The DHC Summit at Sanofi on May 22nd was full of great thinkers, great insights, and great conversations.  Content topics including the life of the physician and how we can message (and measure) effectively with EHRs, latest approaches to digital and video strategies, what we can learn from the social media landscape, and how to operationalize innovation ideas effectively.

Dan Stein, SVP, Crossix spoke on the innovation opportunities for measurement through leveraging the infrastructure built to support consumer targeting in order to reach  physicians, using a data management platform (DMP) or demand side platform (DSP).

“Physicians are consumers and you can treat them as people. So what’s very easy to do with targeting right now is to take an NPI list, work with an onboarding partner and reach or find them. It’s a very exciting time.”

Tricia Brown, Executive Director, US Marketing, Merck inspired listeners to keep up the hard work of creating an internal culture that allows for best possible application and use of available technology.

“I think we have to think very strategically about video. It’s a powerful – powerful medium. We’ve done some good things – we need to do a lot more. We need guidance on how to do it well. We need to be on the top of cutting edge things like interactive video. We need to bring education into the organization. We need to help brand marketers understand it and do it well. We need to not have it be a tactic but have it be a really incremental part of your communication strategy.”

Joe Shields, Senior Director of Global Strategy and Innovation at AstraZeneca, gave fellow DHC members an encouraging and practical roadmap to getting serious about focusing internal efforts in order to design patient services that truly scale.

“Companies need digital product managers who understand software development and ongoing support and improvement.  They need internal IT professionals or outsourced partners that really understand what it means to run a service business in addition to a product business. The industry is extremely good at scaling R&D, manufacturing and sales, for example. We also need to get extremely good at scaling digital therapeutics and digital support programs.”