A healthy market opportunity
The only certainties in life are death and taxes, and avoiding death by seeking health information online has proved a lot more popular than using Internet info to avoid taxes, as Simon van Wyk writes.
The rise of digital in all its forms – Internet, mobile, social media, online video – has fuelled the shift from selling and marketing products to selling and marketing services, as consumers have replaced manufacturers at the centre of the marketing universe.
Everything from product development to promotion to post-purchase evaluation is today built around understanding and meeting customer needs.
This is abundantly apparent in an area like healthcare. From a product-focused sector based solely on convincing doctors to prescribe medications based on scientific evidence (and a few educational dinners), drugmakers are building portfolios of services aimed at patients and doctors around their brands, helping healthcare professionals tackle issues like patient compliance and health education as direct promotion takes a back seat.
Big numbers
I discussed the implications of these trends with healthcare digital strategist (and HotHouse content producer) Ray Welling in this month’s HotHouse podcast. And while the growth of online generally as a medium and a marketing tool has been impressive, the numbers for healthcare are truly staggering.
The Internet has now become the top resource for health questions and concerns – according to the latest Google stats, 65% of people look online for health info, compared to only about 50% who talk to their GP and 37% for friends and relatives. Meanwhile, 75% of people research symptoms online before visiting their doctor, while 70% of them research online after they’ve been prescribed a medication, but before they start taking it.
Searches on major health conditions such as cancer, diabetes and pain management rose by 25% on average in 2010 – and they were already high compared to searches on other topics. Nearly 80% of health consumers do something offline as a direct result of their online research, from talking to their doctor (49%) to changing their behavior (27%) to trying an alternative treatment (16%).
Mobile searches (from either a smartphone or a tablet), which are already growing quickly (more than doubled their share of searches in 2010 to 15%), are increasing even more quickly for healthcare topics. Branded mobile health queries rose by 1400% from 2008 to 2011. Meanwhile, 48% of consumers want healthcare or medical related content on phones in the next 12 months.
The fact that these numbers keep growing shows that it’s working: the Internet helps people make better health choices. This represents a clear opportunity for health marketers to provide credible, trusted information for patients and healthcare professionals.
Health monitor in your pocket
But websites and social media aren’t the only digital opportunities for health marketers. The rise in mobile use (particularly smartphones) is tailor-made for the development of useful applications for maintaining and improving health.
Investments by pharmaceutical companies in smartphone apps (along with social media platforms and wireless devices such as iPads) grew 78% in 2010, according to Ernst & Young’s Pharma 3.0 global pharmaceutical report.
Andrew Tolve writes in the eyeforpharma blog: “A properly designed app – be it a medication tracker, a disease calculator, an educational catalogue, or a patient diary – can improve the lives of patients and physicians and thus increase customer collaboration.
“At the same time, a well-designed app in the hands of sales reps and marketers can maximize organizational efficiency and create competitive advantage when it comes to selling drugs.”
The iPhone in particular is loaded with sensors that can be adapted in ways that can turn your phone into a blood pressure or blood glucose monitor, a stethoscope or even an ECG machine. There are already some apps available that make use of these capabilities, as well as a growing number of apps that encourage patients to manually input data to monitor their diabetes, fertility and cardiovascular health.
With stats showing that people who use in-home monitoring devices have 50% fewer problems related to their condition, apps are proving to be a simple way to promote better health and save on hospitalization and drug costs.
The key is to be able to provide personalized info simply and in an actionable way. Thomas Goetz, medical editor for Wired, calls this approach “information with feeling”. The example he uses to explain the concept is the speed meters used in some road construction zones – the ones that say “the speed limit is 40kmh; you are going 58kmh, PLEASE SLOW DOWN”.
Goetz says this type of approach, and not the current health management approach of lecturing people about what they should/should not be doing, has a much stronger positive effect on behaviour.
Specific, personalized information, he says, creates a connection through relevance, which leads to choices, and finally to action.
Keeping compliant
There’s a no-brainer when it comes to opportunities presented by consumer health mobile apps – patient compliance.
As Ray Welling says, “There’s quite a wide spectrum on compliance, and it relates to understanding the impact of staying on your medication. Women taking the Pill have 95% compliance, because if you miss taking it, you know exactly what will happen and how quickly.
“At the other end of the scale, compliance rates for chronic conditions such as congestive heart failure, diabetes and glaucoma, where you can’t really see the difference day to day, are down around 40% – although in the case of glaucoma, this increases to nearly 60% once you’ve lost sight in one eye!”
Mobile apps are already making big strides in this area. The format of apps lends itself to compiling information and feeding it back to you in a way that gives you personalized advice on your health or your medical condition. There are scores of apps that have been developed to track weight, diabetes-related info, fertility, etc.
The key, according to Ray, is to “provide an app that is actually useful, not gimmicky, and the less information the patient (or healthcare professional) has to input manually, the better.”
The professional side
With all these opportunities on the patient side, healthcare marketers, particularly in Australia where direct to consumer advertising is not allowed, shouldn’t forget their traditional market: healthcare professionals.
Stats are showing that doctors are among the most likely demographic to own a smartphone: 75% of US physicians were using one last year. And they’re using multiple devices; anecdotal evidence points to a very high take-up of tablet devices such as the iPad, as well.
As a result, one of the most popular apps in the iTunes store is the Medscape medical news app, which has more than 700,000 users.
This means healthcare professionals have a high expectation for interactivity in information, which is putting pressure on pharmaceutical companies to supplement their traditional paper-based detail aids with tablet-based animations, videos and interactive clinical data, known as e-detailing.
Ray Welling points out that patient-based web information and apps, as well as e-detailing, are fairly undeveloped areas in the Australian market. “Most of the most-trafficked health websites for Australian audiences are American or European health info portals. There’s a real need for credible, Australian-based information on a variety of health conditions. Also, Australian pharma companies have been slow to embrace e-detailing. There’s a lot of room for growth in both of these areas.”
Tags: e-detailing, health, health marketers, healthcare, Healthcare Apps, Medscape, Medscape medical news app, ray welling, smartphone apps
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