By Sven Larsen(@svenplarsen)

Who’s doing it right?

That’s a question we’re often asked since we’ve routinely challenged Pharma to embrace social media and an expanded dialogue with their customers. So it’s gratifying to find a prime example in our own backyard.

P & P’s parent company, digital agency Zemoga has worked with Weisscomm, EMD Serono and Pfizer on their MS Voices project for over a year now. We’ve written before about the MS Voices Facebook page and the industry leading approach that this partnership has developed to handle comments and questions from consumers. But Facebook is only part of the outreach efforts being made to the MS community.

At the heart of the project is the MS Voices call center, a remarkable customer service operation that has answered over a million inbound calls from the MS community. How’s that for starting a conversation? The call center includes patient enrollment specialists, patient support specialists, nurse support specialists and reimbursement specialists. Whenever someone in the MS community needs to speak to a live person, support is available toll free at 1-877-447-3243. The Ms Community can also visit MS Lifelines online at www.mslifelines.com or on the MS Voices Facebook page.

The call center it truly devoted to providing the highest level of service to it’s callers and this week they announced that they received certification from the JD Power and Associates Call Center Program (the firs time JD Power has recognized a Pharma call center for service excellence). Certification requires passing a rigorous audit of service practices and receiving positive feedback from customer surveys and it’s a major recognition of the great work being done by the call center.

The MS Voices program is a terrific example of how two Pharma companies embraced a community and created a win-win situation for all involved. It’s also a great example of what the future of our industry may look like.

What do you think? Who else is doing it right and putting the customer first?

You’ve told us that you want to see more about what goes on at Zemoga, the sponsor of this media property, so we thought we’d give you a quick look in at a recent project that the team is especially proud of. Maria Rueda gave us the lowdown on one of Zemoga’s new babies, the HeartBeats app (which was created for the Adobe AIR App Challenge), and the thinking behind it, as well as her thoughts on the competition.

Here’s what she had to say:

Originally, the goal was to have HeartBeats be a digital tool for surgeon training, simulating heart surgery with all of its inherent risks and complications. Since that’s obviously complex, creating it will require a lot of knowledge, investigations, permissions and reviews. To begin the process, and to be able to submit an app to the contest, we decided to turn the idea into a game.

This app is designed for everyone, of any age, who has ever dreamed about becoming a surgeon, or who has an interest in medicine. The goal is to demonstrate what a real surgery looks like and what all the tools are that heart surgeons use.

We hope to add difficulty levels to the app, different procedures and other types of surgery. In the long term, it would be great to turn the app into a real training tool; that’s a big challenge we’d love to take on.

While we’re disappointed we didn’t place in the contest, of course, it’s great to see how strong the winning applications are. They all share a high level of polish, creativity and innovation. Conqu, in particular, is a very clever take on the often-visited subject of task management, and Tweet Hunt – the overall winner – presents a fresh and fun way of reading tweets while playing a video game. Something that stands out is that the concepts themselves are not very complex or elaborate, but rather elegantly simple. It goes to show that in today’s mobile market, innovation, creativity and solid execution are the most important qualities.

Out of all of the winners, we’ve been particularly surprised by Level, which we believe succeeded in something that none of the other apps did: it managed to take advantage of the two screens on the Sony Tablet P by integrating it to its core mechanics. This shows the ability of the developer to harness the particularities of the device and use them to their advantage.

As more and more medical schools are handing their students a tablet computer on their first day, we expect to see a lot more applications like Zemoga’s HeartBeats. While it will never take the place of real life experience, it will be interesting to see how this technology will play a part in the future of medical education.

If you’re an Android user, download the free HeartBeats app yourself, and let us know what you think!

By Sven Larsen

These days everyone is familiar with e-commerce. And our more social media savvy readers are probably all clued up on f-commerce (that’s Facebook commerce folks). I’ve even heard Google’s Adwords and Adsense business referred to as g-commerce. But what about the next letter in the alphabet. How come no one is talking about h-commerce?

Make no mistake; healthcare commerce online is big business (A Forrester research report projects 2012 Healthcare spending online will reach $8.7 billion). And the traffic for online health retailers is pretty impressive, too. Drugstore.com, a pioneer in the space nets 4.66 million unique users a month (and a not too shabby $416 mm a year in annual sales). But their traffic pales next to more traditional drug retailers like CVS (6.37 mm uniques per month) and Walgreen’s (10.6 mm uniques per month). And then, of course, there is the 800-pound gorilla of health info online, Web MD with a whopping 16 million unique visitors per month (to put that number in comparison, the New York Times website average 17 mm uniques per month). It’s clear that Americans are more than comfortable obtaining health information online and they’re also comfortable with online purchasing of the drugs and other healthcare products they need. So why aren’t we doing a better job of selling those products to them?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not advocating digital snake oil sales or anything similarly distasteful (or anything that might get anyone in trouble with the FDA). In fact, quite the opposite. As an industry, it’s a real black eye for us that most people associate online drug information with spam e-mails offering cheap Viagra and that most of the discussion of drug sales online revolve around things like obtaining cheap Canadian pharmaceuticals. No wonder the Pharma industry has such a bad reputation with many consumers. While drug manufacturers have sat in their ivory towers doing their best to ignore conversations with consumers, the digital space has been ceded to shady characters who have no interest in preserving brand integrity or serving patient’s needs.

Yes, we’re bound by strict regulatory requirements that preclude us using some of the traditional methods that other consumer marketers use to tout the features and benefits of their products. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t find new and better ways to educate consumers about their health and help them maintain positive lifestyles. Or even just make their lives a little easier.

Consider the plight of a young mother who has just relocated with her family to a city where she doesn’t know anyone. She needs to find a GP she can trust for her family. She needs to find a pharmacist she can trust as well. Maybe one of her children has special needs and she needs to find a local support group. Maybe she just needs to know where that 24-hour drugstore is located. Perhaps she has a prescription that has run out and no one to authorize a refill. What does she do now?

She probably looks at Yelp or one of the many sites that publish HCP reviews. She may type the name of a national drugstore chain into a search engine and find a store at random. And she will spend a lot of time online looking for resources to help her and her family. Not a problem, right? We all know young moms have nothing but time on their hands.

How much better would it be if she were able to go to a one stop portal that contained tons of information about the healthcare resources available in her community? A site that listed HCPs, local specialists, pharmacists and patient support groups. A site that also provided links to educational resources online and e-commerce partners who could help with issues of supply and cost. A site sponsored by one (or several) Pharma companies that provided a real service to the community and a positive representation of our industry online. And, not for nothing, a site that increased compliance and by extension benefitted both the patient and the Pharma company.

The above, is just one example, of ways we can interact with and benefit the end consumer, without violating FDA guidelines. I’m sure our readers could come up with numerous other ideas. The key here is to once again step outside the narrow confines of our traditional industry thinking and to learn from other players in the market. A good start would be for Pharma companies to become more active in the general conversations about online marketing and retailing that take place at sites like INTERNET RETAILER and SHOP.ORG. Ultimately, the end consumer for Pharma is a consumer and we need to realize that despite all the rules that bind us, the purchase funnel for our products is no different than any other.

What do you think? Is this the year we finally start talking about h-commerce?

by Russ Ward (@russcward)

Can science be crowdsourced? Can medicine take advantage of the knowledge of the masses to leapfrog to advances? Can we use social media tools to cure disease?

These are (increasingly specific) questions about the utility of digitally shared intelligence to improve healthcare – sometimes called “citizen science” (similar to “citizen journalism”). While nobody is nominating Mark Zuckerberg for the Nobel Prize just yet, there are definitely signs that social science is paying off. Here are three.

Where it all began: SETI@home

The idea of taking computer power possessed by the multitudes and combining it for science probably dates back to SETI@home, a program first offered to the public in 1999 to donate their superfluous computing power to the search for intelligent life. Still active, the program works by distributing telescope data out for analysis.

Procrastination for science: Foldit

One of the original and best-known examples of crowdsourced medical science is the Foldit project. It takes the complex process of genome folding, and turns it into an online game. If human players can best computers in figuring out biologically “winning” solutions, this can not only provide immediately faster answers, but can also help researchers teach computers those strategies in order to keep improving the pace of their work – whether assisted by computer or volunteer.

Global symptomatology: Health Tracking Network

While SETI@home and Foldit use crowdsourcing in a more detached fashion, using individuals’ resources to solve scientific puzzles, Health Tracking Network asks for your help by sharing your own medical information. High-level information about your cold or flu symptoms will, they hope, allow better predictions and tracking of these viruses and their paths.

There are certainly many naysayers for crowdsourcing in medicine – including this post by John Mack last year, in which he points out the risks associated with having patients “review” their treatments.

However, there are other examples in which citizen science has sped up the time for experiments to be conducted (including this study on tuberculosis).

To me, the difference is an important one. On the one hand, exploiting volunteer or inexpensive human aptitude for completing small nonlinear tasks rapidly can clearly be efficient and effective. On the other hand, relying on anonymous opinions for quality analysis may not be such a great idea – but I don’t think that’s news to anyone who’s been within ten feet of the internet.

Are you working on any projects that harness the power of the people – be they your clients, your patients, your healthcare professionals, or the public at large – to make medical science advance more rapidly, discover more broadly, treat more accurately or predict more closely?

by DJ Edgerton (@wiltonbound)

The question seems almost nonsensical at first – your Twitter followers may be really outstanding people, but they’re not organic chemists or researchers. And your Facebook fans, while devoted, probably do not, generally speaking, know how to move a new drug through the FDA approval process.

Just the same, it’s a mistake to discount your social audiences as a source for insight and innovation. In fact, a wide range of category-leading companies do just that. While social media is not as planned or controlled as a focus group, there’s potential in polling the audience when it comes to research and development – and along the way you can even benefit the very people you’re polling.

Doing it right requires a three-step plan:

Understand what you want to accomplish. In this regard, social media is no different than traditional R&D research: Don’t ask existing or potential customers anything without a clear purpose behind “the ask.” What do you want to accomplish? Are you looking for feedback on a service (such as when consumers call into the customer care center) or improvement on a product or direction for a new advertising campaign? What about new products: Are you exploring the potential for one or looking at whether your customers have a need for a product that you have not thought of?

A solid roadmap will have goals covering what you hope to accomplish and clear indications of which social channels are – and are not – appropriate. Need to demo a product? You Tube makes sense. On the other hand, Twitter may be a better fit for simple questions requiring quick feedback. And tools like custom Facebook apps offer ways to bring customers and fans into the content creation process.

Be relevant in your questions and rigorous in your data collection. A solid roadmap lays out needs and expectations, but even the best plans can go astray if your research questions don’t balance your needs with the realities of social media, which often boil down to: Don’t be boring.

Tweets sending people to a 50-question survey or requests that Facebook followers sit through six sample commercials in search of the one they like best are unlikely to go anywhere. Instead, keep things short, clear and – most importantly – be ready to monitor and take feedback from the conversations that grow out of your public questions. They can be the source of tremendous insight.

Crunch the data and don’t leave the audience in the dark. One of the unique aspects of social media is that a lot of silos get knocked down – people have a great (and sometimes unreasonable) desire to peek behind the corporate curtain and know what’s going on. This is a powerful force and can jump-start your social-driven research – people love to be treated like insiders, and promising to give them a first peek at a new innovation, a new campaign or even just a slight change in how your company does something will motivate participation in your research.

The key is: You have to deliver on your promise. If you tell participants you’re working on a new way to talk about an established product and want their input, give them a peek before it’s rolled out to the public. Not doing so is bad form in the social landscape; promising to do it and then not delivering is an even bigger faux pas.

Whether it’s a one-drug boutique company or a global powerhouse, research and development is a constant part of pharma’s product and service lifecycles. While social media isn’t a substitute for formalized marketing research, it can be a powerful, low-cost augmentation to the toolbox.

by Briana Campbell (@MsMatchGirl)

“If it’s not mobile, it won’t work in 2012 and beyond,” Jason Falls is quoted as saying in Awareness Networks 2012 Social Marketing and New Media Predictions. “We’re a marketplace conditioned to look down on our screen first. It’s not a B2C vs. B2B thing. If your users are people, you’re going to need to be mobile.”

We’ve been talking about the importance of thinking mobile not just for pharma and healthcare marketing, but to provide much needed health services in the developing world for a while now. We feel strongly that including a mobile strategy in your plans will not only help you stay in business, it will help push innovation in healthcare to the next level.

With people turning more and more to the “second screen,” it’s important for us to think on how that screen can be best utilized. From The Department of Health & Human Services Health Data Initiative, which encouraged competitors to innovate around open data available from the government to make smartphone apps to improve health, to the insights shared by Jonathan Richman in his 2011 SXSWi presentation, “Your Computer is the Next Wonder Drug,” digital innovation is what is moving the world of healthcare forward. And pharma needs to keep pace.

Some quick facts for your consideration:

By 2015, 500 million people will be using mobile healthcare applications. [source]

Smartphones will offer the best opportunities for mobile health by 2015. [source]

17% of cell phone owners, or 15% of adults, have used their phone to look up health or medical information. [source]

Later this month, we’ll be at the Mobile Healthcare Communications 2012: Case Studies and Roundtables, taking place January 26, 2012 in NYC. This half-day conference will present case studies demonstrating how major healthcare brands are connecting with consumers and professionals through mobile communications. Case studies will be presented by representatives from Allergen, Mount Sinai Adolescent Health Center – New York, Daiichi-Sankyo, and more. Interactive roundtables will follow the presentations. We’re looking forward to learning more about what companies have been successfully doing with mobile in the healthcare space, and talking about how we can keep innovating.

Use promo code P&P for a discounted rate of $175.

Date: Thursday, January 26, 2012
Location: The Graduate Center of The City University of NY
365 Fifth Avenue (at 34th Street), Conference Level C, New York, New York 10016
Website: http://www.bdionline.com/mobilehealthcare2012.html
Discount Code: P&P

In February of this year, Bob Harrell, Director of Integrated Marketing at Shire Pharmaceuticals, spoke with Sarah McLellan how innovation and advanced technologies like gene sequencing will affect healthcare.

Ceci Zak of Sanofi speaks to Alice An at Digital Pharma East, after her presentation on the focus on consumer-centric marketing in pharma.

What direction do you think this will take in 2012?

We had to include this powerful interview in our Year In Review. From E-Patient Connections 2011, renowned Soprano, Charity Tilleman-Dick shares her inspiring story with Pixels and Pills.

If you’ve seen it already, it’s definitely worth watching again.

Speaking to our friend Shwen Gwee as part of PharmFresh TV, Todd Park revisits his SXSW presentation on the new healthcare system and open data, while Tim O’Reilly talks Google, advertising, and the parallels with healthcare. The two explain their collaboration on moving healthcare into the future.