Earlier this month, DHC members gathered at AMAG Pharmaceuticals for the DHC Northeast Summit.

Industry leaders and subject matter experts came together to discuss several topics important to innovation in digital health marketing. As with all DHC events, themes for the afternoon were selected through collaboration among a number of key stakeholders.

In this case, the content focused on three areas: Structuring for Innovation in the Post-Mobile Age, The Digital World and How the HCP Fits In, and The Customer Experience.

PART 1: Structuring for Innovation in the Post-Mobile Age

DHC members widely agree, we are firmly within the ‘post-mobile’ age. No longer do marketers discuss a “mobile first” strategy any more than do we still attempt to silo digital as a tactic or channel. While there are still mobile-specific advancements (more on tele-medicine below), we live in an age where the personal screen is ubiquitous. Beyond the concept of “cutting the cord”, personal desktop computer ownership has been on a slow decline over the last decade, while over 95% of Americans own a cellphone. This is the reality in which smart marketers are building their marketing plans.

HCB Health’s Colin Foster walked attendees through several important data points to help better frame the understanding of how this post-mobile age intersects with personal health management, starting with the concept that consumers are engaging with health content at scale, with chronic disease categories presenting both the greatest need and opportunity.

And while the landscape is promising, Colin cited a 2018 Spok study on mobile strategies in healthcare to highlight where the road is still bumpy, with especially big hurdles around hospitals and clinical practices, IT infrastructure & policies. And both data security concerns and user mindset/adoption represent roadblocks that marketers will want to work with their partners to better understand as they seek to offer solutions in the space. What should those solutions look like? Colin recommends a focus on compliance/adherence solutions as the top opportunity, as well as adherence-adjacent items like condition education & management and symptom checkers.

Attendees of the Summit saw some of this in action thanks to a case-study presentation from Ryan Billings, Executive Director, Digital Engagement of AMAG Pharmaceuticals and Robin Sacawa, Senior Program Director at imre Health. Ryan and Robin explained the significant barriers they tackled in launching a tele-medicine program for an AMAG brand, along with a third-party partner.

Echoing much of what Colin shared in terms of the landscape, they expanded on the concept by highlighting the opportunity for tele-medicine as demonstrated by the challenges within a traditional office visit – especially for their product, in the category of women’s sexual health. Office visits are being spent mostly in a waiting room or exam room and very limited face time with a healthcare provider. Combining that with the sensitive nature of the conversation, Ryan explained that they jumped at the chance to try to help patients take the conversation into a virtual space.

Ryan and Robin took attendees along on the patient experience, showing sample educational pieces and activation strategies. Since this particular approach was focused first on educating women about the condition and then converting them to a platform carefully selected to handle the actual virtual doctor visit, they outlined how they navigated internal challenges for this previously uncharted territory. Their advice to other marketers looking to achieve similar tele-health results focused on two fronts:

Step 1: Broaden Your Village

You may need to broaden your “village”. While you might normally engage with teams like MLR, brand and digital, you will want to cast a wider net here. Recommended groups to connect with internally for telehealth include: Head of Cyber Security, Head of Procurement, General Counsel, Outside Counsel, Chief Compliance Officer, and Chief Commercial Officer.

And when you look to outside tele-health partners, make sure there’s significant expertise around both customer experience (mobile-friendly, chat functionality, push notifications, secure email functionality etc.) and operational + compliance criteria (HIPPA compliance, platform integration, technology maintenance, speed to market, implementation/level of support etc).

Step 2: Educate Your Audience

Start by educating your audience. Help them understand how tele-health works, what it costs, how credentialed the healthcare provider is, and how their privacy is ensured. Once you’ve achieved the education, then you can convert them by retargeting patient populations who have already had a touchpoint your unbranded or branded properties.

And to marketers who are ready to put this advice into action, Ryan and Robin had three tips:

PART 2: The Digital World and How Healthcare Players Fit In

As the healthcare provider/patient pieces of a brand’s marketing strategy becomes increasingly intertwined, it is imperative that consumer-focused marketers understand the physician landscape (and vice-versa). Attendees of the May Summit were provided an up-to-the-minute look into the “Digital Day of an HCP”, courtesy of Jon Sepp, Senior Director of SERMO. Jon shared recent results of a survey of SERMO members (featuring over 1 million HCPs, as a global physicians-only social network), focusing on how HCPs leverage technology in their day-to-day lives, including TV, social media, and practice tools.

And while it is clear that physicians appreciate the benefits of technology (free quality info & evidence readily available, ease of use, access to peers etc) they have concerns about whether it’s driving things like increased documentation and paperwork, distractions/time waste, the “work is everywhere” problem, and even whether the data they see is accurate. Their concerns don’t stop with the pervasive presence of tech in their lives; when asked about DTC ads on TV 72% said pharma advertises there “too much” and almost the same number (71%) said these same ads are “not useful for their professional lives”.

The question becomes, is the attitude the same towards digitally-served tools? While 73% say that they have to frequently clear up misinformation brought in by patients thanks to “Dr. Google”, they are finding frequent assistance from digital tools within the practice. The most utilized online tool for HCPs was medical research support (61%), while others like secure text messaging (23%) and telehealth (14%) not yet showing wide-spread adoption.

Colin Foster, HCB Health, provided additional insights into doctor attitudes towards mobile health support for adherence, noting that 93% of doctors say mobile apps can enhance the quality of patient health. Top reasons cited included rural-based MDs who can use telehealth apps, opportunity to use apps to improve physician efficiency by streamlining data entry, and mobile health solutions providing decision-support + improving communication between specialists/care team.

In addition to the insights from the SERMO network, the DHC also convened a panel of HCP marketing experts to further discuss both present challenges and opportunities for innovation. The panel included:

The panelists were quick to agree that one of the central challenges speeding adoption of new approaches is the significant changes in the landscape. As explained by Azita McDermott, “one of the trends that continues in the HCP landscape is physicians’ time is crowded. They don’t have time to spend with their own patients, much less spend with our sales reps. This is an area where digital channels really helps us.” Doug Rutz of MNG Health expounded on the challenge, saying “the physician time is of the essence, but in parallel, we’re seeing more and more information available and digestible, yet the time to actually be able to get through it is a common complaint from physicians. They just don’t have the time to digest it.”

The panelists were also presented with recent research conducted by the DHC which indicated that while available data now gives marketers the ability to target doctors on a very granular level, the messaging innovation hasn’t caught up. When asked how they felt about that judgement, the panelists offered some push-back. Azita offered the perspective of a senior marketer building digital HCP eco-systems.

“The difficulty in delivering truly personalized messages is limited resources, especially on our side in the pharma world.  How do we balance that personalization of the content in all channels? How do we augment what the field is messaging for example, with HCP segments, and then emulate that online? You could potentially look at the prioritization of messages versus for HCP segments in digital assets to balance your resources.”

~ Azita McDermott

Donald Hanson of Intouch agreed with her analysis “it’s not only the priority; it’s also how really different are those messages? Does that difference matter to spark change for that physician? Really having a critical eye on those differences to make sure that they’re going to be worth the resource allocation.”

When digging into the idea that data targeting for physicians has reached the desired level of sophistication, the panel challenged the audience to consider several things:

Improve How We Combine Data

We can still improve how we collate and combine HCP data that’s been captured online, especially when considering the idea predictive and prescriptive analytics, in order to get an even more holistic view of HCP behavior. It’s important to understand and critically evaluated how the data is stored, who accesses it, and what they do with it. And in organizations where data is largely siloed, a useful exercise may be to explore the potential benefits of a data lake.

Identify Key Business Questions

Identifying what your key business questions are will help you better identify how to pull data and in what format you need to provide it in. Aligning on that concept early internally is key – be strategic upstream, then use the data to inform. The data is there, so make sure you are asking it the right questions.

Strive for Innovation

Strive for innovation that will allow you to get ahead with a segmented message using data, customizing it, and finding the balance between promotion and value to the physician: try to build the relationship. Start with the content and make sure you’re providing that red thread to your HCPs to speak your same language.

Part 3: The Customer Experience

Much of what pharmaceutical marketers find themselves being asked is not “who in pharma is doing it best” but rather “where has [insert major consumer brand]