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February 17, 2010
How Consumer Access To Healthcare Information Is Creating A Marketing Opportunity
With the launch of County Health Rankings, an informational site created through a partnership between the Univ. of Wisconsin and The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, you can now go online to see how your county is doing comparatively (versus other counties in your state) regarding health outcomes and health factors. It is the latest site offering up information to help consumers better understand their healthcare treatment options.
The trend toward more open access to information is forcing dramatic changes in doctor-patient relationships, hospital-physician relationships, and the marketing of medical devices, pharmaceuticals and other medical/healthcare services. Like car buyers armed with facts and pricing when they walk into a showroom, patients are increasingly entering a doctor's office armed with questions. And when they leave the office, they are less likely to accept everything they are told unquestioningly.
So how does all this create opportunity for pharmaceutical marketers? What physicians need more than ever is access to convenient, reliable sources of information that they can trust. While the pressure to produce blockbusters is relentless, this information gap and its associated gap in delivery platform options, is an open invitation to establish new working relationships with healthcare providers.
Certainly, it is naive to assume that BIg Pharma will suddenly produce universally unbiased materials, but think back to respected publications like the Merck Manual. The world's pharmaceutical manufacturers are sitting on a wealth of information and have access to some of the world's most innovative information management, analytics and investigational resources. With the right partnerships, leadership could be defined not only by the drugs delivered, but the resources and services surrounding the products.
The industry leaders are already deploying a dizzying array of web resources to HCPs, but that is actually part of the problem. Delivering more information on current generation platforms is a recipe for information overload. In it earliest version, the Merck Manual represented a breakthrough innovation -- a published database of critical content assembled in a best-of-breed medium. The real openings today have yet to be devised and their delivery vehicle is more likely to be an iPad or Blackberry or some future-generation mobile device than a current gen desktop computer.
The services story has been borne out in multiple industries through the past two decades. Now, I see a growing number of openings for information services in healthcare with each passing day. Who will step to the plate first?
Posted by jcioban at February 17, 2010 6:40 PM
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