Physicians, patients and everyone else in the world now embrace Social media engagement/ digital tools to learn and connect with one another. In response to this interest in digital engagement, the pharmaceutical industry must embrace commercial strategies that reach, appeal to and educate an ever-expanding online audience.
The healthcare profession is now going digital, following retail, financial and other services, to make shopping and marketing an anytime, anywhere experience but merely presenting medical and product data on an iPad or tablet to clinicians is simply not enough anymore. Pharmaceutical companies must go beyond the static webpage or PowerPoint presentation, and utilize tools and channels physicians, patients and caregivers use to confirm what they think they already know. As with marketers in other industries, pharma must reallocate resources away from traditional television and print ads and towards digital marketing.
In many ways, communication between the pharmaceutical industry and healthcare providers (HCPs) is mired in 20th century methods. In fact, 67% of pharma materials are delivered to physicians via traditional channels, including sales reps, MSLs, direct mail, publications, speaker programs, ad boards and other tried-and-true approaches.
And there’s some compelling rationale to this. The nature of the pharma industry lends itself to face-to-face (F2F) communication between physicians and reps. In addition, although the FDA has clarified many of the issues surrounding industry use of social media platforms, uncertainty lingers and the specter of regulatory oversight influences every interaction.
Traditional approaches, particularly F2F interactions between reps and physicians, have value and are a critical and necessary part of discussing many aspects of healthcare and various therapies. However, adding Social media engagement to the mix would provide opportunities for greater physician engagement, while responding to an unmet demand. Case in point: 65% of physicians have expressed interest in engaging with pharma via social media for clinical data.
Patients are becoming less dependent on doctors for advice and more willing to take control over their own health, which means they would be more accepting of Social media engagement for patients. The vast amount of health information on the internet and in apps empowers patients, as does the huge assortment of health and fitness wearables, such as Apple Watch and FitBit. In fact, there are more than 165,000 mobile health applications, or mHealth apps, available to consumers.
This availability of healthcare technology gives patients more confidence in taking control of their own healthcare. In one survey, more than 85 percent of patients felt confident in their ability to take care of their health and knew how to access resources online. Furthermore, patients are more amenable to evaluating different healthcare products and services because they bear a growing proportion of the costs. Digital engagement that allows pharmaceutical companies and other healthcare professionals to engage with patients who are evaluating different products will be increasingly essential to the success of a pharma company’s commercial model.
Medical professionals – and internet users – frequently engage in confirmation bias, which is the inclination to seek the opinion of others to confirm what the individual thinks is true. Clinicians often ask for confirmation from their peers and other thought leaders when making a difficult medical diagnosis, for example, while patients seek confirmation from their physicians, other patients and advocacy groups when trying to understand a disease, procedure, or medication.
Patients used to rely on the knowledge of their doctors and pharmacists when it came to healthcare and, especially, prescriptions. These patients would dutifully fill the prescription and take it as directed, rarely engaging the prescriber or anyone else in a conversation about the medication.
