Summary
Summary
Marketing and customer engagement strategies experienced a major disruption in 2020. Brands and organizations were forced to launch, replace, or quickly evolve their strategies over the past year to keep pace with the combination of technology, market, and economic forces in play. DHC Advisory Board Member Dale Cooke and DHC Group Co-Founder Mark Bard brought together experts to discuss a few of the coming trends for health and pharma HCP & Patient Marketing during the March 2021 DIA’s Advertising and Promotion Regulatory Affairs Conference.
Highlights from Experts
CEO
eHealthcare Solutions
The Future of HCP Marketing
- Digital Transformation and a shift to digital media is underway at pharma. The pace is fast and the stakes are high, as Pharma-Physician communication channels are shifting rapidly
- The silver lining to COVID has been a resurgence in Pharma’s reputation (40% of American’s have a more positive view of Pharma). Pharma needs to capitalize on this and build the momentum. Pharma needs ask, “What would Amazon do” and think about customer service and relevance through digital channels; Servicing their customer with on-demand content in the right place, at the right time, when they have questions or concerns.
- The effectiveness of sales reps needs to be better understood in light of COVID, the adoption of telemedicine (and remote work for physicians), and physicians changing needs and desires for information. HCP native advertising, serving targeted relevant content to the right audience, at the right moment, when they are in the right mindset is both an NPP supplement to rep coverage and delivers relevance Amazon-style.
- Pharma & their agencies need to have a “Plan B” in the event that the deprecation of the 3rd party cookie is seriously disruptive to programmatic advertising, measurement and attribution.
CCO
Mymee
The FUTURE of DIgital Health
Digital health as a concept is very broad and can include artificial intelligence, clinical trials, virtual reality and the like. For the discussion during this workshop on future trends, “digital health” was defined as one of three main areas:
- Digital medicines: where the product is combined with a digital technology to create something like a tracking pill
- Digital therapeutics: standalone treatments prescription where you use digital health tools such as tracking or behavioral modification apps
- Digital care programs: where there is a human element in concert with other digital health pieces. In this case, there is typically a focus on reversing the symptoms of disease not actually treating disease.
Current Challenges to Broad Adoption of Digital Health:
- Lack of insurance coverage for digital therapeutics
- Compliance and digital infrastructure can struggle to keep pace as the innovation moves quickly
The Opportunities:
- Connecting the ecosystem of the connected devices, actually generating patient-reported outcomes, getting remote patient monitoring back to the physician
- Going forward, this will be healthcare and how it’s administered. Integration of [PRO] tools, real-world evidence tools, monitoring tools is where we’re going to be able to get that connected home, service at home patient experience
How To Get There:
- Focus on the Customer Experience
“Don’t forget customer experience. It’s amazing how much we end up in a different path not thinking about UX, not testing things with the right folks, not meeting customers where they are, not understanding that people have an expectation now that Amazon Prime delivers things in a certain time, and so you can’t take a week and a half to ship them something. That CX work is so important. It’s for the growth of pharma products but also digital health. I would say make sure you always focus on that.”
CRO
Everyday Health Consumer Group
Trends in Addressing Patient Health Inequities: Addressing Racial Bias and Systemic Racism
Bias, discrimination, and racism, along with socioeconomic factors, have long impacted the health of Black and brown communities in America, creating a cyclical pattern from which it can be hard to escape. The healthcare industry can only improve outcomes by first recognizing and highlighting the deep inequities and barriers to treatment in the American healthcare system. Many BIPOC, and in particular Black Americans, have historically been distrustful of the medical establishment due to unfair and unethical treatments and experimentation in the past.
In order to transform the healthcare system, we should be prepared to be asked and to answer, as healthcare communicators, how are we addressing deep inequities and barriers to treatment to improve outcomes. Recognizing the impact and expressing empathy alone is not enough.
The first steps include:
- Listen to the Community
- Do the Research
- Create Actionable Steps and a Culture of Accountability
What does Action and Accountability look like?
- Dedicate resources to research and track the experience in marginalized communities
- Prioritize the inclusion of BIPOC patients in clinical trials
- Diversify staff to give BIPOC a voice in the system
- Collaborate with medical schools or graduate science at historically black colleges
- Listen to the community and adjust language in communications
- Recognize the importance of representation in communications
- Raise disease awareness and education among medically marginalized populations