 2013

computerNow that patient-centered decision making is becoming a reality, it begs the question: are we, as patients, really prepared to make life-or-death decisions on our own behalf?

The biggest problem I have making many of the decisions I am faced with in everyday life, not just in health, is that I simply don’t know enough about the options I’m choosing between. I am fully capable of ordering a cup of coffee—I’ve had lots of different kinds of coffee, and on any given day can be trusted to order myself a latte or a grande or whatever.

But if you ask me something I really don’t know much about, either experientially or theoretically, I’m going to be at sea, metaphorically speaking. To reuse an example I wrote about recently, when my builder asked me if I would prefer for him to install flexible tubing instead of traditional pipes for a new sink, I really didn’t have any idea, at all. He’s the expert, so I asked him what he would do. And he did what anyone might do in that situation—he told me what was good and bad about each, but made it clear that, really, flexible tubing was the bomb. You’d be an idiot not to go with flexible tubing.

And it turns out, he’s wrong. It works fine, but the water tastes like rubber, so you have to let the tap run for about 30 seconds before you fill up a cup of water. Not a huge deal, but what happened is, he gave me advice based on what would work best for him; it’s a lot easier and faster to install flexible tubing, so why not suggest it to me? I mean, he did give me the options, and he told me the truth about each in terms of cost, durability…but he never really told me what it would be like to actually live with a sink that produced water that had flowed through, or worse, sat in, flexible tubing. It was a decision he had to execute—it was a decision I have to live with. There’s a really, really big difference.

This lack of context when making decisions is one of the key problems facing patients who are now tasked with the emerging paradigm of patient-centered decision making, that is, the job of making their own health care decisions. Patients lack the experiential knowledge of what it might be like to live with option A versus option B. Doctors and other health care providers, who are much more familiar with the choices being faced, really never live with the consequences of these decisions, they merely execute or observe them. Just like a plumber, their choices are based on their own interpretation of what is best for the patient, which is probably in some measure based on what makes most sense for them, given that they have to carry out the technical aspects of the decision. This is why we are moving towards patient-centered decision making in the first place, so that the patient can make decisions based on what he or she believes will be best for him or her, given their values, their situation, etc. But if we give patients the kinds of information that doctors use to make decisions, or the kinds of information my plumber gave me about ratings, durability, costs, etc, we’re only helping patients understand the consequences of their decisions from the point of view of someone who doesn’t have to live with them—we’re still not helping them understand what it will be like to live with the consequences of different decisions.

A lot of very important medical decisions are made only once by any given individual, so whereas I might have another sink put in some day and be able to make a second decision differently based on the experiences of the first decision I made, sink-wise—in the medical context, you pick your option and you live with it. We may be providing patients information about these decisions, but in many ways it’s hard to say that the decisions themselves are “informed.”

What we need, then, is some way to give patients a window into the possible futures that might exist for them, depending on which choice they make, which option they follow. Like the Ghost of Christmas Future, we need to have some way to show patients what their lives might be like with choice A, choice B, or no choice at all.

This is, in part, the theoretical underpinning of one of Ogilvy CommonHealth’s two South by Southwest (SXSW) core conversations taking place in Austin, TX, early in March.

One of the best tools for achieving this is video testimonial by patients who have been faced with similar choices, and who made one. These patients can talk from experience about what it is like to make such a decision, why they made it, and what it’s been like since then. Another patient may have made a different choice, and can talk about the consequences of that choice from their distinct point of view. And suddenly a patient who was choosing from medical options based on things like survival rates and risk-benefit can now make decisions based on the experiences of people like them, facing the same issues they faced; people living with the consequences of their choices, for better or worse. This we call “experience-by-proxy”—borrowed experience, which allows you to gain knowledge of a path followed before you follow it for yourself.

These experiences-by-proxy won’t necessarily help make the decision for you, but they can make your decision more grounded in reality. If you are unsure if you need a hip replacement, and watch several videos, one of which has a patient saying, “It changed my life, I have no idea why I waited so long,” and another of which says, “It was horrible, I should have waited longer, and here’s why…”, you may still have conflicting opinions. You may still want a better quality of life with a new hip, but fear the consequences of an operation that is never guaranteed to go right. You may still be on the fence…but at least now you have a clearer vision of what it would be like to live with the option to go forward with hip replacement, and to put a face and a life to the theoretical risk and benefit you considered earlier.

To learn more, go to http://schedule.sxsw.com/2013/events/event_IAP7391

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Dec4

Fighting the Stigma of Mental Illness

Posted by Carrie Swallow from Fast4wD Ogilvy New York - New York, North America

By Carrie Swallow from Fast4wD Ogilvy New York - New York, North America | Published: December 4, 2012

Even with our medical knowledge of the neurobiologic causes of mental illness, prejudice and discrimination against people with mental illness is not decreasing (according to a study published by Indiana University and Columbia University).

The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that there are 450 million people worldwide who suffer with mental illness but fewer than half receive care (caused by limited resources and stigma). While the WHO is taking action, by assisting governments with better access to healthcare and training healthcare workers to recognize the signs of mental illness, the WHO cannot fight stigma alone.

Many people with mental health concerns hide their illness or decide not to seek help because of what others “think.” They are often plagued with shame and agonize over with whom to share (family, friends, colleagues) their diagnosis. Worst of all (in my opinion), people with mental illness often “self-stigmatize” (internalize the public’s perception) and limit the amount of success they think they can attain or deserve.

Could you imagine how different our lives and nations would be if society knew that Abraham Lincoln or Winston Churchill had a mental illness? Or worse, if these two men held themselves back because they felt they didn’t deserve to succeed?

Mental illness is no different than any other illness, but because it manifests in the characteristics that make us human, it is more difficult to understand and often feared. In some cultures, superstition also contributes to how people are treated or viewed among a productive society.

So what is the tie-in with why I picked this blog topic and Fast4wD Ogilvy? Fast4wD has been at the center of global communications for clinical research for the past 10 years. While our therapeutic area of expertise is broad, the majority of our business has fallen under CNS. In addition, since 2003, my career has coincidentally focused on mental health research. I say coincidental because several of my immediate family members and very close friends have struggled with these concerns. I’ve learned a lot through my personal and professional experiences, but the most heartbreaking learning I’ve had is that a double standard exists. From a scientific and medical professional perspective, the “support” is there (just look at the list below of common or well known disorders currently open on ClinicalTrials.gov), but the dialogue behind the scenes isn’t always very nice or compassionate when it affects the immediate business.

ClincalTrials.gov lists the following open clinical trials:

  • 2005 depression trials
  • 1505 anxiety disorder trials
  • 594 schizophrenia trials
  • 475 ADD and ADHD trials
  • 472 eating disorder trials
  • 351 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) trials
  • 296 bipolar trials
  • 158 trials listed collectively for obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), panic disorder and Tourette’s syndrome

As the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) says, “Stigma erodes confidence that mental disorders are real, treatable health conditions. We have allowed stigma and a now unwarranted sense of hopelessness to erect attitudinal, structural and financial barriers to effective treatment and recovery. It is time to take these barriers down.”

We can start by looking for ways to help make a change.

  • Be compassionate and be careful of what you say:
    • “Tard”
    • “Psycho”
    • “Did you take your meds today?”
    • “Just snap out of it!”
  • Participate in a nonprofit like NAMI at some level:
    • Memberships
    • Volunteering your time
    • Join fundraisers (walks, runs, etc.)

My challenge to you is to add to my list above of how we can help make a change. I want to hear from you.

 

 

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Nov20

Infographics as a Pharmaceutical Marketing Tool

Posted by Michael Price from OCH Medical Marketing - Parsippany, North America

By Michael Price from OCH Medical Marketing - Parsippany, North America | Published: November 20, 2012

Infographics—they are everywhere. In the last two years alone, the search volume for infographics has increased by an astounding 800%. Through 2011-2012, that equated to approximately 301,000 Google searches a month. Infographics aren’t really a new trend, but rather a trend that has been reinvigorated through the continued upswing in social media channels.

For those unfamiliar with the term, infographics are broadly defined as any graphic that displays a story or critical information. That information can be data, prose or a combination of both. Whatever information is presented, an infographic must do it quickly and clearly.

Whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or other social media outlets, infographics are quickly becoming the medium of choice—a force—for those who want a data-rich visualization that educates and informs an audience in a quick and effective manner.

So why are infographics so important to us as pharmaceutical marketers? One of the most challenging things we are tasked with is to bring to life the data behind our brands. Better put, we are asked to communicate complex stories in a way that is facile and succinct. With infographics, we may now have a weapon in our arsenal that can do just that and assist in building brand awareness at half the cost of many other marketing tools.

With data at the center of everything we do, we are constantly challenged to find innovative delivery methods that provide the best ROI without sacrificing the strength of our story. Considering the constant fight for share of mind and time, wouldn’t it be better to have a tool that an HCP doesn’t have to cull through to understand?

With what we know about the ability of the human mind to sort through visual information faster than written text, is it any wonder that Customer Magnetism contends that infographics are 30 times more likely to be read (and understood) than a text article?

Add these benefits to the whole social and viral nature of infographics, and you have a profound opportunity to capture the audience and keep them engaged and on your page. In view of the ease with which infographics communicate a story, imagine being able to articulate compelling clinical data, disease-state information, treatment algorithms, or a host of other complex information in a format that is often creatively surprising and yet makes perfect sense.

I recently spoke with a former mentor and someone considered an expert on social marketing in the pharmaceutical space. When the subject turned to infographics, he said that “the time has come for pharmaceutical companies to start considering infographic strategies” as part of their annual communications plan. With content as king and data the king of all content, strategies built specifically around this type of delivery are already in play as we plan out digital tactics with our clients.

Infographics should be an integral part of our offerings. They offer instant recognition of the data and communication points we struggle to demonstrate, in a painless and creative manner.

For a look at some effective infographics, take a look here at my Pinterest selection of diabetes-related and health 2.0-related infographics:

http://pinterest.com/mpradamacue/diabetes/

http://pinterest.com/mpradamacue/health-2-0/

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Nov15

Get Well Soon

Posted by Rebecca Karger from OCH Medical Marketing - Parsippany, North America

By Rebecca Karger from OCH Medical Marketing - Parsippany, North America | Published: November 15, 2012

Dear Us,

With recent trends, the prognosis is clear. The era of the individual made reactive medicine king. But individualism is dying a slow death, kept alive only by all those insulin shots and cholesterol medicines that it’s too late for too many to stop using.

Now we find ourselves looking in on two overlapping orbs, wondering how we will be absorbed into them. One is social media. The other is wellness marketing. These two things came about in a curious chicken/egg scenario–did people start talking to each other first and collectively learn how to be more healthy? Or did all this interactivity allow us to show off what we were already doing, and thereby magnify it?

Either way, it’s happening out there and the only cure for us–all of us in the world of healthcare and pharmaceuticals–is to join them and get preventive.

This is tricky because as preventive medicine goes, you can’t just pop a pill and start using the word “wellness” in your brand’s advertising. You need to truly commit to the change that is happening all around us, and adapt to it. You need to move from ideas that treat the patient, to strategies for preparing the population for better overall health. And those of us in healthcare communications need to get ahead of the next big change. How can we use inspiring communications to move beyond the silos of online profiles and go from social media to real world action?

Here’s the good news: Health and Wellness as a business and marketing model is a growing industry (http://www.warc.com/LatestNews/News/Health_and_wellness_market_to_boom.news?ID=29914) and we are perfectly built to execute upon–and create–its strategies.

So here’s the charge for everyone who has a voice in healthcare:

Get well soon.
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Nov8

Getting to Know Patient Bloggers

Posted by Ludivine Delattre from OgilvyHealthPR - London, EMEA

By Ludivine Delattre from OgilvyHealthPR - London, EMEA | Published: November 8, 2012

How can we engage with online health activists and patient bloggers? This is a question our pharma clients are asking more and more frequently. But maybe the first question we should all be asking is: Do online health activists and bloggers want to engage with pharma? Increasingly the answer is yes, but there are a couple rules of engagement, as we have learned from discussions with bloggers.

1. It’s OK to listen, but don’t just eavesdrop.

Health activists and bloggers are well aware that pharma companies are listening in social media channels to gain insights into how people view their company and their products. But there is a difference between being listened to and being heard. Bloggers value the response and comments they get from their community, that’s why they do what they do—to be connected. And generally that goes for pharma too—an authentic, personal conversation will usually be greeted positively.

2. They are not journalists, they are people telling stories.

Many bloggers are happy to receive information from pharma companies, but they don’t want to be sold to.  They are not in the blogging business to promote drugs or devices—they got into blogging because they want to tell their personal story because it helps them cope, because it helps them connect with other people. So they might be interested in hearing about a new treatment that can make a difference to themselves or their peers. But they don’t want to be sent a press release; they would rather have content in a format that is appropriate to share with their audience, using the right language, tone of voice and level of detail.

3. Not all engagement takes place online.

Bloggers are social by nature—they are reaching out to networks and communities of people because they want to converse and share. This means that they also like to meet up in person—with pharma as well. The most successful way pharma has been engaging with bloggers and activists is in the real world, via blogger summits. Providing an opportunity for bloggers to get together in person can be transformative, not only for the bloggers who for the first time can get to shake hands with someone they have been conversing with virtually for years, but also for the sponsoring company, which can gain priceless information, insight and goodwill.

At the end of the day, sometimes the most effective engagement is the old fashioned kind: authentic relationship building, where the two parties listen and respond to each other in a spirit of mutual trust.

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Sep20

The Paradox of Patient-Centric Decision-Making

Posted by Brad Davidson from OCH Behavioral Insights - NJ, North America

By Brad Davidson from OCH Behavioral Insights - NJ, North America | Published: September 20, 2012

Whenever someone asks me to make a decision about how to do something I’ve paid them to do, I generally wonder why they don’t just tell me what they think I should do. I have no idea whether I want traditional copper piping or the new flexible tubing for the bathroom downstairs; I couldn’t begin to tell you if I want synthetic oil in my car; the only direction I’m happy to give an expert  is how to cook my steak (medium rare, thanks.) I just don’t know what I don’t know, and I don’t have the context of living with previous similar decisions in order to ground my current one. I don’t have 500 cars, so I don’t have a large experimental set with which to work when someone asks me about the types of oil I want to use. I don’t know, I haven’t thought about it much.

My mechanic, now he’s probably thought about it—that’s why my return answer to anyone asking me to choose is usually, “Tell me the difference.” Then, if he or she is any good at upselling, they tell me why the one that makes them more money or is easier for them to do (or hey, is better for me—give people the benefit of the doubt here) is the better choice, and I say, “That one.”

This is the paradox of consumer-centric decision-making—consumers have to live with choices, so they should be empowered to make them and not abdicate or have them taken away by the professional provider; but consumers generally have far less of an idea of what they’re choosing than does the professional who is going to deliver the service, and almost certainly don’t understand the full potential scope of ramifications of one choice over another. In the worst of cases, theory works out in practice to mean that the consumer (me) has the right to make a poorly informed decision (who knew that plastic tubing is easier to install, but that my water would taste like plastic when I went for the flexible tubing? Sucks to be me…).

Apply the consumer-centric philosophy to our world, and you have patient-centric decision-making. Patient-centric decision-making is the laudable philosophy based in the premise that patients know what they want out of life, and since it’s their life to boot, they should be making their own healthcare decisions. We know this won’t just happen—since patients traditionally haven’t had to make these decisions, we need to empower them, as well. This is a far cry from, and improvement over, the days when doctors made decisions for patients, even life and death decisions (apocryphal stories from the turn of the last century abound, including euthanasia, administration of therapy without consent, and other more gruesome stories I’ve heard told to me that I’ll tell you over a beer some time.)

The problem, and there is a problem, is that patients generally don’t know the full scope of their options nor do they know the possible ramifications of their choices, and so are making decisions with less-than-perfect information on which to base them. They could turn to the Internet and post their question in a chatroom, or they could ask a stranger they meet on the subway (it’s sort of the same thing), but most likely, they’ll ask their doctor. Which in turn leaves the doctor with the quandary, how do I provide unbiased opinions relating to a choice about which I actually have an opinion? If I think oral anti-diabetic pill A is better than pill B, I may frame your choices “fairly” but with clear leading intent: “Option A is a good one for someone in your case. Option B generally works for people much sicker/older/younger/whatever than you…”

This is the fundamental challenge of patient-centric decision-making, that at the end of the day, most of the information patients really need to make an informed, rational decision should probably be coming from their healthcare provider, who in turn is put into a fairly strong position to influence the decision itself. It’s a paradox, or even a catch-22, like, “How do I get job experience so that I can get a job without having a job to give me experience?” or, “How do I know I’ll hate flexible tubing until I live with it for a month?” Clearly we need to help patients become educated so that their decision is truly informed; it’s not clear how much education is enough, nor where the best source of that information can be found.

One possible solution is experience by proxy, which the Internet is actually quite good at. If you want to know what it’s like to live with one choice or another, Internet communities are surprisingly good sources for finding out, not necessarily what you should do, but rather what it’s like living with choice A or choice B. It’s not perfect, and you have no idea if the people you’re getting your information from are really unbiased (or even sane.) But at least you can get a feel for life after your choices, which is what really matters, and you can have some sense of the issues you’ll deal with given one choice over another, from people who have had to live with those choices.

Experience by proxy isn’t perfect, but it is definitely a good way to learn something the slightly easier way than learning it for yourself. For example, if you choose flexible tubing over metal piping, let the water run for a minute before drinking it—that works pretty well.

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