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New Rule Proposed to Expand Short-Term, Limited-Duration Health Insurance

February 28, 2018 0

Last week the Departments of Health Human Services (HHS), Labor, and Treasury proposed a rule that would “expand the availability of short-term, limited-duration health insurance by allowing consumers to buy plans providing coverage for any period of less than 12 months, rather than the current maximum period of less than three months.” This will not only provide affordable coverage to Americans who may not have been able to afford current premiums and options, or lacked access to choices that properly matched their needs, but it will “increase competition, choice, and access to lower-cost healthcare options for Americans.”

While the purpose of these health plans was for temporary coverage, but due to their affordability, access to such plans “has become increasingly important as premiums have more than doubled between 2013 and 2017 in health plans on the Federal Health Insurance Exchange,” the news release stated. The short-term, limited-duration insurance does not have to comply with federal requirements for individual health insurance coverage.

Health and Human Services Secretary and former Lilly USA president Alex Azar stated: “Americans need more choices in health insurance so they can find coverage that meets their needs. The status quo is failing too many Americans who face skyrocketing costs and fewer and fewer choices. The Trump Administration is taking action so individuals and families have access to quality, affordable healthcare that works for them.”

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Apple Continues to Expand Reach in Healthcare, Launches AC Wellness

February 28, 2018 0

In the spring of 2018, Apple plans to premiere AC Wellness, independent medical centers for its employees and dependents offering concierge-like healthcare. As first reported by CNBC yesterday, Apple “quietly published a website, acwellness.com, with more details about its initiative and a careers page listing jobs.” While little information is currently available, AC Wellness’ website boasts that their Network will combine technology, high-quality care, and a unique patient experience to drive engagement and achieve exceptional health outcomes. The website also advertises for career opportunities. Positions to be filled include Health Partner, Physicians, Care Navigator, and Nurses, among others.

This initiative comes shortly after Tim Cook commented about Apple’s ability to make “significant contributions” to health care earlier this month during a shareholders meeting. Cook shared that the tech innovator is in a “great position”, being able to leverage its consumer-friendly approach, as reported by CNBC.

Apple has already been collaborating with the FDA to improve regulations on digital health products. Other coordinators announced last summer as a part of the FDA’s Pre-cert pilot program were Fitbit, Johnson & Johnson, Pear Therapeutics, Phosphorus, Roche, Samsung, Tidepool, and Verily. The work is a part of the Digital Health Innovation Action Plan.

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DTC in FocusDTC News

The Reward of Branding? Human Insights to Power Teva’s Next Chapter

February 21, 2018 1

As a company whose products impact the lives of millions of people, many of them managing serious health conditions, we are aware of how societal trends have transformed the way people relate to their health and have evolved their expectations of companies like ours.

So when we decided to launch a new brand positioning, we not only wanted to build an identity that spanned specialty and generics and unified our businesses around the world after decades of acquisitions, but also one that positioned us as a trustworthy partner to the patients, caregivers and healthcare professionals we serve.

To look within and beyond our medicine cabinet with a fresh perspective, we got out of our laboratories and into the real world, asking questions and listening carefully to the answers. From 2015 to 2017, we talked to more than 21,000 patients, caregivers, and healthcare professionals in 20 countries. The simplest insights gained from this research have proved to be the most profound:

  • Few things matter more to people than their health, and they want to feel in control of their journey at every stage of life, both in terms of prevention and in the challenges of managing a disease. They use digital resources to seek out information they can understand from sources they can trust.
  • Consumers’ experience of service in other categories has created high expectations. They are looking for personalization, value, convenience, and relationships. Half of people want pharmaceutical companies to connect with them—online and on mobile—to provide on-demand resources and services.
  • Health means much more than diseases. We learned that people want a holistic experience that addresses their whole person: body, mind, and spirit. This includes health inputs like nutrition and medicine, health outputs like confidence and vitality, and long-term health outcomes like resilience and happiness.

These insights have proved vital as Teva has gone through an important transformation, unifying the company while also becoming simpler, leaner, and more agile. It’s not easy to form a new understanding of a company that’s been around since 1901, and launching a new brand during a restructuring isn’t necessarily intuitive. But our research helped us to understand that consumers expect us to support their health journeys, leveraging our experience to go beyond medicines to the effects of their conditions on their whole lives. And they also want to know about the company itself—insights about the character of our people, what we care about, and how we give back.

Teva's new branded advertising, website, exhibition booth, and packaging.

Our new brand identity emphasizes that Teva is warm, approachable, accessible, and modern—a company that not only makes high-quality products but also one that listens to the people it serves. Ever mindful of our financial situation, we used existing resources in new ways, focusing on evolving the most impactful touch points to people—packaging and digital—while taking advantage of portfolio optimization, regulatory requirements such as serialization, product launches, office moves, and planned events where possible. Through it all, we’ve focused on evolving our value proposition, incorporating storytelling into our digital content offering, and making our new brand a vehicle for unification and simplification.

We’re implementing the new global brand from the bottom up, through a hyperlocal implementation approach that goes market by market with a meticulous test-and-learn rollout grounded in data and insights. To build local relevance into a global framework, we are evolving our value proposition to reflect the nuances of each market, including our business model and portfolio; the local healthcare system; and the specific needs of that market’s consumers, patients, and healthcare professionals. We started with our own employees, soft-launching the brand internally in 2016 to assess the resonance and relevance of the new positioning in different cultures and healthcare systems. Since then we’ve launched in France, Russia, and Argentina, and are rolling out the new brand in Canada and the U.S. this month, with additional launches planned throughout 2018.

In the U.S., for example, where people are more likely to suffer from chronic issues (65% versus 60% globally), we’ve partnered with Mount Sinai Hospital to meet the needs of those with multiple chronic conditions. And in Canada, where 37% of people are caregivers—supporting loved ones who could not cope without them—we’ve teamed up with caregiver advocacy groups to better support that underserved population.

And to deliver the credible online health information that patients around the world are seeking, we’ve piloted a series of articles, videos, and podcasts with the help of Healthline and the Slate Media Group. In the coming months, we’ll introduce a branded portal—first to the U.S. and then to the rest of the world—as well as a documentary film demonstrating what it’s like to be a patient with chronic conditions.

Our research has shown that digital is a cost-effective, convenient, and preferred way for us to bring value to patients and caregivers through information and resources that go beyond medicine, looking at health conditions from the point of view of patients in the context of their lives—not in the context of symptoms and side effects—which is critical to delivering on our brand promise of helping them to live better days.

Beyond gathering valuable insights and information—and meeting a lot of interesting people—our research is helping us become a simpler and more patient-centered organization, aiming to increase the trust people have in us to support their health needs.

Click here to read Teva's news release about their new brand positioning and visual identity.

 

Iris Beck-Codner

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A One-on-One with Galderma VP & General Manager of the U.S. A&C Business Unit Alisa Lask: How Digital is Transforming their Patient Communications

October 10, 2017 0

In mid-September, DTC Perspectives spoke with Alisa Lask, the VP and General Manager of Aesthetic & Corrective Business Unit from Galderma, about the evolution of their digital marketing. “Digital has had a really powerful impact on the aesthetics brands,” she noted. Galderma’s aesthetics business unit is already seeing a large usage of their various digital assets, from materials at the point of care to their digital-only ASPIRE loyalty program. Another digital victory for the company is their Facebook Restylane® page, which after launching just a few months ago, is already outperforming competitors in the space.

Lask shared that, over the past few years, another evolution they have witnessed is how many Health Care Professionals (HCPs) are now using social media and how much they are using it. Utilizing a variety of platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, HCPs are interacting both with Galderma and with patients. This uncovered a big opportunity for Galderma to invest in digital to create their own assets for their partnering HCPs, many of whom have around 10,000-15,000 patients in their databases on average. These materials not only educated the HCPs, but allowed those HCPs to share them with their staff and consumers in the office or waiting room as well.

Innovations to set a new standard

Galderma wanted to make the most of the opportunities digital affords, making one of their approaches an innovative use of video. Aesthetics products, such as Restylane®, lend themselves quite well to digital media. As the industry transitions away from still Before & After photos, Lask explained they created videos that would showcase the natural results of their treatments. “When we launched our two new products, Restylane® Refyne and Restylane® Defyne, earlier this year, the whole philosophy behind those products was that they were designed to be flexible  in animation and in expression in motion for natural-looking results.”

When sending out their first product samples to HCP offices, a video would play when the box was opened, with four different videos being included in each one. With people clamoring to obtain the sample boxes so they could view and share the videos, Galderma took their marketing to another level: text message video. If an individual, HCP or consumer, texted certain phrases to a designated number, they would receive four to five corresponding videos. Of the videos offering through the sample boxes and text message, Galderma developed real Before & After footage, digital animation of the mechanism in action, and the background and science of the XpresHAn™ technology. (XpresHAn™ is derived from the three components it comprises: X = Crosslinking; pres = Pressing gels through mesh for calibration; and HA = Hyaluronic Acid.)

Another innovative approach the aesthetics teams took was through their ASPIRE loyalty program, which is 100% digital communications. Consumers can receive educational emails, digital coupons towards products, and sweepstake offers electronically. Meanwhile, doctors can log onto a special portal within ASPIRE to obtain Galderma assets, find out which of their patients have redeemed Galderma offers or promotions, or track which of their patients may have lapsed in their treatment so they can provide necessary follow ups. Taking a digital only approach has not had a negative impact – Galderma’s response rates are just as good, if not better, according to Lask.

With an obvious expected increase in spending in digital and social media in the future, she said, “Having a social and digital strategy is status quo. I think the real focus is more on how digital and social are going to change, so we have to evolve our spending and budget.” With the challenge being adjusting investments, Lask added, “we all have to learn how to be a lot more nimble so we’re allowed to pivot quickly as the digital and social channels change.”

Ensuring relevance

Infographic shared with consumers, depicting the ‘Natural Expression in Motion’ theme.

Historically, pharma has often lagged behind other industries when incorporating digital or social media into their marketing due to a lack of clear FDA guidance. “There is no doubt that digital is changing faster than any of these regulations can keep up,” Lask noted, so they make sure to partner closely with their legal and regulatory teams from start and every step along the way. Consumers expect brands today to be “honest and candid, but [also] relevant to them.” Balancing such expectations with “the very important fact that we want safe and effective usage of our products … can be challenging and we’re learning as we go in many instances,” she said. Thus, they make sure their assets center on the important safety information, but present it in a consumerized way that people find engaging.

Lask stressed the importance of relevance when developing their educational and branded efforts: “We make sure first that it is relevant for the consumer. There is just so much noise out there, and if we are creating irrelevant material, you can almost guarantee that it is going to be skipped or not used. Then we put our focus on, what is the brand’s essence of our Galderma aesthetic product? It goes back to being honest, candid, and really being true to what we stand for.”

Galderma’s aesthetics brands employ both educational and branded tactics, depending on what is more appropriate at the time. “It’s a combination between education and branded marketing; we feel like you can’t do one without the other,” she said. With these treatments being elective, getting patients to be inspired by outcomes and addressing their primary concern – looking natural – is step one, she explained. Here, educational marketing leads the way. Branded marketing comes into play next to ensure the patient chooses their products, not a competitor’s.

Looking ahead

When preparing future plans, Lask has spotlighted three strategic areas, each one connected in a different way to improving access to education and information. One of the first things Galderma is keeping an eye on are websites such as Yelp or HCP reviews – anywhere that consumers can get engaged with how they find HCPs. She explained that, in the aesthetics market, those are very important to how consumers can figure out where they go for a treatment. Another area of watch for the team is around platforms such as RealSelf.com, which is a community-driven website providing information and research, reviews, and rankings for aesthetic medicines and cosmetic treatments. Lask likened it to the Trip Advisory of aesthetics.

The last key concentration is around retail pop up clinics, she said. It is empowering for consumers to have such access to information and freedom from scheduling appointments. But as a marketer, it provides other challenges – primarily, how do marketers find these places and then also ensure consumers are receiving their materials and relevant messages? Another barrier Lask found is that many of these retail pop up clinics, which are often owned by large corporations now, don’t usually want company branding or materials. She identifies this as a problem that will need to be solved in the future: “how to make sure that we’re able to touch the consumer in those offices as well?”

“The landscape is always changing, but that’s what is fun and exciting about it,” she stated. With more than two million women using aesthetic products currently and another 15 – 20 million more in the US alone who are interested in them, Lask said it is educating and providing them with information so they “really understand outcomes, what they can look like, and what’s possible.”

 

Jennifer Kovack

DTC in FocusDTC NewsGuest Columnist

Creating a Compelling Customer Experience for the Digital Age

August 29, 2017 0

The scope of what we call marketing seems to be growing every day. Within the professional lives of many in the business of pharmaceutical marketing, a campaign of one-size-fits-all magazine ads alone was considered sufficient to launch and sustain a multi-million-dollar brand. Then came television, then the internet, then mobile devices, and on and on – and with each, the expectations of our audiences have grown. Today customers expect an experience from brands, one that caters to their individual needs through a variety of media, especially digital and interactive media. And for all the progress in the digital space, pharma as an industry has not done a particularly good job of providing these coordinated and customized experiences. How to improve? Read on.

Mobile-friendly just isn’t good enough.

Adapting your desktop website to make it “mobile-friendly” is starting to look a bit backwards, given that more than half of web traffic is now coming from mobile devices. If we really want to engage our audiences where they want to be engaged, we need to be thinking mobile first. Every patient interaction that we seek in the digital space – ads, websites, interactive content, email, all of it – should be created with the mobile experience at top of mind. Old-fashioned responsive design works okay for vanilla text content, but any communication tool with any degree of complexity in it ought to be built for mobile, not just able to adapt to it. Agencies and marketers need to adapt to capture attention in the first 35 characters of email subject lines. They even need to think about thumb fatigue when designing pages that may be too long.

Mobile-savvy patients expect quick hits.

People don’t use mobile devices for the same reasons they use desktops. They don’t go to their smartphones to do in-depth research; they go there to find information fast. So marketers need to be tailoring their mobile experiences that way. A good mobile site should offer access to information, services and tools quickly – services and tools like health trackers, copay support apps, specialist or pharmacy locators, non-intimidating patient education portals, touch-here-and-ring-the-patient-support-center-right-now. Great masses of text or dozens of links on a page are not your friend in the mobile environment. We see a day in the near future where patients can even “FaceTime” with their doctor or nurse for live but remote care. Telemedicine, powered by mobile and a desire to reduce healthcare costs, is about to boom!

Plain old targeting isn’t enough any more either.

Data is everywhere and those that capitalize on it will win. So we need to target more deeply – to hypertarget – and think in terms of the cultural prisms through which our audiences will view our communications. To do this we must move beyond traditional segmentation and actually build whole experiences to match each segment. For example, if your brand might have an opportunity in the Hispanic population, you should be developing your communications for that population from the ground up, not just as an offshoot of the “standard” materials. In the old days marketers used to write everything in English and translate as necessary – but today’s audiences, whatever their ethnicity, are expecting more than that. So cultural adaptation versus plain translation is the key to connecting with multicultural audiences. They are expecting communications and images and services that are attuned to their cultural background, and may be actively turned off by those that aren’t.

Leverage landing pages – and please, let’s optimize them.

A handful of pharma brands are beginning to catch on to the vanity URL and landing page concept – creating landing pages focused on narrower topics within brand.com and then strategically salting ads with them, with the hope of creating a deeper connection. For example, one might embed brand.com/efficacy into a TV ad that focuses on copay information, so that the patient ends up encountering multiple reinforcing messages. The trouble is that, as frequently happens in pharma, too many brands are investing in vanity URLs, tossing them out into the marketplace, but never really following up to optimize their use. With just a little added push – the push of A/B testing multiple URLs in the same ad or multiple ads with the same URL – brands could find out which combinations generate the most click-throughs, the most interest – and the best experience for the patient. The idea is to make every dollar work as efficiently as possible. If patient experiences are to be a matter of priority for your brand, you’d best be paying attention to the outcomes of those experiences and optimizing accordingly.

Mind your language, and how much of it there is.

We love our content in pharma. Maybe it’s how invested we are in our brands, or maybe it’s the regulatory requirements and complex review process, but we as an industry find it difficult to resist loading up our patient communications with everything at once. Yes, some of that cannot be avoided due to the need for important safety information and fair balance. But even on top of those guidelines we tend to be content-verbose, trying to squeeze everything into one experience or capture everything possible in a single registration form. It takes a true digital marketer to have the confidence to keep it short, sweet, and sticky, creating an experience and journey over time that delivers the content and value to the patient in digestible pieces.

So we need to narrow the focus of our messaging. Let our customer choose what he or she is seeking and provide it, and it alone, with a pathway to more as needed. Lose the long pages with multiple messages. Offer one call to action rather than four. Keep everything simple, scannable, short, and sweet.

Integrate, integrate, integrate.

Pharma companies love to create monuments to their brands. They can’t just offer a diet tool; it has to be the company’s branded diet tool. But customers don’t think that way. Customers want tools that are applicable across the whole spectrum of their lives, and they don’t much care what brand is attached. For example, many patients with diabetes have other health issues, too, like hypertension. In our present brand monument environment, that might mean one health tracker from the diabetes company, another from the cardio company, and maybe even another from the weight loss company, all beautifully lacquered up with each brand’s name. Or, the patient could use Apple’s Health app, which can take inputs from virtually anywhere and cover all of those bases, creating a simpler experience. Which do you think the typical patient will choose?

So we need to start thinking more holistically. If we really want to improve the patient experience, we have to start building tools and services that can be tied together with other tools and services, even third-party ones, rather than just monuments that are unique and proprietary to our own brands and companies. And yes, some companies are doing this already – Novo Nordisk with Glooko, Sanofi with Google, Novartis with Verily. But we need to see more of it. If a truly integrated and productive patient experience is going to be a matter of priority for pharma brands, we are going to have to start partnering across industries and converging when possible to provide patients the ideal seamless experience.

Aaron Uydess

DTC in FocusDTC NewsGuest Columnist

Advocacy and Industry: Weighing Influence and Transparency

August 29, 2017 0

Today’s healthcare environment – with access to therapy and pricing top of mind, new “right to try” laws, possible legislative changes, and big shifts in the ways that consumers get health information – requires more innovative and thoughtful approaches on how to communicate than ever before. For many pharmaceutical companies, advocacy is a highly promising and rewarding way to connect with patients, families, and communities. Now, some of those efforts are coming under scrutiny.

Advocacy organizations exist to help the people and communities they serve, and can have some impressive reach. One great example is the fact that breast cancer mortality is down 38%, influenced by efforts of Susan G. Komen® to leverage science and education, and directly help patients. And there are numerous reasons that industry stakeholders engage with advocacy groups. Many pharmaceutical companies collaborate with advocacy organizations on non-promotional and unbranded activities to support the community in capacity building, education, and to build advocacy skills. Some have more direct brand objectives in mind, and support advocacy organizations with the goal of getting endorsements from the advocacy organization or from patient ambassadors. Some work with advocacy organizations so that they will recommend specific products to their constituents or to speak with legislators on behalf of companies or products.

Transparency is key to building trust

Trust is essential to building fruitful relationships between the community, advocacy groups, and industry. But lack of transparency can undermine these relationships and may have a negative impact on how the community perceives advocacy organizations and by association pharmaceutical companies. Because trust between them and the communities they serve is key, some advocacy groups have chosen not to accept pharmaceutical funding, so they can say that they are completely outside the influence of industry. The reality, however, is that it is extremely difficult for many advocacy organizations to provide the services and develop the reach and consistency they would like based only on their own public / private support and community fundraising. For this reason advocacy organizations are often open to mutually-beneficial partnerships with industry that ultimately help the patient communities they serve.

But the current level of transparency around funding of advocacy groups has recently been questioned. The New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA Internal Medicine published articles that assessed whether advocacy organizations might have significant conflicts of interest because they accept support from pharmaceutical companies. What the investigators found raises questions about the need for added transparency. According to the New England Journal of Medicine article, 80% of large organizations (annual revenue at least $7.5 million) were found to receive industry support. However fewer than 20% reported specifically how much they received from industry sponsors. More than one-third had an industry executive on their board, and another quarter did not state their board members’ occupations. Only about a quarter published conflict of interest policies, none of which specifically addressed industry influence.

Findings published in JAMA Internal Medicine revealed that two-thirds of smaller organizations (median annual revenue $299,140; interquartile range $70,000 to $1.2 million) were funded by industry and more than 10% received more than 50% of their funding from industry. More than 80% from these smaller groups felt that advocacy organizations should be cognizant of the potential for conflicts of interest, but only about half were highly confident in their organizations’ conflict of interest policies. More than seven percent were consciously aware of pressure to align with corporate interests of donors. The findings illustrate how the majority of large and smaller advocacy organizations receive funding from pharmaceutical companies, but do not have applicable conflict of interest policies to preserve transparency – potentially raising questions about credibility and undermining trust.

Advocacy organizations are not the only ones coming under scrutiny. Since 2013, the federal government has issued subpoenas to a number of pharmaceutical companies to analyze their ties to patient assistance charities. The investigations continue, and now involve many top pharmaceutical stakeholders. These inquiries are similar to those concerning financial ties between industry and physicians and their institutions, and potential conflicts of interest that could influence physicians’ clinical decisions. Financial ties must be disclosed to avoid a potential conflict of interest, or even the appearance of a conflict of interest, so that patients’ welfare remains the primary interest.

Advocacy is stronger with transparency

Should the pharmaceutical companies stop supporting advocacy organizations? Absolutely not. However, all parties should be transparent about their relationships and financial support. Recently, Stat News reported that a pharmaceutical company was found to be a secret funder of a patient advocacy organization that was working to secure more government funding and insurance coverage for treatment. Because this charitable donation was initially concealed, “outing” the company as a financial supporter became the news story. This shifted the focus from the potential positive impact of support for this advocacy group, and possibly diminished the advocacy group’s important role and ability to address a critical community need. Transparency is an effective way to help advocacy groups avoid the pitfalls of implied or actual bias concerning their work, removing a potential barrier for positive impact on the community.

Just as pharmaceutical companies have to publicly disclose payments to physicians, and many physicians are required to disclose any potential conflicts of interest based on industry relationships, it is reasonable to ask advocacy organizations to disclose their industry sponsors and the financial support they receive. This could be similar to a Sunshine Act for advocacy – only hopefully with less complexity! The goal is for all stakeholders to feel confident that everyone is transparent and playing on a level field and lets communities feel positive about the organizations representing them.

Denise Erkkila

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Check the Pulse of Your Heart Health Marketing

August 17, 2017 0
Sponsored Content

Every 42 seconds, someone in the US has a heart attack. Each minute, someone dies from a heart disease-related event.1

Even though heart disease remains the leading cause of death in the US, many adults are uninformed of the causes, symptoms and proper treatment of heart-related conditions. In fact, according to PatientPoint research, over half of patients who are treated for heart health said their issues were unexpected. Further studies have found 70% of adults are not familiar with symptoms associated with heart disease.2

As these statistics reveal, the need for education and support materials for patients at the point of care is paramount – and critical to pharma companies’ success. Because if heart health isn’t top of mind for most adults, it’s likely your treatment isn’t, either. And with nearly half (47%) of cardiologists now restricted, gaining awareness among physicians is also a growing challenge.3

To ensure the right message is delivered to these heart “unhealthy” patients at the right time, PatientPoint conducts in-depth research in the space. Here’s a snapshot of patients who visited cardiologist offices installed with the PatientPoint Communicate – Cardiology Waiting Room Digital Screens Program:

  • Average age: 60 years
  • Gender: 60% female
  • Race: 79% white / Caucasian
  • Employment status: 59% retired
  • 42% are accompanied by another adult
  • 59% want to lose weight
  • Top conditions identified to be at risk for or diagnosed with: high blood pressure / hypertension (72%), high cholesterol (68%), arthritis (55%), heart disease (53%), heart attack or cardiac event (48%)

This information enables us to develop content specifically tailored to these conditions, gaining unprecedented positioning as a trusted consultant to our partners – clients, physicians and patients – to ensure their message makes the most impact at each important moment.

Let’s look at each of these points a little more closely:

  • Waiting room: Patients say the waiting room is often the most stressful part of their visit to the doctor. Reinforcing your brand message alongside easy-to-understand digital information regarding heart health, healthy living tips and personalized messages from the practice will put your brand top of mind right before patients visit with the doctor. Heart patients don’t want to hear about arthritis content. We speak the patient language.
  • Exam room: Once in the exam room, patients crave in-depth education. Interactive touchscreens bring health information to life, whether it’s through a personalized quiz, short article or a brand testimonial video. Once the doctor arrives, he’s likely to use the touchscreen to show the patient exactly what’s happening in her heart via full-color, 3D anatomical models. It’s here where your brand can provide the support and savings information to help guide discussions and, ultimately, decision-making.
  • After the visit: Because the risk factors for heart disease and stroke are directly related to lifestyle choices, continual engagement between provider, pharma company and patient is important to ensure treatment success. We know those age 45-64 (the common age range for the onset of many cardiovascular conditions) still see print as a valuable information resource,4 and including your message in brochures patients can take home and reference later will help reinforce your brand as part of the solution to living a longer, healthier life.

The scale of the cardiovascular market is driving greater demands of quality outcomes data. Providing the right education to patients and providers at the right moments will help pharma companies remove barriers to access and support long-term adherence.

 

References

  1. American Heart Association, 2015
  2. Cleveland Clinic survey, 2014
  3. ZS Associates, “AccessMonitor,” 2015 Executive Summary
  4. 2015 Two Sides North America

Linda Ruschau

DTC in FocusDTC NewsGuest Columnist

Voice Search and the Health Information Impact

August 14, 2017 0

If you haven’t been living under a rock (or aren’t my parents), you are probably aware of the rise in popularity of voice search and voice enabled devices. Thanks to technology like Google Assistant, iOS Siri, and Amazon Echo, voice search is exploding in terms of both adoption and technology integration.

A comScore study in 2016 noted that 40% of adults now use voice search at least once per day and 60% of those people started using it in the last year. A recent report estimates that more than 24 million Amazon Echo and Google Home devices will be sold in 2017. As the technology behind these devices improves, people are turning to them at an increasing rate to obtain information, seek answers to their questions and incorporate them as a part of their daily routine. Because people can typically speak up to 150 words per minute versus being able to type 40 words per minute, and using voice search is seen as quicker than typing or using an app, voice search continues to grow in usage.

The manner in which people are using voice search, beyond just music playback, seems to focus on location based queries and answering basic questions. These uses line up well with the core functionality of voice search and are natural first steps for many people who are getting familiar with the voice search format.

However, there is much more potential in how voice search can be utilized to engage with searchers beyond what we’re currently seeing – this is especially true in the health information space.

Using voice search for health information
Currently, the number of voice search enabled health dedicated applications is very limited. One of the few available now is WebMD’s Amazon Alexa skill, which is essentially a custom voice search program geared towards health information. This new skill is aimed toward answering basic health questions and providing information in a quick and easy voice-enabled format.

Perhaps in the near future, voice applications could simply build on the commonly used question and answer format to help patients at the earliest stages of their health journey to identify potential health conditions and provide questions for them to ask their doctor.
However, while making use of the straightforward question and answer format is a good foundation, there is a plethora of untapped potential for the health information vertical to go even further and create truly interactive, immersive voice search experiences.

For instance, one of the real values of voice-based personal assistant devices is the way they have started to weave themselves into the daily routine of users. This adoption could be useful for people who manage their health conditions on a daily basis. People who live with diabetes, for example, have a variety of concerns they need to be mindful of which could potentially be tied in to the usage of voice based personal assistant devices. These uses could include:

  • Reminders can be given when it is time to eat, drink and check blood sugar levels
  • Using location-based weather forecasts, the assistant can give recommendations for exercises appropriate for that day and even skin care tips in order to keep skin hydrated
  • From a dietary perspective, when someone utilizes the “shopping list” feature of these devices, perhaps a diabetes app can recognize the ingredients and make suggestions for recipes to make using those ingredients that are diabetic friendly
  • Searches for recipes or restaurants can factor in diabetic restrictions when making recommendations, which will allow the voice search experience to be not only highly efficient but extremely personalized to that person’s location and health needs

As people continue to utilize voice search based devices, the amount of health information applications will continue to grow and open up new avenues to engage people with very individualized healthcare information experiences.

Taking healthcare conversations to voice search
It’s one thing to have a presence in voice search, it’s another to provide an application that people find truly helpful and improves the quality of their health journey. To create a voice search experience that is meaningful and useful, developers must provide people with trustworthy information as efficiently and accurately as possible in their moment of need. This is easier said than done, but the ability to offer such valuable and intimate service means there is the potential to become a part of each person’s daily routine.

Much of the potential value in voice search is in the organic experience it can create. Where healthcare is concerned, many people still feel that having a conversation about your health questions, such as you might have with your doctor, is a more natural and credible experience than Googling for information. Voice search and personal assistant devices have the capacity to create a conversational experience that can make people feel more comfortable and thus dive deeper into their health information search by engaging in a way that more closely mimics the interaction that might occur with their physician.

Healthcare brands and organizations who wish to make full use of voice search will have to be true to themselves and to their audience about the types of information they are seeking and how to answer those questions. For brands, this means potentially providing information that they might not normally be comfortable with discussing. Topics such as side effects and pricing are often avoided on brand websites despite searchers frequently looking for this type of information. In addition, we often see in our research that people commonly make comparison searches, essentially typing in “brand A vs brand B”. This is content that is typically not included in brand experiences. In order to feel comfortable engaging in voice search and adopting a vastly new method of searching for health information, people will need to feel as confident in the answers they are receiving as if they were coming from an unbiased source such as their own doctor.

As people embrace this new technology to seek out health related information, the healthcare world has a tremendous opportunity to make an impact. This starts with creating an experience that truly harnesses the value of voice search to empower the user to feel more in control of their own healthcare.

Richard Deede

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Healthcare: Repeal Now, Replace Later?

June 30, 2017 0

Earlier today, Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse sent a letter to President Trump urging him to separate the actions of repealing and replacing healthcare, rather than doing them simultaneously, if there is still no resolution by July 10th. Since not enough progress has been made on healthcare, during an appearance on Fox & Friends this morning the Republican Senator recommended that repeal be handled first and then “have the President ask us to cancel our August state work period and stay here [to] then work on replace separate. We made promises to the American people, we should fulfill them.” Sen. Sasse – who is a supporter of as much repeal as allowable – stated in his letter to the President: “We should include a year-long implementation delay to give comfort to Americans currently on ObamaCare that a replacement plan will be enacted before expiration.” President Trump agrees with the idea of separation, tweeting this morning, “If Republican Senators are unable to pass what they are working on now, they should immediately REPEAL, and then REPLACE at a later date!”

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PatientPoint Raises $140 Million in Capital to Fuel Its Digital POC Growth

June 30, 2017 0

PatientPoint announced this week that it received $140 million in capital from private investment firms, allowing for significant digital growth in its point of care networks. Serving as a strategic advisor, the Peter J. Solomon Company secured the financing from Searchlight Capital Partners and Silver Point Capital.

A leader in patient education and engagement programs in the point of care space, PatientPoint provides trusted content, which is largely created internally, that is tailored to particular healthcare professionals' specialties. The programs are offered through a variety of channels, including digital screens in waiting rooms and interactive touchscreens in exam rooms – currently found in more than 31,000 doctor's offices and 1,000 hospitals across the country. While today's impact levels reach over a half a billion patient and caregiver visits annually, founder and CEO Mike Collette stated via news release that “by 2019, our goal is to provide programs that can impact 60-70% of brand prescribing volume in the most strategically important specialties.”

Collette, who recently returned to his leadership post at PatientPoint, explained, “We have invested a significant amount of financial and human capital into product development over the past six months to ensure that our programs are truly best in class.” Traver Hutchins, Chief Growth Officer, added, “While much of our growth will be through amplification of existing programs, we will also be solidifying several acquisitions and partnerships that will further strengthen our product offerings. We have also significantly increased our data-driven marketing expertise, allowing us to provide more personalized, relevant communication to patients for a truly enriched healthcare experience.”

The rapid growth of the point of care industry combined with PatientPoint's innovative patient programs, reliable analytics and insights, management experience, and the trust of healthcare providers, solidified commitments from investors. PatientPoint enhances the healthcare experience for patients and caregivers through its cohesive, end-to-end communication platform, whether it be in the primary care space or complex specialties.

Click here to read the full news release.

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