We are post-industrial, in the information age, living the digital life, immersed in data, the zeitgeist being grounded in human empowerment. How does this affect healthcare marketing and engagement?

Watch our video – we’ll show you how…

All of the trends, hypes and buzzwords that you are hearing have common features – they are moving us towards a people-centric approach, based upon individual needs, not the old, industrial mass approximations of needs. For business, this means placing people (not products) at the centre of everything, and this requires a holistic viewpoint.

To be truly holistic we need to get the big picture, and integrate the component parts which will include:

• Business integration – the de-siloing of brands and operational units, creating consistency and efficiencies, sharing culture, understanding and direction
• Data and reporting integration – the harmonisation and sharing of business and customer intelligence, to generate more and better actionable insights, for better services and performance
• Integration of products, services and marketing – the blurring of the lines, the art of co-created and holistic service design

Our GLOBALHealthPR office in the UK (Aurora) has an expert team that specialise in helping clients integrate their marketing communications activities. Aurora has created a free-to-use online assessment tool (IMC Index Lite) that takes about five minutes to complete and provides an individualised commentary on how integrated activities are provides with tips for improvement.

Click here to give it a try.

The post The World Has Changed – How Does This Impact the World of Healthcare? appeared first on GLOBALHealthPR.

Activating the public’s voice in healthcare priority setting intuitively makes sense, but can be laden with challenges and risks marginalising those voices that most need to be heard. Surely these aren’t reasons for not trying?

Theorists see a number of benefits in involving the public in healthcare priority setting and perhaps the one that resonates the most with me is instrumental benefit – engaging the public can help identify key social value considerations that should shape policy. After all, a policy should complement the opinions of the public it serves.

Will the public engage when we ask them questions like, “what principles should your health provider work to when serving your community?” and “what outcomes do you expect from your health service and deem most important?” Will they even know how to respond? Will the responses be robust, reliable, valid, generalisable or any other measure we care to apply to conclude whether the data set presents value to decision making or not? And if we can’t agree an answer to these questions at the outset, why should we even start?

Hierarchies of data and levels of analysis have featured in human endeavours since the beginning – the warning cry of an alpha-male caused more commotion among apes than the alerts of a junior, a multi-centre study with replicable results presents a more attractive offering than a qualitative interview for many researchers. Yet should the junior monkey be ignored or the insights from the interview be considered any less pertinent? As the socialisation of media continues unabated and society starts to explore the notion of the quantified self and big data, will our hierarchies of information change?

Pondering these questions, America Speaks provides a 19 year long case study of how technology and a bit of “out of the box” thinking can be used to get the public to air their views and generate engagement with “big debates”. Using technology to facilitate “uber town hall meetings” across the US, the programme has harnessed the public’s voices to assist policy decision-making. Imagine what could be possible as we go into the era of 4G and the coming-of-age of Generation Wifi – the willingness and ability of the public to share its opinions could be limitless!

As for hierarchies of data, the world of clinical trials is seeing a move towards real world data, highlighting a change in classical notions of data value. Social-research methodologies such as the citizen jury exist that can be used to guide the process of insight collection and deliberation on complex topics. I for one can imagine using the citizen jury format to facilitate a set of tweet-ups on a pertinent topic such as the impending obesity time bomb or the continuation of full health services for smokers.

The potential for the public to add value to the process of healthcare priority setting was highlighted by Litva et al. in 2002 and the world has changed significantly since then – more things are possible than ever before. However, when considering this at a global level, we really need to take into account cultural differences and how the general public in different countries voice their views. What are the challenges faced by your country? How can we address these in attempting to stimulate debate and gathering data about healthcare needs across the globe?

The post We Hate Data and Dialogue? appeared first on GLOBALHealthPR.

A word from Aurora, goddess of the dawn

I like to think of multichannel marketing in terms of Greek mythology; it is the mythical beast that must be tamed or slayed, if the hero is to survive.

But which damn beast?

Proteus, the shape-shifter that can adopt many forms, or Hydra, the many-headed serpent – cut one off, two grow back – and don’t forget the Sirens, who lure you into the sea with their hypnotic song, to a watery death.

Approaching multichannel I’ve seen many a hero petrified, as if under the gaze of Medusa, the gorgon.

My favourite comparison however is not a beast, but the Underworld itself – a mysterious place we enter after death – we must pay the ferryman, cross the river Styx and face Cerberus, the three headed giant hound. And what are the three heads on that gnarly beast?

1. The first is called Strategyos – it is robust, and has the power of foresight and far-sight
2. The second is Adoptionikos – it is a great sage and teacher, skilled in the ways of The Underworld, and knowledgeable of human desires and motives
3. The third is Implementationillion – it was the architect of The Underworld, building it with its own paws, keeping a watchful red eye on its creation and the inhabitants, for all eternity

However, let’s get back to present day – without excellent strategy, stakeholder adoption and precision implementation, pharma will struggle to engage the customer and deliver on business objectives, revenues and better health outcomes.

An excellent multichannel strategy will:

• Engage customers with the right content, in the right place, at the right time
• Optimise the conversation across different touchpoints, and in a flexible sequence
• Measure all interactions for effectiveness, driving actionable insights for continuous improvement

So, in English, what are the many heads – sorry, components – of multichannel excellence?

Each organisation has unique requirements based upon its own internal process and the behaviours of its external stakeholder networks (HCPs, patients, partners, and so on).

Multichannel

At Aurora we organise our service offering around delivering excellence in multichannel. This includes thought leadership, co-creation workshops, organisational and behaviour change and, ultimately, implementation of integrated multichannel frameworks, touchpoints and campaigns. Like the mythical Greek beasts, multichannel can take on many forms – it must be modular and flexible, based upon your needs and preferences – and NEVER set in stone!

Business solutions

Contact us if you would like your teams to say:

”I understand multichannel and why it is important to my business. I have the knowledge, tools and support I need to implement multichannel. I feel confident that I can do this. I will make a start now and aim for continual improvement.”

So, cross the River Styx with us, and fear no beast.

The post The Myth of Multichannel appeared first on GLOBALHealthPR.

Uncertainty around when, how or even if things are paid is never a good thing, especially if you are investing heavily and not seeing your return for years to come. This is exactly how global pharmaceutical businesses find themselves when faced with the UK and a future scheme called value-based pricing (VBP).

The current UK pricing system sees a standard cost effectiveness threshold applied to all new products with a profit cap of around 30 per cent; a value based system would in principle allow different price thresholds depending on the relative need for the drug. So new medicines in their first indication designed to treat diseases with unmet need would be awarded a higher threshold and can be given a higher price. It has also been reported that higher thresholds will be given for medicines that have evidence demonstrating ‘wider societal benefits,’ such as people being able to return to work and be economically productive. Medicines without this type of supporting evidence, in less severe diseases or where therapies already exist, will get a lower threshold and obtain a lower price.

The new VBP system was originally meant to be effective from January 2014 but has now been delayed until autumn 2014 at the earliest. A further consultation period is expected to be undertaken and many suggest that it will be watered down from the original aims. It is all confusing and apparently disorganised, with some pretty basic questions that I posed in a VBP blog post 18 months ago still going unanswered.

So why is this Englishman being so UK centric? The UK isn’t after all the biggest pharmaceutical market, maybe 10^th in the world and half the size of our neighbours France or Germany. But as cited in Aurora’s NHS business unit’s director’s previous VBP post, UK branded medicine price is used as a reference by some 40% of the global pharmaceutical market – so what happens here sends ripples across the globe. The world already looks at the UK’s National Institute of Health and Care Excellence (NICE) decisions as a benchmark for health technology appraisals (which look at clinical efficacy and cost-effectiveness). In the future, NICE will also be conducting the VBP assessments.

We know that what happens in Blighty will have a knock on effect elsewhere.

I’ve been talking to our GLOBALHealthPR partners about this topic and each country around the world has a different way of pricing and assessing medicines. As we look into the future, these systems are becoming ever more fragmented. In the UK this year, as in years past, pharma companies are launching really innovative medicines, which are proven to transform a person’s life. The problem is many are being told they aren’t recommended for use as they are not deemed ‘cost effective.’ This effectively halts access and the medicine will only be used in a handful of cases where a doctor puts in an individual funding request, which involves paperwork galore.

So what can be done as we all work hard to make access to innovative medicines a reality?

Well until we all fully understand how NICE intends to undertake an assessment, it’s a difficult call and things remain uncertain, however the wider societal benefits that a medicine brings will be crucial. Creating evidence that is concisely communicated to all the right stakeholders will be the name of the game. This evidence could be gathered in a host of ways such as during clinical trials or say collected in first launch markets, with the data being rapidly shared with later launch markets. This will require delivering tools to measure patient experience and adding services that capture data around the impact of the use of a medicine. This can ultimately be used to support funding decisions which may occur at the national, regional or local level. Digital solutions can make this seemingly daunting task completely manageable.

Whatever happens, the medicines access game is changing – it’ll just be better when everyone knows the rules, and like pay day we would all like that to come along quickly.

If you’d like to speak to our UK partner, London-based Aurora, about VBP, health technology appraisals and the strategies and tools they are already delivering to support access to innovative medicines, contact the team on +44 20 7148 4170, ask for Neil Crump, Aaron Pond or Rachel Terry.

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In England, we often hear that the National Health Service is the envy of the world. But is it really?

To find out, we decided to contact GLOBALHealthPR to ask the partners in the network about their perceptions of the NHS, comparisons with their own healthcare system and which health system is deemed the worst in the developed world.

Guess what? The NHS is not big news elsewhere and awareness of the service is limited. Any positive mentions are generally related to processes, such as NICE (the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence), and the system is only ever really understood by healthcare professionals and journalists. The public doesn’t really care; they have their own healthcare systems to consider.

But what does this mean for pharma? 

In a world where we interact globally, it increasingly seems that individual countries’ healthcare systems want to stay in their silos, focusing inwards. Surely this cannot be good for pharma trying to launch new medicines and technologies across the globe, right? Pharma therefore needs to offer local value propositions across a global market place in a way that is cost effective for their customers and their own business.

So what can pharma do to make it easier?

• Segmenting audiences and understanding the key decision makers in every single healthcare system is absolutely vital. But having a long list of names and job titles isn’t enough. Pharma should be looking to understand how their key stakeholders interact with each other and who influences who. This needs to be done on a global scale, with the information broken down locally.
• Good value will mean different things to different healthcare systems and different localities, but also to each individual whether they work in a clinical or payer capacity. Ensuring pharma understands these nuances when presenting value propositions is a must. A one size fits all approach just doesn’t work. This understanding comes with extensive relationship building with key stakeholders across a vast landscape.
• Recognise that corporate brand reputation is a powerful ally. There will be times when your new medicine isn’t seen as a priority by certain customers in certain healthcare systems. How else can you help? What added value can you bring to make your key customers’ jobs easier? Building relationships for the long term will ensure you reap the benefits when you have a proposition valued by your customers.

As with any new product launch, understanding the customer and preparing the marketplace is often more important than the launch itself. It seems that in a world in which we interact globally, our understanding of, and interaction with, healthcare systems is still very much localised. Pharma should be doing the same.

What else do you believe pharma needs to do to be competitive in this global/local marketplace? Have you got the tools to truly understand your stakeholders?

If you would like to learn more about how to map your stakeholders and understand how they influence each other, please get in touch.

The post Local Value Propositions for a Global Marketplace – What Does Pharma Need to Do? appeared first on GLOBALHealthPR.