Event: The HealthCare Blogging Summit /Consumer Health World
When: September 17 - 19
Where : Chicago
I will be speaking on a panel at Dmitiry's latest healthcare and social media conference. These are all held within the Consumer Healthcare conference which draws quite a crowd from across the healthcare spectrum - pharma to mds to hospital CEOs. I spoke at one a year ago in DC.
The question is: what has changed?
1. There are a lot more healthcare Web2.0 companies up and acquiring users. In fact there is another conference on the West Coast called Health2.0 which will collect the best of those including Sermo, Healthline and others. This most interesting innovation happens here as entrpeneurs and venture capitalists try to create business in a new type of healthcare.
2. Some Pharmaceutical companies are deploying initial programs to get experience in and around social media. The best known right now include J&J's jnjbtw.com blog and the Alliconnect blog, message board plus product site.
Some pharmas are exploring with communties for patients like the kind created by Communispace. I thought this would all happen much faster. a year ago, I would have guessed a brave few pharmas would have tested the waters with more social media experiments. I was sure someone would challenge the prevailing fear that the FDA is waiting to react to a case of non-compliance with adverse events reporting. Pharmaceutical companies are still held back by their individual approaches to adverse events. Basically, it's the legal department within a regulated industry. A recent white paper from Cymfony and Fard Johnmar pretty much coroborates this.
"The thesis of this paper is that, based on existing principles and precedents in the
regulation of direct-to-consumer advertising, marketing, legal and regulatory
compliance professionals can have a productive collaboration in helping their
companies incorporate emerging social media forms into their promotional mix."
Their message is directed to the legal department. The goal is to smooth talk them out of the bunker. The authors go on to summarize the type of issues the FDA has points of view on abd the principles at stake. It's a great article for pharma brand managers but I am not sure pharma lawyers will learn anything new. They go on to include a rating system like our national defense color-coding system for different social media tactics. This is broadly helpful but so much is determined by context that I would hope brand managers would only use this as a guide not a rule.
Other things impede including a marketing culture that is heavily weighted towards their brand of traditional marketing.
3. Communities are springing up in patient groups like the ones maintained by ClinicaHealth, the Nordstrom's of health plays: Revolution Health and inside broad interest social networks like Eons.com.
4. More Americans use the Internet to access health information every year.
5. With the growth of "customer" reviews and the overall growth of the segment of the public creating content, new consumer generated media - like doctor and hospital reviews - will force change upon an old-fashioned industry.
6. HMO's aren't innovating their online customer experience fast enough. They have the most at stake in the principles of consumer-driven-healthcare, yet their own online offerings lag. see this Forrester report.
Two events that are coming and worth checking out:
Event: Health 2.0
When: September 20
Where : SF
Event: Exl Pharma: Digital Pharma
When: October 22-24
Where : Philadelphia
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