The problem with printed HCP detail aids is that all too often they are outdated as soon as they are printed. They don’t address “buzz” of the product nor issues that HCP’s may have about a drug and “canned” responses directed by sales manager and healthcare professional marketing don’t work when less and less physicians are making time to meet drug reps.

The answer to this problem is an electronic detail aid that can be shown via a tablet computer. With an electronic detail aid salespeople can:

-Customize the detail aid based on physicians speciality, practice and prescribing behavior.

-Use animation (HTML5 or FLASH) to really bring to life key points about your product.

-Use CRM to follow up with the physician electronically including a thank you eMail, link to more information both from the pharma company and credible third parties and inform marketing of any relevant feedback so that they can act faster to address objections or new information.

Here is an example:

A sales representative for a major pharma company is getting ready to detail a physician on a statin for high cholesterol. As she arrived at the physicians practice she quickly selects criteria for the sales call including the physicians name, address, prescribing behavior and type of practice. The electronic detail aid is now customized for that physician and ready to go.

As she meets with the physician she goes through the detail on her tablet PC and also asks a series of questions to engage the physician. She leaves some samples and the physician, later that day, gets an eMail thanking him for his time as well as providing links for more information.

The salesperson records the details on her tablet PC and fills out a brief survey including a feedback form that goes to HCP marketing on barriers or questions from the physician on the medication. The HCP Director of Marketing receives a notice to check the detail database and as he arrives he gets a quick picture of how many physicians have been detailed but more importantly he also sees a visual representation (via a chart) of the top issues that salespeople are facing in detailing doctors in the field. For example, he learns that physicians believe his competitor’s product is positioned as a first line treatment and that a lot of physicians feel that generics are really just as good as his product. He than can work with medical marketing to show that his product not only lowers bad cholesterol it also raises good cholesterol. As soon as the MLR team can meet the page with new information addressing this key barrier is posted so that salespeople can add it to the detail.

Pretty cool ha ? What’s more it can be done with some “roll up your sleeves work” and it can have a substantial impact on both your target physicians and the salesforce because you are reacting to feedback and addressing the needs of the salespeople to get information to the field quickly while the buzz is still hot.

Electronic detailing is the future of medicine, whether in person or via the Internet, but more importantly it allows for speed of implementation. The pharma organization of the future is going to have to react with speed to maintain their competitive advantages. Having the best drug is no guarantee of success today.

Read the original here
Reacting to feedback from sales people via electronic detail

The iPad is a completely new category for the industry and consumers. Adaption will not be driven by the hardware but by software and the services they deliver. Nowhere is this more true than with the medical industry.

Apple has taken cost of the iPad by using its own chip rather than purchasing one by makers like Intel. While the entry level price is $499 very few people believe that most of the sales are going to be the entry level model as consumers opt for wifi and 3G models. By the far the biggest drawback of the iPad is that it can’t use FLASH. There has been sort of a backlash agains FLASH by some industry leaders such as Google and Apple. There is a movement to eliminate FLASH from the Web using new HTML technology but it is years from becoming widely adapted.

We know that more physicians are using the Internet and that 1 in 3 has changed a diagnosis or treatment thanks to information they found on the Internet but what will really drive physician adaption of the iPad is software that integrates patient records, medical information, payers, pharmacies and patients. The other key component I believe that will make this a winner for physicians is use of a stylus. Right now entering text to the iPad requires use of a somewhat clumsy keyboard and I can’t see a physician writing an Rx with one finger while he holds the iPad with the other hand.

The key question is going to be what software company is going to offer a full enterprise version of software that encompasses the needs of physicians and other HCP’s and what type of tablet will it work on? Google has already shown it’s tablet which is heavily integrated with Google applications. Apple believes that app stores, like iBook, are going to drive sales of the tablet and that is sure true when it comes to consumers but for business professionals it’s about “integration” and for HCP’s it’s about integration and reduction in paperwork which by some estimates takes up to 30% of their time.

Finally the other major drawback of the tablet is that it can’t multitask yet. This may seem like a minor issue but let’s say that a HCP wants to monitor an ongoing chat with colleagues while surfing the Internet and trying to send information to a patient. At the high end price point of $829 that is a big feature that’s missing !

Like any new technology and category the iPad will be used by early adapters and the belief is that Apple will sell around 2 million units. For the HCP and medical marketing people though penetration drives new software but software drives penetration. As vendors start developing software for the iPad and Tablet computers there will of course be winners and losers but the one with the vision and the ability to use good marketing and research to give the market what it needs and wants will be the winner.

The latest pharma company to report its physician payments is Cephalon. “Cephalon supports transparency in its financial relationships with healthcare professionals,” says the intro to the page where financial data are presented (see “Fee for Services Paid to Healthcare Professionals“). “We believe it is important for the public to understand that our partnerships with healthcare professionals allow us to develop and bring new medicines to market, address the needs of patients, and assure the safe and appropriate use of our medications.”

Now I could be “snarky” and debate whether or not all these “fees” are for “services” actually performed. No amount of transparency can counteract this kind of suspicion. So I won’t do that.

I do want, however, to point out that the way these payments are presented is “translucent” rather than “transparent.” I used PhotoShop to create a view of the Cephalon data as if seen through translucent glass to illustrate my point (see image on left).

Cephalon uses the latest technology — ie, Adobe Flash — to display the data on its web site. It’s cool. You can scroll down the list and you can search the list, but only for first name and last name. You can even find all the physicians on the list whose last or first name begins with “M” or any other letter!

Unfortunately, you cannot do much else with the data. You can’t search for doctors in your state or in your home town, for example. You cannot even see or calculate the TOTAL amount paid in the report period!

You can, however, see who got the most money because the list is broken down into several sub lists of physicians paid within a certain range. The highest-paid physician is Joseph Valenza of Sparta, NJ, who received $149,900 from Cephalon in 2009. Sparta is in a pretty fancy area of NJ where a lot of pharmaceutical executives live. Dr. Valenza may have many of them as patients.

But what about doctor James Mcmillen from Dillsberg, PA? He received a nice total of $101,650, which made him the 5th highest-paid physician on the list. I never heard of Dillsberg, PA and don’t understand why it rates as the location of one of the highest paid physicians on Cephalon’s list. According to the United States Census Bureau, the borough has a total area of 0.8 square miles. Some of my neighbors own almost that amount of land! Wikipedia says Dillsberg known for its farm tractor parade in October. As of the census of 2000, there were 2,063 people, 902 households, and 579 families residing in the borough — probably none of them being pharmaceutical company executives.

But, I digress!

Cephalon’s data do not reveal the hospital or medical practice affiliation of each physician. That makes the list a little less transparent than it could be.

IMHO, a more important weakness of the Cephalon physician payment “transparency” effort is that you cannot COPY the list and analyze it in Excel as I did with the lists for Merck and GSK (see “Pharma Begins to Reveal Payments to Physicians”; Pharma Marketing News Reprint #91-03. Use discount code PAY996 to get it FREE!).

Using Excel I was able to learn some interesting things about the Merck and GSK data such as the median and average payments and compare one company’s payment pattern to the other’s. I could easily see what the distribution of payments looked like by state. From my analysis of GSK’s data I learned that New York physicians were favored by that company (see “Why Does GSK Prefer New York Physicians & Will Governor Patterson Ruin It for Them?“).

Cephalon isn’t the only company that reports its physician payment data in a translucent fashion. Lilly also uses Flash to create a very nice interactive table (see here).

BTW, if you would like the Excel spreadsheets containing GSK’s and Merck’s physician payment data — so you can do your own analysis — find them here. The GSK and Merck data were originally in PDF files that were easy to download and copy (not that easy, but possible). I suspect that in the future, these data will become a little more translucent (ie, compiled in password-protected pdf files that do not allow copying).

Read more here
Transparency Vs. Translucency in Reporting Physician Payments

The current Apple iPad has some shortcomings; you can’t multitask yet, it is costly, there is no FLASH and for the healthcare market there is no way to quickly enter data (i.e. via a stylus). To expect a nurse of physician to type in entries to a patients records or an Rx to send to a pharmacy is unrealistic. Now the good news; even with these shortcomings this is the future of healthcare.

If we follow the economies of scale and Apple’s track record of other portable devices like the iPhone and iPod the iPad should be down to a $199 price point within 3 years. At this price they will be flying off the shelf. The new iPhone OS promises the ability of multi-tasking and I;m sure that either Apple of a third party vendor are working on incorporating a stylus into the iPad. The other key thing to remember is that there are no fewer than a dozen new tablet devices coming out within the next year. The tablet will be incorporated into healthcare because healthcare needs to reduce costs and investments in technology is going to reduce costs substantially.

Here are some things the tablet could be used for:

HCP Practice

-Updating patients records electronically

-Showing patients animations of medicine and anatomy to better explain problems.

-Sending information to patients insurers

-Sending Rx’s to pharmacy rather than writing

-Sending eMail to patient for follow-up and provide links for more information.

-Billing

-Sharing MRI’s and X-ray’s with other physicians electronically.

Healthcare Marketing

-Sending edetails to physicians and allowing them to integrate content to share with patients.

-Connecting physicians so they can share medical information that lead to better outcomes.

-Updating physicians on new information on drugs as well a clinical trials.

-Providing patients with segmented information at point of care

-Replacing sales people laptops with tablets that can instantly connect to Internet to provide updated detail materials and follow with CRM.

-Customized detail materials based on physician segmentation

As you can see the possibilities are endless. The question is not “will tablet computing be integrated into healthcare” it’s “how soon will tablet computing be integrated to healthcare?”

The drug industry has a habit of waiting for trends to bite them in the rear before they move forward and integrate them into marketing but this is one trend that is going to require a lot of trial and error to get it right. The sooner the industry acknowledges the future of marketing to both the patient and HCP’s the sooner they can build capabilities to get it right.

“I can’t use it. Am I supposed to write with one finger while holding the iPad” said one family physician. “To cumbersome, it would have been a winner if it has a stylus and allowed me to write information on medical records or write an Rx” said another. There didn’t seem to be an issue around the price of the device but as one senior physician said to me “we need an enterprise software solution to integrate any external devices with our system. It also needs to be able, on the back end, take the data and communicate with insurance companies and pharmacies. This has a long way to go before it meets our needs.”

As for the tablet being used by the sales force? A medical device VP of training said “it’s not for us right now. It’s missing a lot of features especially FLASH which we use in illustrations to train sales people as well as customers”.

The tablet is still a great future for the medical industry but we are seeing initial versions. Wait 2-4 years when new and lower priced iTablets are introduced and more vendors introduce software to integrate healthcare practices. The most essential piece seems to be a tool to handwrite content rather than forcing users to use a virtual keyboard.

The iPad is the future of healthcare and those who ignore it are going to risk but it’s time for companies like Apple to work with HCP’s and ask what they need and want if they want a piece of the pie.

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In case you missed it (and welcome back to Earth if you did), Apple is releasing yet another version of the iPhone: the 3GS. In today’s post, I’m not going to tell you why this upgrade is going to dramatically change the way pharma markets its products using digital. Because it won’t.

However, one other announcement from Apple came out at the same time  and went largely unnoticed. This little detail will change the way pharma markets its products in digital. While explaining all the cool features and enhanced speed of the new iPhone 3GS, Apple also told us that the current top of the line model, the 3G, will be reduced in price to $99. $99 dollars versus a current cost of $199 or $299 (depending on memory) is a big difference. $99 is one of the those magical buying points where something starts to look really affordable to people. In fact, in a recent study done by Neilsen prior to the announcement, they noted, “…the second most important factor-noted by 20% of respondents-as to why people did not pick the iPhone was its price.” It doesn’t take a lot of calculations to figure out that there’s going to be a huge increase in iPhone sales because of this decrease.

So, how does this affect you as a pharma marketer?

With more iPhones (and any other smartphone with a browser), more people can instantly get quality information no matter where they are. For you, this means in their doctor’s office, a pharmacy, a hospital. It essentially allows patients to immediately double-check their doctor’s recommendations. Picture someone who was just prescribed Lipitor walking out of their doctor’s office. Let’s say they have an iPhone. What’s the first thing they do when they leave that office? If it’s me, I check out Lipitor on my iPhone and see what it’s all about. This is going to become more and more the norm as these types of phones become the standard instead of just another high-tech gadget.

So, when your patient checks out your site on their iPhone, what do they see? Let’s consider our friend who was just prescribed Lipitor. If he checked out the Lipitor site at home. This is what he’d see:

Not a bad looking site. Front and center patient stories. Clear navigation. Good.

What about on the iPhone? The iPhone browser has one big limitation; it doesn’t recognize Flash. Flash, as you know, is what’s responsible for much of the animation you see on the Web today. Chances are that if you see something moving around on a webpage, it uses Flash. As far as the iPhone is concerned, Flash doesn’t exist. So, your very expensive to develop Flash piece (the patient stories) on the Lipitor site looks like this on the iPhone:

No more patient stories. Everything else still works, but you’re missing your big feature and there’s an ugly blank spot on your page that makes it look like it’s broken somehow.

Who else has the problem? I looked through the sites of some of the top-sellers out there and found a few more plus one that does it right (almost).

One that I found that goes on the “needs improvement” list is Actos. Here’s their website:

Here’s the iPhone version:

So long strange, talking, bacon-man (and the sound as well because he does talk in the Web version, but not on an iPhone).

One other site that I actually wrote about very positively in a recent post about addressing caregiver needs, looks great on a full browser, but not so much on the iPhone. It’s Exelon Patch.

Full Web version:

It includes the engaging visuals that really speak to someone caring for someone suffering from Alzheimer’s. However, when you look at it on the iPhone…

All the visuals are gone and you’ve got a page filled with tiny words.

So, is there a way to fix this? Absolutely. What’s more, it isn’t very difficult to do. Correcting the way your site displays content is critical so that users of smartphones (including the iPhone) can view it properly, but there’s one other even more important reason you need to ensure that you have an alternative to Flash on your site. It’s called Google. Perhaps you’ve heard of it. Turns out that Google doesn’t like Flash all that much either (at least Google’s spiders don’t). Google cannot read Flash. It basically doesn’t exist. This oversimplifies the issue a bit, as Google can see some elements of the “behind the scenes” parts of Flash, but for the most part it can’t. Here’s a good article explaining some of the details if you’re interested. So what if Google can’t see it? If it can’t see it, it can’t index it, which means it can’t consider it in the rankings for search. Bad news.

So, here’s the deal. You’re beautiful website…

…looks like this to a search spider:

Not pretty, but that’s okay. Google doesn’t rank on pretty. However, it’s not okay if all your important keywords aren’t showing up here. If they are buried in the Flash, Google doesn’t see them. In this case, much of the content of the Iams site is contained in Flash and isn’t seen by Google. Interested in seeing how your site looks to Google? Here’s a great tool.

It turns out that there’s a great compromise that is a really simple programming fix and one that you should be requiring your digital developers to do. Essentially, you create two versions of your website. Relax, it’s not twice the cost. All you are going to do is create second version using some programming techniques that ensures all of your content that was included in your Flash piece is visible to search spiders. You can direct which page is seen through a really simple programming technique that allows you to check either browser type or other parameters that ensure the right visitor sees the right page. So, you can show search spiders one thing and regular people another. You can also show an iPhone version to iPhone users. You don’t need to understand the technicalities of how to do this, but if you really want to, contact me and I’ll get you in touch with one of our developers (no charge of course).

Let’s just see what it looks like. Someone in pharma has done it ALMOST perfectly. This is the normal Web version of the Seroquel website (note that I cut the page off a bit):

There’s a big Flash piece right in the middle of the page that feature some patient stories. It’s nicely done and looks great, but as we now know, the iPhone (and Google) isn’t going to like it very much. But, AZ (makers of Seroquel) handled this the right way. Here’s the iPhone version:

What you see is that the site explains that it’s optimized for Flash and gives you directions on how to install Flash if you don’t already have it. You still lose the stories, but at least you don’t have a big blank area on the page that leaves people wondering why your site looks broken.

For those paying close attention, you noticed that I said they did this “ALMOST perfectly.” Here’s the problem with this approach. All of the great content that is in the Flash piece is gone. If you use the simulator like I did for the Iams site, none of the patient stories are seen by search spiders. The stories are even narrated and have some good content, but Google doesn’t know about it. However, it’s possible to take that content out of the Flash file and display it essentially in transcript form only for search spiders. You have the transcripts already (because your regulatory team demanded them), so adding this to your site isn’t a big deal. It won’t mess up the look of the site because you can program it so that only search spiders can see the text. It’s a simple fix, but one that is overlooked pretty regularly. With all the competition out there for important keywords in Google’s rankings, you need all the help you can get. Why leave out big chuncks of content when you don’t have to?

In addition, you could invest a little more and make a non-Flash version of the patients stories that is going to be viewable on an iPhone. That was the point of this post after…optimizing for an iPhone. So simply saying, “Sorry, you’re out of luck because you don’t have Flash,” how about offering an alternative using static images or some other technologies that mimic Flash, but without some of the issues?

The big takeaway…make sure that people who are using smartphones can see your website the way you want it seen. Do a little experiment and find out what your site looks like to iPhone users. If you’re not happy with it, contact your developers and figure out how to improve it. Don’t leave your site with a gaping hole in the middle of it. This doesn’t instill confidence among visitors. At the same time, make sure that you are truly optimizing for search. The two really go hand in hand. If you have an issue with how your site displays on the iPhone then you probably have an issue with how Google sees it too.

So, go out and wait on line for a new iPhone 3GS today (or just ask to borrow a friend’s if you’re not quite that gung-ho).

Source: Dose of Digital – Is Pharma Ready for the New iPhone (or any iPhone)?