Pharma: Trends in e-detailing

To whom does pharma turn when facing cutting-edge research challenges such as designing algorithms to comb unstructured EHR data hunting for undiagnosed pa

Brand: Pristiq

Owner: Pfizer

Duration: September 2016, ongoing

There are more than 165,000 health apps, according to a 2015 IMS Health report. Of the th

Marketers are taking to Facebook Live en masse, but can live social video work as a marketing tool for pharma? Yes, experts say—and it might be easier than expected.

The easier-than-expected part is that pharma marketers can and should build on live content they already use. For instance, pharma companies could use Facebook Live to stream conference speeches by key opinion leaders with added interactive elements, such as a question-and-answer session after.

The recent Novartis Facebook Live chat with Queen Latifah about heart disease (read “Novartis, Queen Latifah, & American Heart Association Team Up on Facebook Live Broadcast”; http://sco.lt/6caCxN) is another good example of a “safe” experiment where pharma can engage with patients and caregivers through disease awareness and community building,said Dave Wieneke, digital strategy practice director at Connective DX.. Patient stories in general are a good use of Facebook Live in both the initial broadcasting and in the ability to access those authentic social stories later, said Wieneke.

Another bonus to Facebook Live is audience building. During any particular session, viewers can click to follow all future Live sessions from the marketer.

In general healthcare, Wieneke noted several hospitals including the Mayo Clinic, UNC Healthcare and Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin successfully using Facebook Live with live-streaming events such as “ask a doctor” sessions, lectures, fundraisers, and guided tours. UNC Healthcare, in fact, reported results of its Facebook Live streaming that included a 480% increase in daily interactions and a 75% increase of page likes in the first six months. One of its live chats about the Affordable Care Act has been replayed more than 2,000 times.

The risks, which pharma companies tend to fall back on when it comes to new forms of media, are more about being live than the use of video. Potential comments made during interactive sessions around off-label use, incorrect information, or the reporting of an adverse event, for example, are the same risks as at any live event, said Wieneke.

“We don’t want to miss the train of digital health” is a phrase I often hear from pharmaceutical companies. However, there are no trains to catch anymore. Disruptive healthcare trends are the futuristic spaceships many pharma companies don’t even see flying above them. If pharma doesn’t prepare for the coming waves of change, it won’t …

The global prescription pharmaceuticals market was estimated to be USD 1,114 billion in 2015. The market is mature and highly consolidated. The top-10 pharmaceutical companies in this market had share of over 30% in 2015. These companies are large and established organizations that are primarily located in U.S. and Europe. They offer drug products for…

Sales reps are now more likely to engage with physicians through nonpersonal promotion than in-person visits with doctors at their offices, a ZS report finds.

mHealth apps might not be all they’re chalked up to be, especially in the realm of patient engagement and chronic disease management.

In a data brief published by the Commonwealth Fund, researchers explain how most mHealth apps have low design quality, making them essentially unusable for many patients.

The researchers, led by Urmimala Sarkar, MD, MPH, conducted an observational analysis using 11 high-rated diabetes, depression, and caregiver apps. The team asked 26 patient and caregiver participants to complete a set of tasks intended to indicate the app usability.

Overall, these apps showed significant interface design problems. The buttons were not large enough for patients, and most apps lacked instructions for easier navigation.

The apps also lacked contextual information explaining to patients why certain data entry points were important.

Limited patient education often keeps patients from fully understanding their chronic illnesses, thus keeping them from full engagement. When the tested apps did not explain to diabetics why they may want to review a past meal, the apps kept those patients from fully understanding the implications of their disease.

Drug prices will jump by 12 percent in 2017 adding to high medical costs

Like in most industries, players in the pharmaceutical world get a boost when customers the world over feel that they are innovators, act responsibly and are, generally speaking, a force for good. Recently a survey was published scoring exactly how good people in developed countries all over the world feel about big pharma.

How pharma distributes information to doctors is changing as rapidly as how doctors prefer to receive and process such information.

From PPC ads to social network advertising, deciding which type of paid digital advertising to use for your next healthcare marketing campaign can be a challenge.

This guide covers the three most important types of paid digital advertising to help you decide which is right for your marketing needs:

PPC ads are a type of advertising in which advertisers pay a fee onlywhen someone clicks on their ads. Search engine advertising, like Google AdWords, is one of the most popular types of PPC ads.

If your practice doesn’t rank highly in Google search engine results, PPC ads can help close the gap.

Organic search engine optimization takes time. PPC ads provide immediate results. PPC ads like Google AdWords also provide a plethora of digital data about the ad’s performance and keyword success.

You can use this feedback to adjust your ad’s message, the time of day the ad is shown, and narrow down the geographic region. For example, let’s say your urgent care practice wants to reach more mothers searching for urgent care for their children.

Using feedback from the campaign you’ll be able to narrow down which keyword phrases are most popular with your target audience (e.g., “urgent care children” versus “urgent care “pediatrician”) and adjust your campaign accordingly for maximum ROI.

Retargeting is a type of advertising that utilizes “cookie-based technology” to track target customers who click on one of your paid ads or visits a specific page on your website.

You place a piece of code on your website that drops an anonymous browser cookie. Later, when your visitor browses other websites, the cookie will tell your retargeting provider to show an ad for your healthcare practice.

Retargeting is highly effective since it focuses your advertising spend on potential patients who have already demonstrated an interest in your practice.

For most websites, only 2 percent of visitors convert into customers, clients or patients;retargeting allows you to stay in touch with the other 98 percent. Retargeting is great for advertising campaigns with KPIs like new patient online appointments or sign-ups for a blood drive event.

If a potential patient or donor visits the sign-up page but fails to submit the form, you can use retargeting to continue advertising to the prospective patient in an effort to bring him or her back to your website and complete the sign-up form

With Facebook’s estimated social media advertising predicted to top $11 billion in revenue by 2017, according to the Marketing Tech Blog, social network advertising is big business. That’s in part because social network advertising allows businesses, including healthcare providers, to find new potential clients, customers, and patients by using social network user’s own information to identify possible interest.

Rather than relying on keyword searches to identify user intent, social media advertising can build your brand awareness with prospective patients before they even begin to search.

While paid search (e.g., PPC ads) is great for driving visitors to your website based on search intent, what if no one ever searches for your search terms, or if the most effective search terms are too expensive for your practice to bid upon?

What if you just want to build brand awareness around your healthcare practice? In both cases, social network advertising is the best option since it allows for advanced targeting, provides reliable conversion tracking, and works equally great on mobile devices and desktops.

You can target prospective patients by interest, behavior, connections, and “lookalikes” (reaching new people who have the same profile characteristics as people who already care about your business)

Big pharmaceutical companies have found replacements for the army of sales representatives they've laid off in recent years: digital sales tools that seek to sell doctors on drugs without the intrusion of an office visit

"You can't eat the orange and throw the peel away - a man is not a piece of fruit," says Willy Loman in Act 2 of Death of a Salesman. Today, many pharma sales reps may be feeling like tossed peeled fruit.

eDetailing in one form or another seems to be making a comeback since the recession hit the drug industry in 2007 and 2008 (see chart on right). I'm not really sure which is the "chicken" and which is the "egg"; ie, whether an uptick in adoption of eDetailing technology lead to the recent layoff of pharma reps or if reps were laid off because of the economy and subsequently replaced by machines.

Despite the title of this post, reports of the death of pharma "salesmen" may be somewhat exaggerated and not all sales reps can be replaced by machines.

Johnson & Johnson Innovation LLC (JJI) announced the creation of the Center for Device Innovation at Texas Medical Center (CDI @ TMC), a broad, new collaboration between JJI and TMC that aims to accelerate end-to-end development of breakthrough medical devices.

Pharmacy benefit managers are excluding more therapies from their plans, limiting treatment options for patients. Discover why this approach is a misguided.