Group 8020 Think It. Do It.
The Nielsen Company reported overall online video usage and top online brands ranked by video streams for August 2009. Year-over-year, unique viewers, total streams, streams per viewer and time per viewer were up, led by a 41 percent growth in total streams.
How are you using video on your site?
You’ve always known that patient education was important, but did you know it also makes excellent business sense? Healthcare Finance News reports that:
Patients who have a clear understanding of their after-hospital care instructions are 30 percent less likely to be readmitted or visit the emergency department than patients who lack this information.
The data comes from a new study funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and was first reported in Annals of Internal Medicine. Findings point to an opportunity for a win-win situation between pharma and hospitals.
Currently, one in five patients has a complication or an adverse event, such as a drug interaction, after being discharged from the hospital. The study reveals that by following the “RED” protocol – Re-Engineered Hospital Program - hospitals can reduce readmissions by 30% at an average savings of $412 per patient. The secret is to better communicate to patients their after-hospital care.
A pharmaceutical product with high hospital usage could compete more aggressively on price when it has data demonstrating lower TOTAL costs. These costs include longitudinal data like after hospital care as well. But how do you get that kind of data? In three straight-forward steps.
This kind of solution would require especially clever communicators; those who can map out a successful strategy that spans multiple financial quarters. These kind of thinkers would be savvy enough to pull it off and make it pay for itself. For example, a well-constructed deal could derive a revenue stream by licensing the co-produced patient education media to stock photo agencies like Corbis, or by repackaging the educational media for use at other sponors’ hospitals.
It’s a win-win-win situation. Patients win with fewer complications and readmissions. Hospitals win by demonstrating quality performance and attracting more, better-insured patients. And Pharma wins both formulary status and pharmacoeconomic data for future efforts.
So the question is, who wants to give it a try?
Augmented Reality is the process of superimposing metadata onto a video feed. When that video feed comes from a smart device like Android or the iPhone things get interesting. The technology marries GPS, local maps, a digital compass and specialty “data layers” to produce real time images featuring clickable highlights for shopping, banking, transportation and other information.
One of the quickest ways to grok augmented reality is with this short video clip by Layar, a Dutch company producing a catalog of some 80+ datasets and “the world’s first mobile augmented reality browser.” Read the rest of this entry »
When you work in pharma communications and cannot email, blog or write you are pretty much dead in the water. In August I got Lyme Disease and for about a month lost the ability to read, yet still consider myself lucky. From hallucinatory fever to diagnosis I sped along at a zippy clip of just four weeks. That included a full Saturday in the overflowing halls of a New York emergency room spent staring at my sneakers (shown right)
There’s little doubt that the U.S. health care system is truly broken. If you are lucky enough to work in health care then you already know enough to rocket your way through the system. You can find appropriate treatment faster than the next person. But what about everyone else? When you cannot advocate your own medical needs you are left to rely upon the kindness of strangers.
I found information gathering frustrating as a new “non-reader.” Blurred vision and headaches drove me to seek out information in both audio and video format. Good patient education that didn’t rely upon reading tiny type was hard to come by.
Modern learning theory shows us that there are also visual, auditory and kinetic learners well represented in the general population. So why not reach out to multiple patient populations in media that makes sense for their mileu? Here’s a list of 7 ideas to jump your own thinking:
Click to learn more about online video patient education
Jonathan Richman is a respected e-marketer and the author of Dose of Digital blog, in which he writes there is a Myth of Adverse Event Reporting in pharma marketing. Drawing upon a Nielsen Study which found that only 1 in 500 postings on the Yahoo Health discussion boards met the full criteria for adverse event reporting, pharma may in fact be over-sensitized to the issue.
Assuming that the Nielsen study is statistically significant (is a sample size of 500 from Yahoo sufficient?) then what resources would be required to audit a message board with high volume traffic?
ADHD Message Boards is a site devoted to the discussion of attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder. A particularly popular forum is Parents of ADHD Children with 105,938 posts as of July 2009. Applying the Nielsen metric of 1/500 would yield 211 reportable adverse events.
Assuming an AER auditor could review 2 messages a minute, auditing this board would require 882 person hours – or 110 person days – over the life of the board. This would be an almost full time job were it not for the fact that ADHD Message Boards do not feature personally identifiable information (curiously, the site lacks both a privacy policy and a terms of use statement) so any reporting obligations on this site would be obviated by lack of an identifiable patient and identifiable reporter.
Facebook, however, is a completely different story, with members’ identifiable information including a first and last name, an email address, and often a phone number on the user’s “info” tab.
As of July 2009, McNeil Pediatric’s ADHD Moms page on Facebook counted 8,505 members. Assuming 1 post per member multiplied by the “Nielsen coefficient” would yield a possible 17 adverse events, requiring 70 person hours – or 8.8 person days – of monitoring. Of course not every member would post, and some members would post more than once, so these estimates are just back of the envelope calculations. This scenario is staffable.
Richman’s blog post suggests that “adverse events are nothing more than negative reviews” and compares them to reviews for computer products.
For example, someone ranks a product 1-star and says “this didn’t work on my Mac.” Well, if you have a PC, you aren’t worried. Simple example, but you see how it works.
I would agree with him, but only up to a certain point. When making a purchasing decision for a discretionary product, I am willing to accept that “Dave from Des Moines” or “Sally from San Diego” might be qualified to review a new piece of software or a computer peripheral.
But are they qualified to provide accurate information about prescription drugs beyond their own experience? Unless they are willing to also share their age, weight, lifestyle, diet and exercise regime, medical history and enumerate any other medications they are also taking, I say “no.” There are too many confounding variables for me to believe there would be much, if any objectivity.
Television viewership is down. Newspaper and magazine readership is down. Follow the eyeballs and you end up on the Internet. DTC spending was down 18% last year. Follow the money and you find a lot of people scrambling to recapture a portion of that DTC spend by reallocating budget to social media. There’s some great work out there done by stellar agencies, but…
Social media is merely a platform, not an ends onto itself. So while Richman may be on to something with his “myth of adverse event reporting” the real question remains:
What evidence is there that patients want a dialogue with a pharmaceutical company given their lack of trust in the industry at large?
Listening without engaging may not be glamorous. It may not recapture the entire DTC spend. But given the recession, $80 Billion in concessions to the federal government, and the need to maintain a low profile until health care reform legislation is hammered out, what’s wrong with using social media as a distribution platform and skipping the public dialogue altogether?