Tag Archives: healthcare marketing

Are we ready for digital marketing in pharma?

Thursday evening kicks off Interactive Day San Diego (IDSD), a digital marketing and technology event held here on the west coast. The speaker list is rather impressive and I’m ready for a Friday full of new ideas.

Who am I most looking forward to hearing speak at the conference? Hard to pick just one person, I’ll give you two… Rand Fishkin from MOZ and Wade Forst from Razorfish. I think they’ve both driven significant change and growth in their space and I’m interested to learn how they made that happen and what’s coming next. I’ll also admit that I love Rand’s title, Director of Emerging Experiences. You can’t get more ‘what’s coming next’ than that!

I work in pharma, much more conservative and highly regulated than the consumer space. Everything I hear on Friday won’t be directly transferable to my space. I’m looking for the pearls; those ideas that resonate in any industry and will help push pharma in a new direction – the direction of digital marketing.

Come Friday you’ll find me tweeting highlights from the conference, follow #IDSD, and gathering those pearls to share in an upcoming post.

To get you thinking digital pharma marketing, here’s a little reading material…

1. What is digital marketing: infographic

2. Digital Pharma Blog

3. Pharma’s Digital Health Strategy: Four Options

4. THE biggest challenge in pharma digital marketing

5. Pharma Content Marketing: Just Do It

Do you work in pharma? Do you have a digital marketing strategy in place? Thinking of implementing one? Let us know what you think of digital marketing use in pharma and healthcare overall.

Oncologists share the most exciting ESMO 2012 developments

Today marked the close of the 37th European Society of Medical Oncology (ESMO) Congress in Vienna, Austria. More than 17,000 attendees from over 120 countries came together to discuss new cancer treatments, explore new technologies and share experiences. This global event was defined as a ‘practice changing’ Congress, putting us on the cusp of major change in the treatment of cancer.

Prior to the start of the Congress, Martine Piccart, ESMO 2012 Congress President was quoted as saying, “The oncology field is going to explode within the next five years and in ten years from now oncology will be drastically different from what it is today: what we are going to see at ESMO 2012 in Vienna will give a broad overview of how new technologies can improve the tailoring of cancer therapies for the benefit of our patients.” With this in mind, InCrowd asked 100 oncologists that attended ESMO to tell us what they felt was the most exciting development to come from this year’s Congress.

The top five developments defined by ESMO attendees include:

  • Personalized medicine and targeted therapies
  • Genetic profiling, gene mapping for targeting treatment
  • HER2-directed therapy for breast cancer
  • New developments in the treatment of melanoma
  • Immunotherapy in cancer treatment

n = 100 oncologists attending ESMO
Time to field micro survey during ESMO: 32 minutes

Physician comments:

  • Personalized medicine — hope and complexities that will engender a need for better informatics infrastructure and physician (and other) education.

  • I am personally less optimistic that Martine Piccart. The more we learn the more complex cancer biology becomes. There are some success stories but a lot are still left behind. Due to complex biology, lack of targets and increasingly unaffordable drugs.

  • Genetic profiling of lung cancer, breast cancer, new pathway inhibitors, more immune directed therapies.

  • The new targeted treatments and genetic / molecular markers to tailor treatments to specific patients.

  • The data that Genentech’s TDM-1 agent has broad efficacy particularly in breast cancer is a major development as this is a completely novel type of agent. The phase III COMPARZ data in RCC supports that Votrient may be better tolerated than Sutent. The phase III data from INTORACT in RCC continues to support the notion that sequential therapy maybe more effective than combination therapy thus far in RCC.

  • The development of targeted therapy and personalized management plan for individual cancer patients.

  • The validation of 12-months of adjuvant Herceptin for Her2+ breast CA.

  • For melanoma, 2-drug combination is better than 1 drug including BRAF inhibitor and MEK inhibitor. TDM-1 safe with improved PFS and OS in Her-2/NEU(+) mBC.

  • Targeted BRAF and MEK therapy for melanoma; 1 yr duration of adjuvant Herceptin.

  • This conference has clearly shown the rising interest not only in the research of cancer therapy and the introduction of new markers for early Cancer detection such as histone modifications – but has also in cooperated patients needs in the view of rising health care questions.

  • Agree with Martine Piccart, that oncology practice will have dramatic changes, especially it will be more individualized treatment tailored specifically to the tumor biology very exciting.

  • Continued emergence of “smart” chemo-therapies, tailored to the proteins and factors is the most important aspect of oncology and its future.

 

  • We are treating cancer so differently now than several years ago, and it is only going to get more specific.

5 real time data resources for the health care marketer

Our world is moving at a relentless pace. Don’t believe me? Take a look at the infographic Data Never Sleeps from Domo. Every 60 seconds Google gets more than 2 million queries, over 100,000 tweets are sent and 48 hours of new video is uploaded to YouTube. All that, and more, takes place on the internet a single minute. Think about the amount of data generated in an hour; now think about 24 hours.

How do you keep up with all this data being generated in real time? You’re a health care marketer; it’s your job to be in the know, helping your company and brand stay competitive. Here are 5 tools that can help you do that.

Real Time Medical Data is a search and sort tool that helps you analyze near real time Medicare data.  Compare your market share to other brands, assess market potential, identify reimbursement issues – these are just a few things pharma and medical device companies can do with this tool.

Need to quickly collaborate with your colleagues or send and share proprietary documents? TigerText is secure real time texting; it’s HIPAA compliant and works with any smartphone or tablet on a PC or Mac.

Getting market feedback in real time can be critical in the highly competitive health care industry. InCrowd is a real time market research platform that provides immediate feedback from screened and targeted health care professional. This case study  highlights the value of using real time data to support the product launch process. Gaining prescriber feedback within hours of product launch and detailing by sales representatives provided Vertex Pharmaceuticals with access to market information that previously wasn’t available for several weeks.

This tool is not specific to health care but can be used in any industry interested in social listening. Social Mention lets you track and measure what the social media world is saying about your company and brand – in real time via their do-it-yourself (DIY) tool. It searches social media conversations across numerous platforms and pulls the dialogue together into one organized stream of information. Give it a try!

Everyone has a favorite search engine they use to find what they need, but Blitter is a little different.  This is a clinical search engine populated with content from clinicians who blog or tweet. The goal is to index content that independent health care professionals found to be of value. The thinking goes, if they found the information worthwhile other clinicians might too. It has some pretty neat search features that allow you to filter results from the perspective of a specific specialty – making what you find potentially more meaningful.

Have you used any of these real time data resources? Do you have a DIY tool you use to access and manage data? Feel free to share your thoughts with us in the comments below.