The first vaccine for COVID-19 was approved by the FDA on Aug 23, 2021. The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine will now be marketed as Comirnaty for those aged 16 and older. For those aged 12-15 years as well as immunocompromised individuals needing a third dose, the vaccine is still available under emergency use authorization (EUA).
Click here to read the full FDA press release.
IQVIA analyzed four key areas in regards to digital health trends: innovation, evidence, regulation, and adoption. The report, by the IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science, found that “more than 90,000 digital health apps [were] added [to app stores worldwide] in 2020”, bringing the total apps available to consumers to over 350,000. Apps can be typically split into two categories: health condition management, which now account for 47% of the market, and wellness management. “Mental health (22% of apps), diabetes (15%), and cardiovascular disease-related (10%) apps [account] for almost half of disease-specific apps.”
Yet, “while software developers of digital health apps initially commercialized through public app stores under a direct-to-consumer business model, apps providing the most significant health benefits focus increasingly on payers and employers.” The US market, in particular, is starting to see increased reimbursement by payers and employers as they are often looking to offset health costs and ensure health and wellness among its users. This may further entice software developers to focus more on this sector, rather than consumers directly, when it comes to their commercialization pathways.
Additionally, in the US, nearly half of physicians (44%) are interested in prescribing medical apps for patients as are more than two-thirds (70%) “of formulary decision-makers within hospitals, IDNs, MCOs and PBMs — who either currently provide coverage for [digital therapeutics] (25%) or have expressed interest in providing coverage (45%).” Major barriers prevent more widespread adoption though, including a lack of criteria standardization for app evaluation by governing bodies as well as a clear reimbursement process yet to be established by Congress and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
Click here to read Digital Health Trends 2021: Innovation, Evidence, Regulation, and Adoption.
UnidosUS and AARP have teamed up to educate hard-to-reach Latinos on the benefits of COVID-19 vaccines through a mobile tour. As a part of UnidosUS’ Esperanza Hope for All campaign, this tour will provide attendees with answers to their questions and distribute bilingual educational materials at their various stops, which will also be held in “rural and socially vulnerable areas,” according to the news announcement.
“It’s a somber fact that older Hispanics are more likely to suffer health complications or die from COVID-19 than their white peers,” said Julie Marte, AARP New Jersey Associate State Director of Community Outreach in the news announcement. “By working with UnidosUS, we are helping to ensure the Hispanic community is included equitably in vaccine education and helping the community get the information they can trust.” The New Jersey tour stops will run every Saturday and Sunday through August 8th.
The Esperanza Hope for All campaign has reached more than 25,000 people nationwide with its mobile tour, “helping build trust in the COVID-19 vaccines and ensure that the older Hispanic adult community is included equitably in vaccine distribution efforts across the country.” As Rita Carreón, Vice President of Health at UnidosUS further explained, “Latinos are disproportionally concentrated in ‘essential’ occupations where they face higher risk of exposure to the coronavirus—exposure that often results in their hospitalization or death when unvaccinated. That is why fostering trust in the safety and efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines and combating vaccine misinformation and disinformation is paramount. Only by reaching out to Latinos where they live and engaging trusted community leaders to deliver this important information, can we meaningfully advance our community and country’s recovery.” For more details about the mobile tour, click here.
Five months after opening a special enrollment period for via HealthCare.gov, two million more Americans signed up for health insurance. In mid-July, The Biden-Harris Administration launched “Summer Sprint to Coverage” for the final 30 days before special enrollment closes. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) will run a series of testimonial ads during prime-time television, featuring real individuals (Dorothy from Charlotte, NC; Darrell & Erica from Duluth, GA; and Jeremy from Houston, TX) who were able to sign up for zero-cost or low-cost health insurance. Television commercials, in both English and Spanish, will air during high-profile sporting events, such as the Olympics. Digital and social media ads, and other educational materials available in multiple languages, were created to “[increase] outreach directed to underserved and minority populations” and populations with high uninsured rates, stated the news release on U.S. Department of Health & Human Services’ website. Community outreaches are being employed, too, by partnering “with Navigators, licensed agents and trusted messengers. Additionally, CMS has created a 30-day toolkit for partners to amplify the message of coverage options available during the SEP and the importance of signing up before the August 15 deadline.”
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Pharmaceutical companies pour billions of dollars each year into patient support programs, aiming to provide patients with drug information, financial assistance and other resources.
But those resources aren’t actually reaching patients, new data say. Phreesia, which surveyed nearly 5,000 patients checking in for doctors’ appointments this past February and March, found that just 3% were using patient support programs (PSPs).
That’s a pretty low figure, considering pharma’s annual investment tops $5.7 billion. And it wasn’t much higher when accounting for patients’ lifetime use of support programs, either: Only 8% had ever used a PSP before, Phreesia found.
Why the low usage? The problem isn’t so much that patients aren’t interested in what PSPs have to offer. Sixty-three percent of surveyed patients said support programs would be at least a little bit helpful for them, with 14% answering that they’d find PSPs very or extremely helpful.
Instead, the issue seems to be a lack of awareness. Fifty-nine percent of patients said they had little to no knowledge of PSPs—a gap companies are going to have to close if they want to successfully drive patients to their resources.
So what can drugmakers do to get the word out? Step one is creating marketing campaigns to increase awareness among qualified, targeted patients and to educate them on specific program offerings. An omnichannel approach that can reach target patients on the online platforms they’re already using should also be part of the plan.
Case in point: A life sciences company partnered with Phreesia to boost awareness around its savings program, and initially, 90% of patients were not using the company’s copay card. But after receiving information about the offer during check-in for doctors’ appointments, 53% said they were very likely to use a card if they had one.
Another option? Bringing pharmacies on board to help educate patients, whether that’s verbally or through brochures and other distributed materials. Only 14% of patients said they had learned about support programs from pharmacies, versus 32% who said they’d like to learn about support programs from pharmacies.
By far, though, the biggest disconnect Phreesia found was that just 10% of patients had learned about PSPs online—and 44% wanted to. For drugmakers, that chasm may be a signal that it’s time to revisit where and how support information is housed online and make it more prominent and easier to locate for patients surfing branded sites.
Of course, at the end of the day, healthcare providers will still be a major part of the equation. They’re currently the primary way patients are learning about PSPs, with 53% of patients getting their support info from doctors, and the way most patients (55%) would like to hear about support programs, too.
But as this new research shows, if companies really want to ensure an optimal medication experience for patients—not to mention, maximize their hefty investments—it’s going to take some additional strategizing to make sure patient support program information gets to patients in a clear, digestible way.
Connect with Phreesia:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/phreesia-life-sciences/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/PhreesiaLifeSci
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Populus Media, the leader in virtual care media solutions, today announced the positioning of its Custom Connect service as the first virtual patient acquisition platform, allowing pharmaceutical companies to realize immediate script lift ROI from their existing digital media campaigns.
The company’s Custom Connect platform allows pharmaceutical brands to immediately realize revenue through prescriptions by leveraging their existing digital media platforms and connecting patients with physicians at the click of a banner or other call to action.
The ability to eliminate the guesswork required to drive a patient from a media asset to an HCP is transformative in the industry and drastically reduces the amount of effort and budget required to drive that conversation and it dramatically increases ROI.
“It’s important that companies have realized that Custom Connect is about direct virtual patient acquisition and that it’s not a media campaign” said Howard Seidman, the company’s COO. “We are providing a vehicle to connect an interested consumer directly from a digital ad or part of an existing media buy to an HCP for a consult and prescription. No one else in the market is doing this at scale.”
Populus Media has demonstrated significant success with their clients, who have case studies showing that up to 75% of patients who click on an ad become qualified for the consult, and the majority of those patients have been prescribed the client medication when medically appropriate.
Populus has seen tremendous growth over the past 12 months, working with over 36 clients such as Evofem Biosciences and Bausch Health. Populus made history as the first company to provide media buying opportunities within the telehealth consultation environment. Custom Connect takes their leadership in the telehealth media industry one step further by connecting patients directly to prescriptions for branded pharma products.
The company has also announced that its other existing media offerings are being enhanced through a new offering called PatientAccess, which follows the patient post consult and ensures media views through follow-up communications with patients.
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About Populus Media
Populus Media, Inc. was formed in 2019 and is based in New York City. Populus is positioned as the first virtual media and patient acquisition company specifically built for the virtual care industry. Populus curates a deep archive of condition-specific content for timely delivery to patients before and after their virtual care visit alongside its partnership with HealthiNation, a GoodRx company. It also offers digital patient acquisition tools via its Custom Connect platform.
Media Contact: Matt Adler
Email: madler@populus-media.com
Health Union has acquired WEGO Health, now making the company “the largest team of experts, patient advocates and healthcare leaders, reaching scale that has never before been achieved in social health,” stated the press announcement. The combined forces allows them to connect with all patients, covering the spectrum from those “who passively seek information to patient advocates and influencers who actively share health information on multiple social media platforms.” This move also will allow for cohesive, expanded opportunities among online health communities.
Olivier Chateau, co-founder and CEO of Health Union, noted how the two companies’ “have been committed to advocating for patients, in complementary ways.” Jack Barrette, CEO and founder of WEGO Health, echoed that sentiment in a web video featuring the two team leads, commenting how “both of our companies have been about patient empowerment and activation – the same mission, coming at it from different angles with different, complementary ideas of how to get there.”
Barrette will serve on Health Union’s executive leadership team, while the rest of the WEGO Health team joins Health Union as well. WEGO Health’s offerings will be known as Health Union WEGO. Health Union creates condition-specific online communities for chronic health conditions, currently running 33 of them with more launching in the near future. WEGO Health is the largest network of patient leaders, including advocates, community leaders, creators, and influencers.
A claims-based analysis found that 26 million doses of CDC-recommended vaccines were missed in 2020. The report, commissioned by GSK and conducted by Avalere Health, an Inovalon Company, investigated claims from commercial, managed Medicaid, Medicare Advantage, and Medicare fee-for-service Part B from January through November 2020. When compared to the same time frame for 2019, results revealed that 8.8 million vaccines for teenagers and 17.2 million for adults were missed.
Non-influenza vaccines in 2020 tracked at 13-35% lower for adolescents and 17-40% lower for adults when comparing against 2019 data. Influenza vaccines, which were analyzed independent of other vaccines due to the seasonality of the influenza virus, initially showed some “early gains” but “lagged as the season progressed” in 2020. According to the news release, “Influenza vaccination claims from August-September of the 2020-21 season exceeded the same months of the 2019-20 season, suggesting early heightened awareness of respiratory disease in 2020; however, those surges levelled off by October and then fell in November.”
The report does not that while the pandemic “compounded this problem”, vaccinations were “under-utilized for adults and in underserved populations” before COVID-19 emerged. An insight from the report also predicts that “this vaccination deficit is likely to continue to grow, particularly as the US saw a significant rise of COVID-19 cases after November 2020.” On May 12, 2021, the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) updated previous guidance, issuing a recommendation to allow coadministration of COVID-19 vaccines with other vaccines; the previous recommendation was a 14-day waiting period between the vaccinations.
Vaccines analyzed in this research were: Influenza; Haemophilus influenzae (Hib); Hepatitis A; Hepatitis B; Human Papillomavirus (HPV); Meningococcal ACWY; Meningococcal B; Measles, Mumps, and Rubella (MMR); Pneumococcal; Tetanus, Diphtheria, and Pertussis (Tdap); Varicella Zoster (Chickenpox); and Herpes Zoster (Shingles). Avalere Health is an Inovalon company, a leading provider of cloud-based platforms empowering data-driven healthcare.
The term “healthcare” used to be reserved for working with the professionals: doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and others with the training to potentially deliver vital treatments and help improve patients’ lives. In quick fashion, several headlines during the COVID-19 pandemic have affected how we define what healthcare really means. Companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and even Uber and Lyft have carved out their own healthcare divisions with promises to deliver innovative new solutions to support efforts across the country. With billions invested in traditional healthcare marketing channels annually, what does this mean for the way the industry approaches reach and executes campaigns for target audiences?[1]
Vendors are continually looking for a way to gain an edge in the space. The need to reach targets has become more dire in the face of a global health crisis, not only due to the urgency of delivering information about COVID-19, but also due to the lowered share of voice non-COVID brands have access to. In recognition of message fatigue and understanding that patients of all other disease states haven’t stopped suffering over the last two years, vendors are looking to innovation in the space to help keep the paths of communication between pharma brands and target audiences open while remaining both appropriate and effective.
The digitization of healthcare that emerged along with the pandemic served as a start to a unique transformative period, opening doors for digital communication experts, the tech giants, to make an impact. In turn, telehealth and point of care services are becoming more mainstream, such as Microsoft’s developing full suite of virtual health solutions, highlighted in their dedicated “Digital Healthcare Playbook.” [2] As a result of these shifts, healthcare vendors and agency partners alike are feeling the pressure to adapt or risk falling behind the competition. A partnership between EHR company Cerner and ride-sharing behemoth Uber provides non-emergency transportation to patients and draws a new standard of integration. Most importantly, it serves as a prime example of how vendors can evolve to avoid competing directly with big tech, thriving instead by pursuing a collaborative solution.[3] An almost identical partnership between Epic and Lyft further emphasizes the rapid adoption rate of this form of innovation.[4] In sum, partnerships like this are note only business-savvy, but also help vendors maintain relevance within a growing need for functional integration; reaching the right people at the right time with a seamless user flow is exactly what audiences are looking for today.[5]
Similarly, agencies seek innovative tactics to bring the best solutions to their clients but may be failing to evaluate whether these new opportunities are compatible with the integrated campaign approaches today’s audiences require. For example, voice assistant Amazon Alexa is already being used to flag appropriate individuals for marketing. Despite the multitude of case studies speaking to the relevance of this type of household reach however, agency processes for building campaigns rarely consider the ways in which this type of “big name” tactic can be used holistically with other, more established channels in the way the tech giants are considering applying their capabilities to traditional services like 24/7 telehealth sessions, on-demand healthcare visits, and prescription deliveries.[6] For this reason, agencies should consider pivoting from thinking about new and innovative tactics as isolated opportunities that add star power to their campaigns to leveraging an omnichannel lens to see how these tactics fit into their larger campaigns as a whole.
Without evolving the current, conventional approach toward healthcare marketing, both vendors and agencies risk positioning themselves far behind the curve of adoption as solutions rapidly evolve among major players in the space with equally major resources at their disposal. It’s likely, with a small degree of speculation, that these types of solutions will eventually open the doors for more advanced technology, like blockchain, to play a big role in the industry as well. In any case, as healthcare becomes more integrated in everyday life, pharma as a whole will certainly need to adapt its understanding of when, where, and how to reach target audiences going forward in order to set the stage for a significantly more digitized future.
[1] “Healthcare & Pharma See Big Uptick In Digital Advertising Spend,” https://insights.digitalmediasolutions.com/articles/pharma-healthcare-digital-advertising, October 2020
[2] “Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare,” https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/industry/health/microsoft-cloud-for-healthcare
[3] “An integration that lowers the barrier to care” https://businesses.uber.com/cerner.html?_ga=2.22989371.1264410594.1623422092-1045984492.1623422092
[4] “Lyft is Integrating with Epic, a Leading Electronic Health Record,” https://www.lyft.com/blog/posts/lyft-for-epic-healthcare-integration-launch
[5] “User Flows and Their Importance to the Digital Experience,” https://www.tpgi.com/user-flows-and-their-importance-to-the-digital-experience/
[6] “Healthcare made easy,” https://amazon.care/
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Today, digital marketing has carved out a place for itself in virtually every business sector, including healthcare. This omnipresent technology is constantly evolving and presenting users with new capabilities through improved reach and retargeting capabilities. It’s a technology with countless proven uses, yet it still leaves many people wondering—what will be next? Over the past six months, InStep Health’s Chief Product Officer, Dan Wilmer, sat down with a handful of the healthcare’s top media marketing publications to discuss reaching patients, influencing HCPs, and maximizing client ROI. Here are the key takeaways:
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Reaching Patients and Consumers
Digital media can bring meaningful and measurable experiences to patients and consumers at various touchpoints. Getting them educational information about health products and therapies makes patients more knowledgeable about the conditions they are facing. Messaging doesn’t need to be intrusive or immoderate; it simply needs to be helpful, timely, and appropriate to the audience it serves. This is the kind of digital messaging that InStep Health delivers — education, offers, and reminders to help patients make the best decisions for their health.
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Influencing the Influencers
In addition to reaching patients directly, brands must deliver relevant information to doctors, pharmacists, and medical staff where patients are being treated and seeking healthcare advice.
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Mixing Tactile and Digital Exposure for Maximum ROI
InStep Health has seen inordinate results when traditional tactics such as at-shelf displays and physician office table tents are integrated with digital targeting tools. For example, InStep Health frequently creates custom digital targeting audience models for a particular patient sub-population. Then these patients are reached with a client’s brand message throughout an InStep Health program using various digital media outlets aligned to the in-office and in-pharmacy impressions. By putting these messages in different venues and types of media, the audience gets repeated exposure to the education or offer. Seeing customized messages, strategically placed, and shown multiple times, makes people more likely to act.
These are just a few of the concepts from Dan’s recent discussions. And while we cannot say precisely what’s next for digital marketing, when methods are applied strategically and ethically, the benefits are infinite. To get the full interviews, use these direct links:
Beet.TV Data-Driven Marketing Boosts ROI
PharmaVOICE 1-1 with Taren Grom
