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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Also posted in adherence, advertising, Analytics, behavior change, Data, Digital, Healthcare Communications, Patient Communications, Strategy | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment
Apr18

Sharpening Up the Industry’s Smartest Teams

Posted by David Chapman from OCHWW - NJ, North America

By David Chapman from OCHWW - NJ, North America | Published: April 18, 2013

GraphOgilvy CommonHealth Worldwide (OCHWW) purchases a unique and expansive range of syndicated research, currently providing access to over 30 different sources. In January, the management, oversight and strategic deployment of these properties were aggregated within the Global Business Intelligence and Integration (GBII) Skill Center led by industry veteran David Chapman.

The GBII Skill Center is dedicated to helping staff know what the research assets are and learn how to gain access to the incredible depth of resources that exist at OCHWW. The key point here is that this depth of resources allows Planners, Account Management and Creative to gain insights into the market and brand that help develop winning, innovative ideas. Starting from facts allows them to speak with authority and awe the client with new perspectives on how to drive brand growth.

The GBII team continually evaluates and analyzes the properties we buy or can access now through Ogilvy, trying to assure the best data and the broadest reach of global and US markets, disease states, therapeutic categories, audiences (both professional and consumer), channel, digital usage/preference, and more.

One example is GlobalData’s Pharma eTrack, which combines much of the information found in Datamonitor, Pharmaprojects, ClinicalTrials.gov, The Pink Sheet, and news aggregators such as FierceBiotech and more, in one simple-to-use site. Information is available by molecule, by compound, by drug, by category, by pipeline, by disease state, by company and by country…including comprehensive US, global and/or regional in-depth reports on key disease states.

Some of the others include:

  • MARS (Multimedia Audience Research Systems) for OTC/DTC data
  • eMarketer  and Compete – online behavior and digital research
  • Manhattan Research – HCP online usage and habits
  • Yankelovich Monitor – consumer research
  • IMS/NDTI – prescribing and diagnosis information

To socialize the inventory of our syndicated research properties and the “power users” who provide guidance and interpretation, staff can access all this information in the Intelligence Center site on the organization’s secure intranet.

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Mar15

Expanding Universe: Centers of Excellence

Posted by Ramana Yalamanchili from Ogilvy CommonHealth Medical Education - Parsippany, North America

By Ramana Yalamanchili from Ogilvy CommonHealth Medical Education - Parsippany, North America | Published: March 15, 2013

Expanding UniverseThe success of most pharmaceutical products and medical devices is in part based on the expertise of learned physicians in designing and conducting clinical trials, interpretation of data from these trials, and eventually in educating healthcare providers. Historically, these esteemed physicians are the most recognized names at the highest-ranked medical schools and affiliated teaching hospitals. More recently, a new trend has begun to emerge: the rise and expansion of private research centers that are quickly rivaling their traditional academic counterparts. This phenomenon is a consequence of two significant developments over the past few decades.

Since the 1980s, industry funding for biomedical research by pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers has surpassed the investment by the federal government. PhRMA estimates that member companies in 2011 invested $50 billion in the discovery and development of drugs. This amount, even without counting the investment by medical device manufacturers, is significantly higher than the $31 billion spent by the National Institutes of Health.

A second development is an increase in media and legislative scrutiny of relationships between industry and physicians. Many media stories brought questionable interactions into the spotlight, and legislators at state and federal levels began to put rules in place to increase transparency and minimize perceived undue influence of industry on healthcare providers. As the industry developed guidelines for interactions with healthcare providers, academic institutions began implementing their own rules limiting interactions.

The dwindling federal research dollars and ever stricter institutional rules are beginning to drive some investigators to switch their affiliations to private health organizations or start their own research centers. Early indications are that the quality of research at these nontraditional research centers is likely to be as good as that performed at major medical centers. In fact, a 2012 article by researchers from Harvard Medical School reported that “academic and nonacademic sites are equally effective in their ability to identify and retain appropriate study participants.” If the current trends continue, we can expect more industry-funded clinical research to be conducted at these private research facilities.

Many of the physicians at these centers are already well-known in their respective therapeutic areas due to their prior research and publications. Their personal reputations may translate into their new centers’ prestige, as they continue their contributions through congress presentations and peer-reviewed publications. In time, younger researchers from these centers may indeed grow into future thought leaders, just as those from academic research centers have done historically.

Emergence of these potential new “centers of excellence” presents opportunities and challenges for the manufacturers and for communication agencies. As the nonacademic research centers are managed by investigators who have expertise and interest in working with industry in various capacities as investigators, advisors, and educators, they may be more open to collaboration than the experts at academic institutions. They will also continue to maintain high ethical standards to protect their own reputations among their peers. However, there may be a need for the industry to educate them regarding the latest guidelines issued by PhRMA or AdvaMed, and the constantly evolving regulations at the federal and state levels, since these centers may lack the compliance infrastructure of the major academic centers. As communicators who facilitate interactions among industry, researchers, practitioners, and patients, it behooves us to keep an eye on this trend to better serve our clients.

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Feb5

Analytics Drives the Contact Center

Posted by Angelo Campano from Ogilvy Healthworld - NY, North America

By Angelo Campano from Ogilvy Healthworld - NY, North America | Published: February 5, 2013

Call-Centers

“This call may be monitored and recorded for training purposes.”That’s a familiar refrain to all of us who’ve called into a call center in the last 15 years or so. In the past, these recordings were used for exactly what the recordings stated—company supervisors would listen to them to perform employee evaluations. Recently, however, companies are driving a change from this traditional tactical approach, moving toward a more strategic focus by mining this mostly untapped goldmine of data coming from the voices of their customers.

Most companies are now changing their focus and targeting the untapped opportunity in the recordings of their customer interactions. We need to do the same, and as we do, we are learning more and more.

Identifying opportunity in contact center communications with analytics

The call center (which should be referred to as a “contact center” because it does a lot more than just handle phone calls) is a place that more people interact with on a daily basis than see the average advertisement. It is also where customers and prospects provide priceless feedback on the products and services (including customer service) that our clients offer. The continued reduction in the cost of data, salesforce.com products, and voice-identification cloud-based software now allows us to identify important trends, opportunities and risks in the conversations our clients have with their most important constituents.

Companies should record 100% of their calls. If they do, by using call analytics, we can identify potential issues before they negatively impact the company. For example, not long ago we were able to identify a trending problem and take steps to address it before it resulted in a huge issue. The issue was with direct mail, but it was found at the contact center level with the advanced methodologies we used in our contact center analytics. Our client believed (and we validated and proved) that call analytics helped proactively save them thousands of dollars while gaining thousands of incremental Rx’s (think Rx lift).

Get rid of the contact center silo

As the new insights from customer interactions become available, the traditional silos between the contact center and other marketing areas are coming down. The untouched data mined from contact centers can be used as essential building blocks to inform multiple aspect of the business. We need to push our clients to eliminate the informational silos and share data, especially within the contact center. It can, has, and will result in tremendous new opportunities.

More than anything, gaining real-world customer feedback can help us fine-tune what and whom to target, understand how targets respond to information, and determine how they should receive information. Using the insights of this “big data,” we can transform how our customers think. Using the contact center to find and deliver what we all already know we must deliver—the right message to the right person in the right way at the right time—can help produce a guaranteed ROI.

Optimizing ROI with contact center analytics

The No. 1 thing teams, clients, us, the President, and probably God want to see from any new campaign or program is a positive return on investment (ROI). Contact center recordings and analytics will provide a measurable ROI to our clients and customers—all by using the voice of the contact center to find gaps and make needed changes as they are found.

And given the cost savings, improved efficiency, customer retention and new opportunities identified by the campaign, companies are able to see ROI timelines that are measured in weeks, not months or years.

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Jan8

The Ethics of Online Observational Research

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

By Brad Davidson from OCH Behavioral Insights - NJ, North America | Published: January 8, 2013

Ethics-of-Online-ResearchBlogs typically are not the avenue to explore issues of ethics, but recently someone asked if we had ever looked into the ethics of online research. Not the kind where you pay people to answer questions—rather, the kind where you read a ton of blogs, or tweets, or message board messages, and use these as a primary source of data. It’s a good question, and a topical one, as I see more and more research reports that are based in the analysis of web data, and am part of a team that generates our own ethnographic analyses of online communities of practice. Basically, my friend, who is something of a cyberhippy, was asking: are you conducting research, or are you snooping, or, to put it bluntly, are you spying? I’m not an ethicist, but as a researcher I spend a lot of time working with oversight committees to ensure the research we do is ethical, and his question sent me in search of answers.

It turns out, there’s a lot of ink spilled on this topic, and here’s the answer: yes, no, and depends. (I love ethics.)

Before I explain, I will introduce, and then avoid, the subject of reciprocity as an ethical imperative in field research. This is the somewhat new “what’s in it for them?” question, which asks, if you get tenure for spending 10 years with the headhunters in Borneo, or the Hutterites, or tattoo artists or short haul truckers (all communities who have been the subject of detailed study), what did they get from you? In our case, it’s: if you get a nice contract to study a community online, what’s in it for them? This gets into a larger question of what we’re doing in healthcare marketing, and my quick answer is, if we use the data with the intent to create better materials to serve that community, we’re on the side of the angels—but it’s too big a topic for a blog post, so I’ll skip it here.

So, on to the straight observational ethics. In the broadest sense, yes, it is legal, and ethical, to read online messages and analyze them. The Internet is a public forum, and as such provides no reasonable expectation of privacy—just like activity that takes place in, say, Central Park, if you’re doing whatever it is you do in public, you are a legitimate object of study (so be careful…). Key to this is the assumption that you are conducting research in good faith; while it’s legal to take pictures of sunbathers in Central Park, if you take hundreds of them and plaster your apartment walls with them, it’s creepy. But if you’re studying the culture of sun-worship in New York City, then, hey man, sounds boring to me, but go for it. It’s all in how you frame the research question. (The wallpaper example above doesn’t have an intent to answer a question, so beyond being creepy, it’s not really “research.”)

There are a number of other aspects of the “yes” answer, such as: it’s impossible to get informed consent if you can’t actually determine if the person you’re talking to is able to consent (say, if you’re talking to a 40-year-old man, who turns out to be a 15-year-old girl pretending, for whatever unfathomable reason, to be a 40-year-old man); or, the fact that community norms of most online communities of practice treat “lurkers” as “licensed overhearers,” not “eavesdroppers,” as evidenced by the common reaction to someone announcing they are finally posting after years of just reading (“Welcome! C’mon in!”). There’s more to it, but the analogy of ethnography in public spaces is apt: it’s ethical to study patterns of behavior in public without informed consent, provided you treat individual behavior collectively, i.e., don’t report on an identifiable individual but instead report on patterns of behavior as a whole (which applies if you are, say, studying a church ritual, like Easter Vigil, or are interested in describing the culture of roller disco in Golden Gate Park.)

In certain very clear situations, however, no, it’s not ethical to conduct observational research online without informed consent. For example, you can’t break into closed communities and analyze their posts—or if you can, you shouldn’t. Most of us don’t do this, but in case anyone wants to, a private community is to a public forum what a private home is to a public park: you have a reasonable expectation of privacy, and reading data found there is akin to spying. Even if we’re just dying to know what’s being said behind those closed doors, without permission, any attempt to pass those doors is clearly unethical (and possibly illegal).

The grey area is sort of interesting, to me, because it gets to the heart of a bigger ethical question: in a nutshell, is it ethical to pretend you’re something you’re not, to get something you want? If you put it that way, then no, it’s not, at least not unless there is a clear legal impetus to do so (think: undercover cop). It was highly unethical for Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe to pretend to be a prostitute and a pimp when visiting an ACORN office, because the intent was to entrap; no IRB in the world would have approved their “research,” regardless of their opinion of ACORN. But…was it unethical for John Howard Griffin to dye his skin in order to pass for “black” in 1961, so that he could write the book Black Like Me? Many Southern whites were incensed by his research, and Griffin had to move his family to Mexico for reasons of personal safety for many years after the publication of the book. Does anger of the community studied work as a good litmus test for whether research was ethical or not? Probably? Possibly? Reasonable people can disagree. This is a big area of “depends”: for the kinds of research we do, it’s probably unethical to pass yourself off as someone with cancer when you don’t have it (sort of like Brad Pitt and Helena Bonham Carter in Fight Club—it’s funny, but darkly weird, and definitely unethical, to go to support groups for diseases you don’t have); but it’s probably ethical for police officers or concerned citizens to pass themselves off as minors in online chat rooms in order to catch pedophiles.

So there you have it. The amount of observational research being conducted online, in the form of “social listening,” “digital ethnography,” and the like is, you will be relieved to know, by and large ethical, at least according to currently available ethnographic standards. But, and in ethics there is almost always a but, common sense should prevail—you can’t do whatever you want to collect the data you’re analyzing; it has to be public and readily available.

So the next time you’re tempted to break into Sermo, or whatever closed physician chat room it is that is popular today, do what the Dread Pirate Roberts counsels Inigo Montoya to do in The Princess Bride: no matter how much you want to know what’s being said, “Learn to live with disappointment.” For the rest, sleep easy—your conscience is clear.

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Jul24

Why Is It So Hard to Learn From Somebody Else’s Mistake?

Posted by Donna Ambriano from OCH Medical Marketing - NJ, North America

By Donna Ambriano from OCH Medical Marketing - NJ, North America | Published: July 24, 2012

Recently, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to drive to Key West from southern Florida. (I know, I know, it sucks to be me. If you’ve done it before, you know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, I highly recommend it). It’s an absolutely spectacular drive along Route 1, with crystal blue water as far as the eye can see on either side of a long, straight, wide-open road. Really long. Really straight. And really wide open. With a heavy foot on the accelerator and some decent horsepower, one could really cut some time off this trip. Or at least pass that annoying RV piled high with bicycles, kayaks, and fishing gear, going a grinding 40 mph, and towing a rusting, mustard yellow 1994 Pontiac Aztec.

That was probably the same thought that flashed across the minds of many of my fellow drivers…right before they became names on the roadside memorial signs that dot both sides of the Overseas Highway from Homestead to the Southernmost Point.

I’ve been driving to the Keys at least once a year for 20 years. And every time, there’s a big sign with flashing lights that announces how many fatalities to date have been reported. And every time, it’s in the double digits (13 in 2012 at the time of my trip, in case your inquiring mind wants to know). So why do we never learn, even when the evidence is right in front of our eyes?

I started wondering about this as we meandered along behind the RV under cloudless blue skies, taking in the stunning vistas of mangroves, watching the boats from far away and the pelicans from closer up, and counting the small, white signs that represented the site of gruesome tragedies. At least 39 people in addition to the aforementioned 13 had ignored the history of the unfortunate drivers before them—and that was just between Key Largo and Key West.

Never mind the cause of their crashes (yes, the majority are alcohol-related). How about, “Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it”? The sad signs were there. Obviously. How could somebody miss them?

Maybe the answer lies in the dual concepts of “proximity” and “causality.” The ability to learn from our own mistakes is globally recognized: we make a mistake, and the result affects us directly as we are very close to it (“proximity”). There is a direct connection between our action (or inaction) and the consequence (“causality”). This is borne out at a neurological level and can be documented via electroencephalography. Within 50 milliseconds of a screw-up, your brain involuntarily sends out an initial reaction called error-related negativity (ERN) involving the anterior cingulated cortex. This part of the brain monitors behavior, anticipation, reward response, and regulates attention, helping you recognize that an error has occurred. (Also known as the “uh oh.”) The second signal, called error positivity (Pe), shows up 100 to 500 milliseconds later. This signal shows that you are aware of and paying attention to your mistake and its results (informally, the “you IDIOT” response). Numerous studies have shown that we learn more effectively when the ERN signal is larger, suggesting a bigger initial response to error, and the Pe signal is more consistent, demonstrating we are paying attention to, and thus trying to learn from, the mistake.1

 Our ability to learn from others is a little more complex. A 2011 Scientific American article shows that people can learn from other people in a competitive situation—but more from their competitors’ failures (what not to do) than their successes. In an experiment, volunteers played a simple game, modeled after foraging for resources in the wild, against a computer. While the computer was making its move (which simply consisted of changing the color of a box), the live player’s mirror neuron system (a system known to respond to the actions of others) was engaged as if the player him/herself was making the same choice. If the computer’s choice failed, the mirror neuron system of the live player immediately shut down the mental simulation—in other words, the live player’s brain learned from the computer’s mistake so he/she would not make the same error.2 Why? Proximity and causality: the live player was directly involved with the computer player, and the decisions the computer player made directly influenced the decisions and actions of the live player. The relationship between the person and the computer came down to learning “what’s in it for me” by seeing what failure looked like, and acting on that knowledge to achieve success.

So back to those unfortunate accident victims: Shouldn’t they have learned from the examples of their fellow fatalities? I would think that living to see another day would be a pretty strong motivator to trigger the “what’s in it for me” learning response, wouldn’t you? Again, this is all about proximity and causality. If you don’t see the accident, or the fates of the victims don’t impact your life directly, your neurons won’t react the same way. You may feel distressed or sad about the people behind the memorial plaques, but you have no direct experience of their failure and therefore no context for how you could learn from their mistakes. On the other hand, if your brain is sending out ERN signals while you’re behind the wheel, you’re probably already involved in something awful…and hopefully, will have the opportunity to experience the Pe response and learn how not to repeat the mistake in the future. Unlike the unlucky 13.

 

 

  1. Lehrer, J. Why do some people learn faster? Wired. 2011. Available at: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/10/why-do-some-people-learn-faster-2/. Accessed June 19, 2012.
  2. Swaminathan S. Monkey see, monkey don’t: learning from others’ mistakes. Scientific American. 2011. Available at: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=monkey-see-monkey-dont. Accessed June 19, 2012.

 

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Jul17

HCPs Who Access Data: Just Like the Rest of Us!

Posted by Mary Anderson from Ogilvy CommonHealth Med Ed and SCI Scientific Communications & Information-NJ, North America

By Mary Anderson from Ogilvy CommonHealth Med Ed and SCI Scientific Communications & Information-NJ, North America | Published: July 17, 2012

Guess what! Scientists, clinicians and other healthcare professionals own and use smartphones, iPads and an array of desktop and personal computers. These same people are fundamentally interested in the clinical studies and scientific evidence that result from research studies. They read specialty and  peer-reviewed journals and are asking, “When will I be able to read more via my personal devices?” As lay consumers, they can access everything from instructions on how to build a nuclear bomb to the recipe for Uzbeki-style lamb via their digital devices, yet the journal articles that satisfy their professional needs and passions are not yet uniformly available. Go figure!

SCI Scientific Communications & Information recently utilized a three-wave electronic survey to understand just how eager clinicians, journal authors and industry stakeholders are to receive data in a digital format. The results are in line with society at large. They want more!

Data collected from 50 internal medicine and primary care practitioners showed 86% accessed peer-reviewed literature from 2010 to 2011, and the overall proportion of information accessed with these modalities increased from 52.2% to 64.6%. Mobile tablets showed the highest percentage increases.  Preliminary results from 15 authors who published more than four articles over the last three years show that they decreased their print-only submissions to 15.3%, from 25% of the submissions two years ago.

While computers and laptops remain the primary devices for accessing online peer-reviewed content, HCPs say they will want and expect that journal articles become available for e-readers and smartphone applications. These devices are likely to outpace PCs/laptops based on portability and convenience.  Industry stakeholders anticipate a rise in open access and non-print options. They aim to please as long as regulatory and compliance agents within their organizations get on board and clarify the rules around more novel dissemination approaches, such as podcasts. In the meantime, they support open access publications and utilize QR coding at congresses to disseminate posters and presentations.

Like all other consumers, HCP readers perceive that technology will make their access to information more timely, cost-effective and convenient. They want to see e-mail notifications of new articles, smartphone applications that work for middle-aged sets of eyes and tablet applications.

Summary excerpted:

Hudson C,  Cecere E, Yalamanchili R, Anderson M, Pucci M, Aloia D, Scheckner B. Utilization and attitudes on technological advances in medical publications. Podium presentation, ISMPP, 2012.  

 

 

 

 

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Jul5

Will Health Plans Of The Future Take Care Of Widows And Orphans?

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

By Stephen Lubiak from OCH Payer Marketing- NJ, North America | Published: July 5, 2012

“Widows and orphans” is a long-established phrase that connotes one of the neediest segments of societies. Throughout time, communities have been asked (or commanded, as in the Bible) to support them in some way. One modern-day version of this support takes the form of estate planning. In the 20th century, stocks that provided a relatively high degree of safety (from declines in price) and steady dividends were nicknamed “widows and orphans” because they were good to have in the portfolio and provided relatively steady income. Prevalent among this type of stock were utilities. Utilities offered consistent returns because state or federal governments had established these companies as monopolies. In return for their monopoly status, governments regulated (or seen another way, guaranteed) a specific level of profits after fixed and variable costs were covered.

In 2012, a new group of companies that may fulfill the role of utilities is health plans. The Affordable Care Act fixes the medical loss ratio (MLR) of health plans at 80%, or 85% for large health plans. Here, the medical loss ratio is a metric that means 85% of health plan revenues must be spent on patient care. You don’t need to be a mathematician to figure out that 15% of revenues is left for overhead expenses and profits. So, the level of profits is regulated, just like those of utilities.

The business leaders of health plans are not settling for lower profits, which are estimated to fall from the 7-8% range to 3-5%. Health plans are already diversifying and are either acquiring or developing higher margin businesses. Here are a few examples:

Information technology (IT) or information management (IM) is a popular area. The thought here is: instead of assuming the financial risk of insuring patients, acquire the financial and actuarial know-how to do so, and sell that expertise to others who will assume the risks (and the lower profit levels). The Wall Street Journal says that managed care plans have made about 20% of their merger-and-acquisition deals with IT firms since 2010, up from about 7% in 2007. They’ve reduced their M&A of other insurers from 39% to 27% in the same period.

  • Aetna purchased Medicity in 2011, a company that sells software that transmits health care data across the different systems in different provider offices
  • Aetna also purchased Prodigy Health Holdings, which will allow midsize companies the financial and information knowledge to offer self-insurance options

Other insurers are purchasing physician practices. Humana purchased Concentra, which runs urgent- and occupational-care clinics. The thinking here is to exert more control over physicians and other providers, optimize their approach to patient care, and lower costs (and fatten profits).

Some insurers are expanding internationally, where legal and regulatory (and profit) constraints may be less onerous. Cigna has entered India in the form of a joint venture with TTK.

And recently, WellPoint acquired a contact lens company. Simply, the margins in vision companies are higher, and this is also an opportunity for health plans to cement relationships with consumers without the “middle men” of physicians or external opticians.

What does this mean for marketing communications?

Payer marketers traditionally target 3 audience levels: the payer level, the provider level, and the patient level. While these audiences will remain in the evolving health care landscape, they may need to be approached differently:

  • At the payer level: analytics groups may possess powerful data that show differences in cost or performance for specific drug therapies. Can marketers acquire and leverage these data to reinforce the value of our drugs or other therapies? Conversely, if sophisticated IT systems detect physician deviations from practice protocols sooner, traditional formulary controls such as prior authorizations or step edits may be enhanced and present bigger obstacles to prescriptions
  • At the physician level: if physicians work directly for health plans, their flexibility to practice or prescribe will be constrained more than if they worked on their own. Will drug marketing messages that only contain safety, efficacy, and effectiveness be enough, or will additional message components be needed? How will sales force pull-through campaigns need to be engineered if a greater degree of control binds both formularies and prescribers?
  • At the patient level: cost pressures may make insurance plans a bit more rigid. Out-of-network (or non-formulary) options may be sparse and much more expensive. What value proposition will convince the member/patient to pay for the appropriate therapy?

No one knows what the future will bring. Even if health plans do transform themselves in the 21st century and “take care” of widows and orphans in a hypothetical role as “utilities,” we can probably guess that many payer audiences will still be eager for high-quality information that demonstrates value for each health care intervention. Most likely, health care marketing communications will have challenges and goals that are similar to those of today, yet slightly more difficult.

Readers, will heath plans’ transformations affect drug and device marketing significantly?

 

 

Sources:

  1. King James Bible (James 1:27).
  2. Do “widow and orphan” stocks still exist? Investopedia.com. http://www.investopedia.com/articles/analyst/121802.asp#axzz1x7O6I4Dw. Accessed June 5, 2012.
  3. Reforms prod insurers to diversify. The Wall Street Journal. May 12, 2011. http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703643104576291022457851278.html. Accessed June 5, 2012.
  4. To find new revenue streams, insurers are branching out into nontraditional areas. From Health Plan Week. http://www.henryloubet.com/news030512.htm. Accessed June 5, 2012.
  5. WellPoint to buy 1-800-contacts. The Wall Street Journal. June 4, 2012. http://professional.wsj.com/article/TPBWR0000020120604e8640002u.html. Accessed June 4, 2012.

 

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Jun12

BATMAN, SIESTA and AWESOME

Posted by Rhiannon Preston from Fast4wD Ogilvy -Oxford, EMEA

By Rhiannon Preston from Fast4wD Ogilvy -Oxford, EMEA | Published: June 12, 2012

An apology to fans of Gotham as this blog post isn’t about the awesome Batman having a siesta prior to launching an attack on the Joker but on the (often somewhat fudged) acronym names given to clinical trials in the pursuit of creating a captivating trial identity.

So which clinical trials were betrothed with BATMAN, SIESTA and AWESOME?

BATMAN:  Bisphosphonate and Anastrozole Trial – Bone Maintenance Algorithm AssessmeNt

SIESTA:  Snooze-Induced Excitation of Sympathetic Triggered Activity

AWESOME:  Angina With Extremely Serious Operative Mortality Evaluation

I also have to mention other enchanting clinical trial name acronyms that caught my eye:  ASTRONAUT, CABG Patch Cardioplegia Substudy, EUROSTAR, REDHOT and BLIND-DATE.

A catchy identity based on an acronym of the title of the clinical trial is memorable. The acronym can resonate with both the clinical trial participant and the trial investigator. And an unforgettable acronym doesn’t need to be as complicated as a superhero.

I asked an oncologist friend for a memorable clinical trial name and their response was: SCOPE—Study of Chemoradiotherapy in Oesophageal cancer Plus or minus Erbitux. Their reasoning being that not only is SCOPE an acronym of the trial title but it is also strongly associated with using an endoSCOPE to examine the oesophagus.

It is proving increasingly difficult to come up with unique acronym-based clinical trial names for our clients as indicated by SMART (at least 25 trials lay claim to this name), HOPE (five trials) and CURE (six trials). To get around this, some clients opt to use a name that symbolizes the tone and goal of the research as opposed to an acronym. However, The New England Journal of Medicine reported that compared with clinical trials without acronym names, acronym-named trials enrolled five times as many patients (but were not more likely to report positive results).1

Either way, naming a clinical trial, whether using an acronym or otherwise, gives the trial an unforgettable identity and provides a creative platform for communications and messaging. The identity engages clinical trial participants and investigators, optimizing the recruitment and retention of participants in clinical trials.

 

1Acronym-Named Randomized Trials in Medicine — The ART in Medicine Study

N Engl J Med 2006; 355:101-102, July 6, 2006

 

 

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May17

The Next Wave Of Healthcare Innovation

Posted by Fred Petito from OCH Interactive Marketing - NJ, North America

By Fred Petito from OCH Interactive Marketing - NJ, North America | Published: May 17, 2012

In 2010, Internet scholar Clay Shirky wrote an interesting book called “Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers Into Collaborators.” His premise was simple yet powerful: The ongoing migration of people from passive pursuits (Shirky particularly calls out watching TV) to more engaging pursuits enabled by the Internet and other digital technologies is igniting an era of “collective creativity” where people are able to connect and aggregate their efforts toward positive ends. Examples of the output from this collective creativity include Wikipedia, the open source software movement, and the myriad companies that have used the Web for crowdsourcing (i.e., online group collaboration) consumer inputs to co-create new products and services.

“Abundance” — Activating the Crowd for Good Works

Now, a new book called “Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think,” by Peter Diamandis (the founder of the nonprofit X PRIZE Foundation whose mission is to stimulate investment in R&D through incentive prize competitions) builds on Shirky’s premise by proposing that this cognitive surplus is starting to be harnessed in ways that will significantly raise global living standards.

Diamandis’ theory is that this collective creativity will soon reach a tipping point (to wit, a point of “abundance”) in a way that activates the intellectual capital and resources on a scale needed to solve intractable problems like hunger and disease. Diamandis sees the confluence of three macro-trends behind this transformation:

  • The exponential growth and accessibility of computer processing power
  • The do-it-yourself ethos of the Internet culture
  • And, the “rising billions” represented by the world’s poor who are coming online en masse thanks to the dropping cost of digital hardware and the growing ubiquity of mobile networks

Abundance and Health Care Innovation

What does all this have to do with health care innovation? Imagine the types of innovation that can be achieved by combining the democratization of clinical data through the open sourcing (i.e., free distribution) of scientific data sets, with the awesome computer processing firepower scientists now have access to over the cloud at minimal cost.

Another example: some countries are leveraging the Internet and mobile networks to bring quality health care to their poorest rural communities. For instance, India uses a combination of digital technologies like SMS, mobile phone cameras and remote monitoring systems to treat kidney disease patients in isolated communities at a cost that is roughly 90% less than traditional treatments. The real kicker is that these rural patients frequently have better outcomes than their urban counterparts who receive in-person treatments on an outpatient basis.

Diamandis’ vision is a bit rosy but by no means unrealistic—considering that today we carry smartphone devices in our pockets the size of a deck of cards that have roughly the same processing power that a mainframe computer the size of a 12×12 room had 40 years ago!

Click on the below links to purchase the books mentioned in this blog post:

Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers Into Collaborators

Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think

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