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By Aimee Delorey, Ph.D., and Mark Miller of Symphony Health

It comes as no surprise that big data is being used in all aspects of human life, from where we shop, how we listen to music, how we date and more. But in healthcare analytics, it’s more than just collecting data for the sake of marketing, it’s about understanding how we as doctors treat our patients based on their everyday life habits and goals for living a healthy lifestyle.

The problem and the solution

Large scale data systems, like CRMs may not always provide a holistic, 360-degree view of the patient. They provide limited or incomplete databases in which healthcare professionals have to fill in the blanks. Gaps in data provide significant barriers in understanding patient behavior. Thus, patients receive underwhelming care. According to a 2015 study from McKinsey & Company, 95% of patient data resides outside of the care management system.[1]

Doctors need to be merging traditional data with new sources in order to identify behavior, attitudes and life circumstances. Getting to know our patient’s stress levels, job responsibilities, food and exercise routines, hours spent using technology, social lives and more with the data provided to us will help us provide individualized treatment and advice.

A 2016 study by the SAS Institute merged third party consumer data with claims data to predict healthcare utilization risk and costs.[2] As a result, researchers were able to identify TV viewing patterns, mail-order buying habits (including mail-order prescriptions) and investments in stocks and bonds. The culmination of all this information arms doctors with predictive power in helping understand a patient’s risk for particular outcomes and the related cost.

Using data to invoke change

The earlier we can detect and give our patients a diagnosis, the better their outcome will be. With more comprehensive data and information which is critical to the patient’s journey, (family history, lifestyle and comorbid conditions like diabetes or anemia) can lead to earlier detection.

For example, a main symptom of congestive heart failure is fatigue, which is not always a telling symptom to the average patient. Most patients aren’t diagnosed with this disease until the later stages, meaning most have been living with the disease for some time before diagnosis and treatment.

However, with the help of data, a physician can triangulate their historical information with current signs and symptoms to identify heart disease at an earlier time. This is significant to a patient suffering from unrecognized heart disease who can have a materially improved quality of life with the help of early detection and appropriate treatment.

Conclusion

It’s critical that the healthcare industry, from practitioners to pharmaceutical companies, to look to new ways to understand patients that go beyond traditional data sources, (i.e. wearable technology and the cloud). A better understanding of patients through data will vastly improve diagnosis, earlier detection, more effective treatment, aftercare, prevention and quality of care.

References

[1] McKinsey

[2] Statish Garla, Albert Hopping, Rock Moaco, Sarah Rittman. What Do Your Consumer Habits Say About Your Health Risk? Using Third-Party Data to Predict Individual Health Risk and Costs; SAS Institute, 2016

About the Authors

Aimee Delorey, Ph.D., senior director, Strategy & Research at Symphony Health, has spent nearly 20 years in analytics and consulting roles serving biotechnology, pharmaceutical and health plan clients. Her areas of expertise include CRM strategy, marketing effectiveness, predictive modeling, data visualization and customer journeys.

As the leader of Symphony’s Audience and Media practice, Mark Miller's team is responsible for helping clients design, measure and optimize highly complicated media and marketing initiatives. He does this by leveraging Symphony’s unique data and analytic capabilities with an eye towards effective and nimble marketing execution. Mark is widely regarded as one of the foremost thinkers in customer experience design with a focus on groundbreaking solutions in the areas of brand planning, digital media and CRM execution.

Editor's Note: Join Mark as he copresents with Britta Cleveland, SVP of Research with Meredith, at our DTC Forum on TV & Print, discussing the impact print ads have on Rx sales conversions and overall Return On Ad Spend (ROAS). The 2017 DTC Forum on TV & Print will be held Oct 26th in NYC.

For years, many luxury goods retailers, concerned about exclusivity and control, either sniffed at or completely ignored the internet as a marketplace.

Now, a recent McKinsey & Company Marketing & Sales report tells us “Nearly half of luxury goods buying decisions are already influenced by what consumers hear or see online.” The same report predicts that by 2018, “global digital sales for women’s luxury fashion are expected to grow from a current 3 percent of the total market to 17 percent, for a total market size of $12 billion.”

Conventional wisdom also underestimated the internet’s power as a source for health information, but a Pew Research Center study shows “80% of internet users have looked online for information about any of 15 health topics such as a specific disease or treatment.” The same study finds “34% of internet users, or 25% of adults, have read someone else’s commentary or experience about health or medical issues on an online news group, website, or blog.”

Likewise, conventional wisdom held that patients would never use social media for health information. However, Health Union research found that 26% of the patients used Facebook once a day or more for health information and more than half (52%) use it at least monthly.

Hubs for medical innovation

While the emergence of social media tools and online health communities as hubs for medical innovation might seem far-fetched, their importance in a digital environment can’t be overstated. We now live in a world where communication is multi-directional, information is more accessible, and experience-sharing is simple and fast.

But what can online health communities contribute to health research?

Not surprisingly, descriptions of a patient’s experience are most valuable when they come directly from the patient. Posing questions to an online community or monitoring conversations aids in the observation of trends in habits, desires, symptoms, and other information otherwise unavailable or difficult to obtain. Trends can be analyzed and online communities can provide feedback regarding product attributes that patients and caregivers find most important. Observational studies can inform researchers about real patient experiences and patient-driven research can serve as a starting point for future trials or as verification of previous results.

Online communities also offer valuable input for clinical trial design and feasibility. While the current belief is that patients are generally not involved, we’ve found that patients are very interested in contributing to the study design process. Patient advocates can add value to study development by identifying challenges and helping to create patient communications.

The rise of patient-driven research

We are witnessing a growing trend of patient-driven data from wearable technology from companies like FitBit, Garmin, and Apple as well as from direct-to-consumer health testing such as 23andMe or recently FDA-approved tests that can detect a predisposition for late-onset Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease.

At the same time, we see an increase in patient-driven research. Although it is a less-controlled form of study, there is potential for it to complement controlled, scientific studies. And while there is a possibility for inaccurate data, there is significant potential for fast, large-scale, and low-cost data collection.

As an example, consider a recent online community’s participant-led study of the effects of lithium on patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). The study had no control arm and required patients in the community to self-report their experience and ALS symptom progression while taking lithium.

The results from the community indicated there was no connection between lithium and symptom progression. Researchers then completed a scientific study, analyzed the patient data, and compared the experimental group to a control arm utilizing existing electronic patient records. Researchers concluded that the results of the patient-driven study held validity. These results also confirmed the findings of a previously conducted clinical trial investigating the same hypothesis  —  that lithium did not affect ALS progression.

Though these types of trials can have academic merit, they are not a suitable replacement for FDA-approved clinical trials. However, they show promise as a means of validating previous study results, or generating interest in a particular treatment method.

What motivates patients to participate?

Health Union’s latest survey data from nearly 20,000 individuals representing 12 different chronic conditions finds the majority of respondents (64%) are interested in participating in clinical research. We find the same trend among condition-specific communities such as migraine (74%), rheumatoid arthritis (64%), and inflammatory bowel disease (57%).

Community members are motivated by a desire to improve the quality of medical care for themselves and others, and to help researchers understand what it’s like to live with the condition. Other insights we’ve uncovered influencing motivation are also personal and compelling:

• “As a young person who was diagnosed with something that can make you feel helpless, research and taking charge by devoting my career to making a positive impact has pulled me through.” — Stephanie B., MultipleSclerosis.net
• “Being able to say they actually wanted my opinion…can make a person feel validated and important.” — Katie G., Migraine.com
• “I think the patients [researchers] are looking to recruit would be more apt to be part of a clinical trial that has patients and researchers working together.” – Cathy C., MultipleSclerosis.net

Tapping into the desire to participate in clinical research, online health communities can broaden the scope for recruitment of research participants beyond traditional methods and often accelerate the speed of enrollment.

The incredible potential of online communities in health research

Online health communities can change the efficiency, feasibility, and speed of health research while engaging a larger population than ever before. Trials have the possibility to be designed for maximum retention and recruited with more efficiency.

The possibilities within this realm are vast and, if treated with appropriate caution, can have a tremendous impact on patient care along with the quality of health research and innovation.

You know that men and women are so different that we have to look to the planets to sort out the contrast.  But when it comes to trusting the biopharmaceutical industry, we’ve found that the genders are at the same time similar and different.

For the last two years, we have conducted a revealing survey among women making healthcare decisions asking how much they trust the pharmaceutical industry – the WEST Survey on Pharma: Women’s Engagement, Satisfaction & Trust. This year, we also conducted the same survey among 300 men, the MENT Survey on Pharma: Men’s Engagement, Needs & Trust, again through our subsidiary Health Stories Project, an online community of people inspired to tell their health stories to help others to connect and learn.

We undertook both surveys with the goal of understanding how true patient engagement can help build a foundation of trust with these important audiences. Though we will publish detailed results later, we’ve pulled out the top three responses to several questions to share some key findings.  The results were very revealing.

Differences: Men and Women

We know men and women are different, and now we know it is because their brains are actually built differently.  A study of 1,000 brain scans[i] showed that “on average, female brains are highly connected across the left and right hemispheres, and connections in male brains are typically stronger between the front and back regions.”

• As a result, men tend to perform tasks predominantly using the left side, which is the logical/rational side of the brain.
• Women, on the other hand, use both sides of their brain, because a woman’s brain has a larger Corpus Callosum, which allows women to transfer data between the right and left hemispheres faster.

As expected, our surveys showed several differences in how men and women perceive the biopharmaceutical industry.  We asked men whose opinions they would find very or extremely credible when forming an opinion of a pharmaceutical company.

• Men’s top choice: a technical expert.
• This is compared to women’s top choice of a friend or family member, which actually took the #2 spot for men.
• Men’s top three influencers were rounded out by an academic professional, showing the value men place on validated, vetted authority figures when they are looking for information they can trust. (And women place a premium on their trusted personal relationships.)

The survey also emphasized differences in the way men want to communicate with the biopharmaceutical industry, again with subtle differences from women’s responses.

We asked about specific initiatives biopharma companies could use to communicate directly with patients and caregivers to understand their needs that would have a lot of or significant impact on a company’s trustworthiness.  Both men and women agreed that direct channels that enable the industry to communicate with patients would have the most impact, but their emphasis was tellingly different.

• Men’s top choice was creating an online community where the company and patients or caregivers could engage with one another.
• Men’s second and third choices were methods companies can use to regularly gather feedback from patients, including focus groups and in-person or online patient/caregiver advisory meetings.
• In contrast, women’s top three choices were reversed: their top two choices were methods companies can use to regularly gather feedback from patients, and their third option was creating an online community.

Another departure between the responses of men and women was evident when we asked if recent attention to drug pricing has changed survey respondents’ perception of the pharmaceutical industry.

• Men were significantly less sensitive to pricing issues, with 62% of men but only 42% of women saying recent events have not changed their perception of the industry.

Similarities: Men and Women

However, there were also several key areas in which men and women’s perspectives were very similar.  When describing themselves in the survey, a majority of both men and women said they were the primary decision maker for someone else, such as a child or spouse, who has taken a prescription medication.

• Surprisingly, 92% of men said they were primary decision makers.
• According to a recent Center for Talent Innovation (CTI) survey: 94% women who work and have children under the age of 18 make healthcare decisions for others[ii].

And though men were less influenced by recent attention to the pricing of pharmaceuticals than women as referenced in the Differences section, we were surprised that the perceptions and trust of both men and women were not as impacted overall by recent events in pharma as we thought they might have been, even after a year with high-profile negative attention on the pharmaceutical industry.

And finally, while we are still analyzing all the data from both the men’s and women’s surveys and we don’t want to give away all of the results, I can tell you that across the board, men have more trust in the biopharmaceutical industry than women.

More Details at DTC National 2016

Pam Garfield, SVP of Strategy & Innovation with Patient Health Perspectives, will be presenting the full results from the 2016 WEST women’s survey, overlaid on the 2015 results, at the DTC National Conference  next week.  If you are attending, be sure to look for her presentation, “Do Women Trust Pharma?” for all of the details.  We will also present the men’s survey results later this year.

References:

[i] http://www.fitbrains.com/blog/women-men-brains/

[ii] http://www.talentinnovation.org/_private/assets/PopHealthcare_ExecSumm-CTI.pdf

The relevance of social media monitoring and engagement in the healthcare industry

Billions of conversations take place every month on social media platforms including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, as well as blogs and forums. These conversations are not only taking place in social settings, but are influencing companies as well. Social media use continues to rise as we see more people using it in both their personal and professional lives — and brands are responding by continually looking for better ways to engage with them. All of these conversations comprise pools of rich data, but listening to them for meaning can be challenging. So, how do companies make sense of all this endless data to determine how and where to listen, identify what consumers are talking about, classify the types of content they are posting and understand the behaviors they are engaging in?

In the healthcare industry, patients and healthcare providers (HCPs) are looking to social media for information and support regarding their health and the health of their patients. They serve as a “perpetual focus group,” whose conversations taking place on social media provide brands with the opportunity to listen. Patients share their opinions, ask questions about diseases and treatment options, and directly or incidentally report adverse events. Meanwhile, HCPs voice opinions on the healthcare industry, provide thought leadership on a wide range of topics such as participatory medicine, reimbursement, and medical education. In a recent survey, more than 40 percent of respondents reported that information found via social media would affect the way they coped with a chronic condition or their approach to diet and exercise; 34 percent said it would affect taking certain medication.¹ This demonstrates to companies that patients are directly impacted by what they view on social media and in order for brands to leverage that data radiating out of all the social conversations, several factors need to be in place.

When determining how to utilize the data in social media conversations, one rule-of-thumb is to work backward — start with objectives and determine which categories of data would support the analysis and provide actionable insights. Companies can build a tagging structure based on relevant categories, such as: source (e.g., social media platform), author, type, topic, behavior, and sentiment. For example, if a brand is looking to identify who is talking about a product, the kinds of content they are posting, and the topics within their content, a structure that would classify posts into categories such as Consumer, Branded Product, and Medical Inquiry could be utilized. As more and more posts are tagged, patterns, trends, and themes can be identified.

Social media strategists must be cognizant of the regulations pharmaceutical companies face when approaching social media usage and determining involvement. Many pharmaceutical companies have legitimate concerns regarding social media participation, including the need to have:

• Identification, triaging, and reporting of Adverse Events (AEs), Product Quality Complaints (PQCs)
• Consistency of messaging and having a team that can adhere to social media promotion guidelines and regulations
• Previous experience and internal knowledge in terms of social media engagement and usage

The current regulatory environment is understandably daunting and serious consideration must be applied when developing a social strategy. While these challenges exist today and are likely to remain for the foreseeable future, there are prescriptive solutions and industry best practices available to mitigate risk.  Regulations and the strategies that come about as a result can impact a pharmaceutical company’s ability to continue that social media conversation. Reliable processes can be implemented, borrowing best practices from existing patient interaction policies, as well as social monitoring and engagement strategies from other regulated industries.

Other key steps and factors to consider to successfully make sense of social conversations include:

• Train staff – Reduce risk by utilizing highly trained specialists experienced in the nuance of monitoring, identifying, and triaging AEs.
• Establish documented workflows – Configure a systematic approach to the identification of AEs and PQCs and their triaging to the appropriate Pharmacovigilance point-of-intake.
• Technology – Utilize cutting-edge technology platforms to monitor and tag conversations. Although there is no replacement for human engagement, as volume scales, technology becomes increasingly critical for success.

The importance of listening is always stressed in the pharmaceutical industry, but the actual work requires an appreciation of how different people “speak” on social media (patients versus HCPs), understanding the value of categorical organization of data, and the selection and application of appropriate technology. There is no silver bullet, but building meaningful structures out of disparate sets of data is doable – in fact, it’s necessary if the industry is to make the most out of today’s social media landscape. Leveraging social media data and engagement opportunities are crucial imperatives for companies to support key business goals focused around patient and provider programs — and it will pay off.

Reference

1. Social Media ‘Likes’ Healthcare: From Marketing to Social Business. PWC Health Research Institute. April 2012

Healthcare is the most personal of categories, and the micro-/macro-economic benefits of addressing individual patient needs and barriers at population-level scale are huge. Digital marketers from the early 2000s will remember the earliest pushes into personalization – most efforts were not successful. But a lot has changed, especially in the past year. A new generation of multi-channel marketing (MCM) is coming – one that successfully merges time-tested crafts of traditional digital, direct, and RM with rationalized people-based marketing enabled by ad-tech and CRM automation.

We see 2016 marking the turning point in our ability to orchestrate a direct, personal customer interaction in a logical, spontaneous sequence, that is automated and in real time. The results we’re seeing are positive – lifts in ROI as high as 5-10% across industry groups, as well as higher engagement rates, lower media costs, more scalable revenue and profits, better health outcomes, and a rich proprietary data trove that drives the single-most-important source of competitive advantage today – customer relationships.

MCM transformation must now move beyond the incremental. Bigger value creation will be architected through connected journeys where segmented, personalized game plans automate a range of individual addressable opportunities. These media investments won’t necessarily show up on Kantar, so competitive intelligence will be harder to glean going forward. Companies should look both ahead and laterally in their MCM maturity curve to create disproportionate value. For example, digital-centric brands pushing forward with personalization may look to drive greater scale and cultural relevance via traditional DTC and pilot addressable video. HCP-sales-focused organizations should better integrate the consumer/ patient influence models and direct relationships. DTC-focused brands who lack time to master search and content marketing can demonstrate digital halo to secure funding for automation initiatives. Despite this great diversity and range of motion, most firms have to create greater value. Here are four developments I would emphasize to drive continued MCM maturity in 2016:

1. Prioritize Addressable Media in the MCM Playbook

Personalization is the pinnacle of people-based marketing. It relies on the fact that addressability, the ability to target an individual and create a tailored event stream at scale, is increasing volumetrically across all of the people-based platforms we work with every day, including Facebook, Google, Amazon, and many more. As the agenda and role of the consumer are changing rapidly, marketers have to personalize the way we speak to our audiences.

The good news is that personalization in healthcare can be accomplished in lots of different ways with different levels of effort and risk thresholds. Consider some of these as entry points:

• Personalized marketing materials include different treatments and offers – or the copy, creative (imagery), and calls to action – based on the recipient
• Personalized content provides specific materials that are relevant to the individual based on preference data, medical specialty, condition,  demographic data, or based on key terms that the individual provides
• Preference personalization is when healthcare companies enable their consumers to select product options and manage desired interactions

2. Accelerate Strategic Planning Cycles via Real-Time Analytics

The prediction for 2016 is that advanced analytics, with more powerful campaign platforms like Adobe Workbench, will continue to become mainstream, particularly to inform how customer strategies drive the overarching business strategy at the enterprise level. Traditional analytics teams working towards monthly reports could not, and cannot, operate in real time. Now, real-time reporting requires faster synthesis and strategy planning oversight. Whether you’re in CPG, financial services, entertainment, or healthcare, all marketing game plans are learning to operate in more real-time environments. Thus, customers’ immediate needs, behaviors, and values can be served in the instantaneous moment of truth. Speed to insight is the new source of competitive advantage in increasingly crowded marketplaces.

3. Increase Adoption of Next Generation of Immersive Media

We will see further convergence between the addressable digital, virtual world and the real world. You must collapse the physical and temporal distance between your customers and the brand while inserting the brand into both prescriptive and spontaneous journey maps in unique relevant ways. The power of both addressable and more immersive media, including live human-to-human interaction, and supportive content marketing will increasingly simulate and unlock steps towards the real life health experience. Journey mapping will focus more on connective experience design across advertising and augmented care delivery, creating highly experiential value chains that are more immersive accelerating the pace towards true behavior change.

4. Layer Brand Storytelling Across the Connected Journey

A tighter link with brand storytelling will give newly empowered MCM teams a considerable edge over those who try to build brands in traditional ways. Brand storytelling needs to capitalize on the revamped MCM toolset – one that guides customers to immerse in newly combined digital / virtual reality, but also keeps them focused on the behavioral goals that lead to better outcomes. Whether it’s completing a hospital procedure or starting and staying on a potentially costly prescription medication, brand stories are essential to guiding desired behavior. The future of customer care is about caring for people and people feeling cared for. When measuring healthcare outcomes, high customer motivation scores correlate to a positive mental attitude. Brands must be evaluated on the softer scores that indicate behavior change alongside the hard metrics that indicate engagement.

Connected Journeys Will Define What Good MCM Looks Like

Given changing media consumption behavior and the rise of addressability, brands will be increasingly built in the addressable mid-funnel, giving multi-channel marketing powered by connected journeys a resurgence in 2016. 2016 will require a healthy dose of ideation, but shifting to a customer-driven world where real-time segment needs drive more dynamic planning cycles will accelerate change and speed to volume for most brands. Going forward into 2016, if we expect to fundamentally change the way we go to market, we all need to get better putting the customer at the center of the planning process to illustrate the ideal experience, then align the teams, tools, and talent to push ahead further and faster in the individual conversations that will drive brand success going forward.