Archive for the ‘Health’ Category

FDA tweets too

The FDA is a very well known office for all Americans. As the Food and Drug Administration, it controls the safety of food, medications and cosmetics. The FDA is known for its rigorous rules regarding drugs’ approval. The rules force the pharma producers to apply very specific procedures and inform their customers about the risks of taking the drugs.

Healthcare marketers complain that the FDA does not provide them with clear guidance regarding drugs-related communication in social media. One might then be surprised by how much this regulatory agency is using social media! The first campaign in social media, the peanut-product recall list, reached the public via blogs, You Tube and Twitter. The @FDArecalls started in the end of March and has posted already over 600 tweets notifying its followers about the Food and Drug Administration’s recalls, market withdrawals and safety alerts.  The number of FDA followers is growing every day. Other social media tools in use by FDA include a blog, You Tube videos, podcasts, social networks, second life and widgets. It seems like FDA is doing more in social media then pharma companies themselves! European Medicines Agency on the other hand, a corresponding body to FDA in Europe, does not have a Twitter profile neither a blog. One may expect that official tweets about the swine flu would be of big interest at the moment.

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Marketing and Money

Was it Milton Friedman that said that there are four types of spending?

1. Spend your money on you.

This makes the spender cautious–interested in acheiving an individual ratio of cost versus value. You want a nice car that you like to drive but that doesn’t break your budget in gas bills. This is where the consumer gets the best ROI, return on investment, because the consumer dictates the value of a purchased good or service.

2. Spend other people’s money on you.

Now the spender can be a bit less concerned with price and more concerned with quality (or status). You can blow a bit more cash on a nice car if your parents promise to cover the insurance. Not such great ROI for the spender, but a lot of fun (or at least less cost anxiety) for the person that ultimately consumes the purchase.

3. Spend your money on other people.

Do you buy Grandma a piece of jewelry or a nice sweater? What if it’s for your girlfriend? For Valentine’s Day? After a fight? The logistics involved in this question merit a certain amount of cost/value math modified for the person on whom you’re spending the money as well as the reason why. ROI can be hard to judge here. As a consumer, Grandma may get a lot more satisfaction out of a sweater than a diamond ring, but the ROI on a ring for your girlfriend may make you, the spender, happier.

4. Spend other people’s money on other people.

This is where a spender generally wastes the most money and gets the worst returns. This is why a lot of government spending is notorious-there is too much cash with not enough accountability or consumer satisfaction. If, as some studies suggest, the United States economy spends close to 11.3 billion dollars on health care yet some 47 million Americans, 16 percent of the population and growing, are uninsured and unable to access satisfactory, much less appropriate care, one has to wonder where the money is going.

Number 4 is also where marketers get stuck. They spend corporate cash on campaigns geared towards nebulous customer niches. Measuring the returns on some of this marketing can be difficult. Are consumers happier because they are consuming more? Or is a brand better off because consumers are more appreciative of the corporation’s reputation and sense of civic sponsorship? How to tell?

Measure online buzz.

Most online communities attract like-minded individuals. These communities congregate around topics, ideas, events and even brands that interest them. They talk about these initial community interests, but they also discuss other issues of importance to them.

For example, an online community built on interests in individual health and lifestyle will inevitably discuss favoured lifestyle trends and diets. Measuring and monitoring the buzz produced by these communities allows producers to anticipate the needs and desires of their customer niches. It lets them measure the possible returns on marketing before launching a campaign, identify where to launch the campaign and attract the most relevant and most reactive consumer audience. Lastly, after launching a campaign, monitoring and measuring online buzz can demonstrate how the buzz picks up and reacts to the campaign.

Listening to buzz lets a marketer know whether Grandma would buy herself a sweater if she had the cash or a diamond ring. It lets a marketer know not only whenand why the girlfriend wants the ring, but how big, how many carats, and with what setting. Online buzz puts a marketer as close to the market as s/he can be by letting the consumer dictate the best way to spend corporate cash and get real, measurable reactions (and returns) from consumers.

Health Care Consumers and online conversation create communities

An Economist article explored the trend of medical tourism in Europe and the United States. Consumers of medical services are going abroad to escape high prices and long lines at home. Hannaford, a grocery chain, and a few intrepid insurance programmes, are exploring the possibility of lowering total employee heathcare costs through incentivising traveling abroad for health care needs.

Physical travel, however, is the tip of a rapidly decentralising (disintegrating?) health care consumer paradigm. HCPs (Health care consumers) also go online rather than travel abroad to find products and services that they couldn’t otherwise access. In doing so, they frequently discover new and innovative products and services that pique consumer interest and fuel further individual (as well as corporate) research.

HCPs find communities of like-minded patients and caregivers and exchange information, ideas and opinions about health care goods, services, even specific providers. They research medications and treatments through forums and health care social networking sites like Trusera and PatientsLikeMe.

HCPs that share languages compare and critique public health systems. They let each other know what’s available where and who or which insurance is willing to fund what. Even institutionally-based medications, once limited to the institution that provided them, can now limit the institution. If a patient can’t access the med that s/he thinks s/he needs locally, s/he goes online and finds a provider that is willing to access the HCP–through the mail, through a network, through travel.

Health used to be geographic. What the next-door neighbor perceived as “health” could be considered standard for the neighbourhood. Now, the community of patients or HCPs determines what is “health” for their community. A patient suffering from dysthymia, a mood disorder, can go online and ask fellow patients across the globe how they best deal with depression. Then that community can advise, support, sympathise and even supply a patient with the products and services that patient wants.

Managing Meds in the Modern Market

The Stryker Navigation System allows surgery to be a lot less invasive. The system allows a patient’s internal organs to be virtually “mapped” through the use of specialised instruments. “Nav reps”, navigation representatives or the specialists in Stryker’s software, are now joining the modern surgical team. (I love how software is ubiquitous in any successful enterprise these days.)

More and more, medicine is a team effort. In business terms, the patient is the CEO, the person that rises or falls with the success of the project. The patient’s chosen physician is the CFO, the person that must account for the assembled team and know the purpose of each position on the team, if not exactly how to operate within each position.

Nav reps, nurses, additional physicians, specialists, counselors, hospital administrators, insurance agents, researchers, pharmaceutical representatives, and an increasingly vast field of scientists and policy experts are stakeholders in the health of individual patients. Efficient and effective members of these teams go from stakeholder to shareholders, investing their money and time while reaping financial and reputed rewards in the health maintenance of millions of individuals.

These individual patients shop for the components of their health online. Millions log-on in China, the Americas and Europe in search of the goods and services that will make up their health management team. Manhattan Research noted that 143 million adults in Europe looked for health information in the ten countries surveyed. 62.6 million of these individuals looked for pharmaceutical information-the health consumer products over which the individual has the most control, aside from their own body.

But that’s just the beginning. Blogs explore and explain health care policy, insurance programmes both public and private, law, and the modern conditions of medicine and public health. Investment in private insurance throughout the world of welfare states is steadily increasing as public health systems become unable to provide all the options the individual patient wants and needs.

Monitoring and measuring what which individuals want and need is essential to anyone interested in investing resources or money in the health care market. Luckily, this is easily done; Attentio’s tools are phenomenal at keeping interested parties updated regarding the health industry online. As a health care policy analyst that regularly compares the US/EU health policy regulations, I am most appreciative of both Attentio’s tools and the millions of proactive health care consumers that post daily about their concerns and health care interests.

Ditch the DTC

Health care today is an individually-consumed good that produces benefits for everybody.

But there is a problem–”health” is subject to interpretation. By the patient. By the doctor. By the nurse. By the judge or the lawyer or the jury or the neighbour or the parent or the secondary school counsellor or the teacher or the boss that sends/does not send the kid home.

Health care consumers know this. That’s why individual consumers are taking ownership of their health care-online. They post and participate in sharing side effects, suspicions, and successes with medications, diets, and treatments.

Online, there are no national boundaries limiting the information about medicines and health care services. Consumers price shop, compare experiences, and exchange advice. But not with everyone. Consumers prefer to talk to each other-consumer trust other consumers, in health care as in all other consumer goods.

Consumers do not trust the professionals-at least, not directly. Direct to consumer (DTC) advertising is despised. Expertise is suspect.

But experience is king. If a pharmaceutical has good word of mouth online, it attracts a dedicated and appreciative following. Consumers are “pulled” to the medication by positive reviews, rather than pushed a drug by DTC.

Drug dealing online

It’s no secret that the British are royally PO-ed about their ailing public health system. Understaffed and underfunded, hospitals are unable to respond to demand. Media accuses clinical beds of breeding superbugs. Patients criticise doctors for hit and run diagnoses that fail to satisfy. Treatments are increasingly compared online as being inconsistent and worse, ineffective.

Not surprisingly, political Buzz has turned to public health. How to create and condition a more healthy, happy population? Politicians do the usual teetering between sympathising with and “constructively criticising” their health care constituents. But really, it’s the Buzz online that is connecting the health care consumer.

Parents trade local treatment regimens and the different Brand names of generic antibiotics. Patients compare doctors and prescriptions. (We may not be that far from a rate-a-doc, like the rate-a-prof created by US university students). Patients of chronic conditions are given the de facto status of experts in experience online, and they dispense support and advice with more speed (and more consideration, according to their networks) than the educated, expensive experts that haven’t got the time to listen.

What the patients say, why they say it, and to whom promises to radically alter the business of medicine. Pharmaceuticals, health officials, and local and national health care policies are all being actively reviewed online. Already, patients can order medication from online pharmacies in different countries. What they buy, where they buy it, and what they think about both choices makes for an interesting study already underway at Attentio.