By Krissy Goelz

Between the ongoing debate about U.S. healthcare reform, rising costs and an explosion of new technologies, what does the future hold for nursing?

It’s a vital question. The nation’s millions of nurses are front-line caregivers; virtually anything that impacts healthcare impacts nursing, and vice-versa. Figuring out changes to the profession based on healthcare reform and cost cutting goes beyond our expertise. But technology? On that, we’ve got opinions!

Nurses will become the lynchpin of the patient/caregiver experience. To a great extent, this is already true. The shortage of primary care physicians, combined with the shift to out-of-office, at-home care means that nurses are increasingly the main interface between a patient and the healthcare they receive. Technology is both an enabler and a challenge as part of this brave new world: On the one hand, nurses have access to more information at their fingertips than ever before. On the other hand, those same technologies mean that nurses face more pressure than ever before to accurately record patient data and, often, help patients themselves master health technologies.

The growth of technology will create a whole new field. Nursing informatics combines nursing and information management skills to support and enhance patient care. Informatics nurses develop and improve systems for telemedicine, telehealth and telemonitoring. Nurses working in consumer health informatics assess patients’ needs for health information and treatments, conduct research on how to meet a patient’s need for health information and self-management of health issues, and integrate their preferences into information systems. It’s a growing field with a lot of demand: The Bureau of Labor Statistics and HIMSS reports that the average salary in the nursing informatics field has risen substantially over the past several years.

Technology means caregivers are also, increasingly, coaches. Yesterday’s nurse taught the time-tested methods of insulin injection, catheter insertion or other personal medical tasks. But today – and even more so tomorrow – nurses will be teaching patients how to download and use smartphone medical monitoring apps, or giving them a tour of their electronic health records. While the specialists in nursing informatics will be important in helping the healthcare establishment better connect new technologies with patients, nurses of all stripes will likely have to master the process of teaching these consumer-facing innovations.

Against all three of those trends is a fourth: It’s all about the team. With medicine increasingly specialized, technology and teamwork are necessary to improve health outcomes. Nurses will be more mobile and, aided by technology, will be making care decisions in untraditional venues. For example, patients often need help deciphering complex medication regimens and in some cases nurse practitioners may help to simplify regimens. Nurses will need to coach patients and their care givers during transitions, easing the process from hospital to discharge, assessing them in their homes, and helping to coordinate home-based services. Here too, technology will play a growing role, as the rise of tablet-based and smartphone technologies for both patients and healthcare professionals are starting to show.

The common thread to all of these trends and predictions is easy to see: Technology will enable game-changing advances in patient care and healthcare administration. And nurses – long the front-line caregivers – will lead the way in this revolution,

by Jason Brandt (@jasondmg3)

Can two of the hottest organizational and operational trends from the last 20 years – Lean Manufacturing and Six Sigma – be adapted to pharma? That’s a trick question: They already have been, and quite successfully.

But, how about online pharma marketing? It’s a more interesting proposition.

First, some definitions for the majority of us who aren’t steeped in business-optimization methodologies: There are differences between Lean and Six Sigma methods of business, but both emphasize continuous improvement and a formal process of review and correction. Lean is sometimes seen as less time-consuming than Six Sigma; the easiest way to boil it down is that Six Sigma seeks reduced process variation, and Lean strives for improved process flow.

All of which sounds great if you’re running a manufacturing facility – who wouldn’t want fewer variations from an optimized process or an improved process flow? And they’re proven: Top-flight Six Sigma implementation is one of the factors that helped General Electric become a leader across many industries.

Applying these principles to digital pharma marketing isn’t quite the stretch you’d imagine. And while implementing a full Lean or Six Sigma strategy in your marketing efforts requires more than a lone blog entry for guidance, you can grasp some of the broad brush strokes pretty quickly:

Get good at measuring, and then measure everything. Whether you’re drawn to the Lean or Six Sigma model – and there’s a case to be made for both when it comes to pharma marketing – you’ll want to figure out how to measure things, both more comprehensively and more accurately.

Anyone exposed to social media or Web analytics knows you can measure online activity, but don’t be lulled into a false sense of security by these easy numbers. The sort of comprehensive measurement that these processes call for cover things like median and mean sales growth per sales rep in the weeks following an advertising campaign’s launch, or ROI per dollar spent on paid media in category-leading drugs (which might have much higher public awareness) versus secondary drugs.

Bottom line: You can’t track what you can’t measure and you can’t improve what you can’t track.

Round up your black belts. Six Sigma relies heavily on small groups of professionals, sometimes called black belts or green belts, empowered to review data, brainstorm improvements and then implement them. They operate with management’s approval, but they are also empowered to suggest changes outside of their department or division if that’s what it takes to improve quality.

Note a couple of key differences from many marketing processes: First, there’s an understanding that solving a problem might mean changes outside of the department or area of business operation – a big change for some marketing operations. Second and equally important is the idea of the small force of change agents, something that is necessary for breaking down organizational silos and stimulating overall movement of social initiatives.

Bottom line: Even if an organization’s social media strategy is centralized, training the entire organization can mistake-proof social execution.

Commitment to the process matters more than implementing it everywhere. Make no mistake: It’s a huge commitment to undertake either Lean or Six Sigma methodologies. That’s why it’s acceptable – advisable, even – to dip your organizational toe into the water slowly, with project-level and department level test projects. Try, fail, analyze, iterate and try again – get the process right for your team and your challenges, and then you can roll it out to more of your digital marketing efforts.

Bottom line: Every business is different. As new technologies, platforms and devices expand the digital experience, flexibility is necessary for managing a fast-moving, changing environment.

Marketing has always been a simple proposition: Deliver value in order to capture value. Within that context, business-optimization regimens like Lean and Six Sigma not only have a place in digital marketing, they’re just one more step in a long tradition of figuring out the most effective, efficient way to get the right value proposition into the right prospect’s hands so they can take action.

We’ve been writing a lot about the case for mobile in healthcare over the past couple of years. And we’re going to keep writing about it. With one quarter of US adults turning to their mobiles for healthcare information, it’s important that the industry keeps pushing forward with innovative sites, apps and tools that will keep us at the top of our game and, in the end, be useful to the community at large.

To that end, exploring how to better accomplish this is always something we’re interested in. Which is why, on Thursday, January 26^th, some of the crew from Pixels & Pills will be at the BDI Mobile Healthcare Communications 2012 Case Studies and Roundtables.

About the Event:
Consumers and professionals are increasingly using their mobile devices for healthcare information. They are also interacting with healthcare providers and colleagues on their mobile phones. This conference will demonstrate the best case studies of how major healthcare brands are connecting with consumers and professionals through mobile communications.

Speakers and Roundtable Moderators:
Meighan Berberich, Vice President, Marketing, BlogTalkRadio
Lance Hill, CEO, Within3
Scott Hopkins, Executive Vice President, Anderson Direct Marketing
Monique Levy, Vice President, Research, Manhattan Research
Dr. Katherine Malbon, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, Division of Adolescent Medicine, Mount Sinai Hospital
Talya Miron-Shatz, PhD, Marketing Department, Wharton, University of Pennsylvania
Jenna Mons, Consumer Product Manager for LAP-BAND®, Allergan
Mario Nacinovich, Jr., Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Communication in Healthcare; Managing Director, AXON
Xavier Petit, Shire
John Vieira, Daiichi-Sankyo
Date: Thursday, January 26, 2012
Time: 8:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.
Place: The Graduate Center of The City University of NY; 365 5th Ave; NY, NY 10016

For additional information, including registration, please click here to visit the event website. Use promo code P&P for a discounted rate of $175.

Hotel Sponsor: Hotel 373 is the official hotel of BDI’s events. Click here to receive a discounted rate

Sponsors:
PR Newswire; Within3; Anderson Direct Marketing; BioCrowd ; Cinchcast; Journal of Communication in Healthcare; Manhattan Research; New York University; Pixels and Pills; Public Relations Society of America – New York Chapter; Society for Healthcare Strategy and Market Development

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!

We’ve entered conference season and there are a lot of great ones on the horizon in the next few weeks. Our friend John Mack has a fairly comprehensive list over on his website, but he’s missing one that we’re particularly excited about.

The Life Sciences Innovation Forum, from Microsoft and our friends at ExL Pharma, promises to addresses how to excel in this shifting global climate, with the rise of the emerging technologies in the healthcare and pharma world, along with globalization and shifts in demographics, we’re seeing a change from the traditional model – and doors being opened to previously unthought of opportunities.

This is the first time this forum is being held and we’re happy that we’ll be there, interviewing attendees and speakers alike, bringing in as much information and content that we can, for you, our readers.

The forum will address questions like:

• What is the role of eHealth in clinical research?

• FDA is encouraging technology solutions to capture source data electronically – what does eSource really mean?

• How can we enhance collaboration by having the ability to access, share and analyze data more efficiently?

There will be presentations from Johnson & Johnson, Sanofi, Microsoft Health and Life Sciences, Eli Lilly, Pfizer and more.

Will we see you there?

Date: January 26 & 27, 2012
Location: Marriott Forrestal Village Conference Center, Princeton, NJ
Website: http://www.lsinnovation.com/
Discount Code: C210PPS

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?

This post is part of a series of point/counterpoint arguments proposed by different members of the Pixels & Pills staff. We’re strong believers that healthy arguments can yield the best solutions, and we hope that you enjoy our series. Feel free to add your own arguments in the comments section below!

by Krissy Goelz (@krisgoelz)

In The Godfather Part II, Michael Corleone lambasts a Mafia crime family member following an attempted hit on his life.

“In my home!” he rages. “In my bedroom, where my wife sleeps! Where my children come and play with their toys.”

Even in the mob, business doesn’t belong in personal quarters. The same is true for how professional communicators should handle their social media presence. If your business role requires you to participate in social media, you need to lock down your personal profile, tailor privacy settings and keep what you do on the off hours separate from your job.

In my father’s day it was easier to compartmentalize work. You left the office at 5 p.m. and your personal life was your own. In the digital age, segregating personal details from professional ones is harder, and it takes a great deal of diligence. But, it’s worth it if you want to build an image as a thought leader, trusted advisor or esteemed professional.

When participating in social media you have to enact the grandma rule. In the fields of Behavior and Psychology, this is known as the “Premack Principle.” What it means is conduct yourself properly and never post anything that you aren’t willing to shout from a rooftop or say in front of your grandmother. This is true of all social media users, but especially those who post on behalf of their organizations.

To borrow again from The Godfather, when participating in social media you also have to keep your friends close, and your enemies closer. There’s always danger of putting information into the wrong person’s hands – whether that’s competitive details, revealing personal health information or posting personal messages on Facebook during business hours. Even messages that are meant to be private sometimes find their way into the public arena. If you share too much of yourself, you may be surprised when it comes back to haunt you.

Blurring the lines between work and personal life can cost you reputation or financial damage. Just because you qualify something you post with the caveat “the views reflected are my own and not that of my employer” doesn’t mean that a reader is able to maintain that separation. In fact, the more the lines between work and leisure blur, the harder it is to separate our identities.

One way to manage a clean division is to use different platforms for different purposes. For example, keep business relationships and professional content on LinkedIn or Twitter. Use Facebook to connect with college roommates, neighborhood or childhood friends or other personal connections. If you want to use platforms like Facebook or Google+ for both purposes then make sure you create two profiles and work the privacy settings.

While you could argue that we’re all multidimensional human beings and everyone knows people have a work personality and an after-hours persona, there’s still no reason to mix them together.

We’re at work to work and do great things on behalf of our employers. How and when we socialize needs to be kept separate. Also, judiciously parsing information is never a bad thing. It’s good to keep a little mystery about yourself.

There’s no way to know how even the most inane things will be perceived by an outsider, whether it’s having a bad day or not being able to relate to your training for the New York City Marathon or sharing feelings about the NRA. Connecting with others online is critical, but as with anything, perception is reality. Shaping and controlling how you’re received requires a disciplined approach to managing your digital profile.

How are you handing your online presence?

This post is part of a series of point/counterpoint arguments proposed by different members of the Pixels & Pills staff. We’re strong believers that healthy arguments can yield the best solutions, and we hope that you enjoy our series. Feel free to add your own arguments in the comments section below!

by Jason Brandt (@jasondmg3)

As Egon Spengler told us in “Ghostbusters”, “crossing the streams” was a horrific tactical error, one which would create a terrifying explosion of undreamed-of power and destruction. “Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light,” he explained.

That’s how a lot of people feel about mixing business and personal personas. Nothing comes of “crossing the streams” except chaos and disaster. Social-media professionals – those of us in the communications and marketing fields who work largely in social digital venues -cross the streams” between personal and business social networking at our peril, and that of our brand. As a result, some people, in representing their brand to the world, put on a brand hat so big that they hide underneath it completely.
In my opinion, all that gives you is a boring hat. I want a hat that’s walking around with a living, breathing, interesting person underneath it. This is what makes the company real: a warm fuzzy personal face. That’s the whole point of social media. It’s social. It has personality and feeling and humanity. If all I wanted to see was the brand hat, I’d go to Wikipedia or to your website.

There is, of course, inherent risk with the personal nature of social-media marketing. If you tie the online brand to one person, you risk losing your whole brand if that person leaves. Or, perhaps worse, if they disgrace themselves somehow, they take the brand down with them.

That simply reinforces why it must be done astutely. Social media is a delicate mix of informal conversation and careful consideration. Deliberation and silliness are never a more necessary couple than when trying to conduct yourself in social channels. Your brand is represented by a person, but your brand isn’t just one person.

One great example of this? Tony Hsieh. He is the Zappos dude, but Zappos’ culture and customer service is bigger than him.

One example to watch? Apple. Is their drive and idealism and vision the company’s, or did that die with Steve Jobs? The next few years will tell us.

To return to the “Ghostbusters” metaphor, do you remember what happened at the end of the movie? (If for some awful reason you haven’t seen this cinema classic, I’ll wait here while you go and do that now.)

The state of affairs had gotten desperate. The old ways weren’t working. People had made mistakes. Nothing they were trying was stopping things from getting worse. As a last resort, they crossed the streams. This new way of doing things, taking their individual energy and combining it in this new and scary way, was finally enough to save the day.

Should you take all your life lessons and business acumen from Ray, Winston, Egon and Dr. Peter Venkman? Well, maybe not. (Although, if someone asks if you’re a god? Say yes.) But in this case – go ahead. Cross the streams. Dare to be yourself as well as your brand.

Here at Pixels & Pills, we like to push the envelope (or, better, encourage all of you to push it) when it comes to innovation in the healthcare space. That’s why we were so excited to have the opportunity to cover the Life Sciences Innovation Forum, produced by our friends at ExL Pharma in a partnership with Microsoft.

From the website:

The Life Science business environment and model is in a state of accelerating change. More drug approvals occurred in 2011 than any other year in the past decade. This brings some very exciting new opportunities to our industry. The traditional operating model separating Payers, Providers, and Government Health Agencies is under increasing pressures from globalization, healthcare reform, demographic shifts, and emerging healthcare technologies. The Life Sciences Innovation Forum addresses how to excel in this shifting global climate.

There is untapped potential for Pharmaceutical, Medical Device and Biotechnology companies to reap the benefits of the post-reform healthcare market. From discovery to product marketing, from manufacturing and distribution to patients, there are enormous opportunities to better leverage technology to create new business models, further differentiate your organization, and thrive in this dynamic environment.

At the upcoming LS Innovation Forum we are enlisting industry recognized experts and thought leaders to lead engaging sessions that provide you with strategic information to help you achieve goals in areas including:

• Patient Engagement
• Leveraging Enterprise Content
• Global Regulatory Collaboration
• Innovation Networks
• Leveraging Health Information Technology

Please take this opportunity to participate in the dialogue and be part of the exciting changes that our industry will experience in the coming months and years.

Register today for this exciting new event.

Date: January 26 & 27, 2012
Location: Marriott Forrestal Village Conference Center, Princeton, NJ
Website: http://www.lsinnovation.com/
Discount Code: C210PPS

We recently chatted with Paul Simms, Chairman of eyeforpharma, the mastermind behind the ‘Pharmasuiticus reps’ YouTube nature “documentary,” which you may have seen doing the rounds in your social networks.

Pixels&Pills: Why did you decide to make this video?

Paul Simms: We find ourselves quite frustrated with the current situation in pharmaceutical sales management. This is still the area of highest expenditure in medical promotion, and whilst we have seen some movement, there is still a hardcore group resisting the new methods which will ultimately make a great improvement to healthcare at large. This is despite the swathes of industry insiders preaching the need for change. So, to really incite action, we simply went to great lengths to emphasise the ridiculous nature of the once-saturated pharma sales landscape.

P&P: Has it worked?

PS: Depends what you mean.  After a week, there were over 5,000 views without us any real promotion from us, and we’re currently close to 10,000 views, so people are obviously watching and sharing.

Of course, numbers aren’t the point. We hope that it will switch on some light bulbs and make people think about changing their ways of working.  But it’s too early to say whether it has achieved this – ask me again in a year!

P&P: Popular it may be, but some people haven’t liked it, as evidenced by a few detractors on Pharmalot. Do those people have a point?

PS: The main objection seems to be a belief that we are poking fun at the pharma sales rep. And this is a group of people who are going through tough times. There is plenty of fear, diminishing returns and plenty of lay-offs within this group, and we’re kicking them while they’re down.

Laughing at others’ misfortune is certainly not our intention, nor do we want to rub people’s noses in it. The theme of the film was ‘evolution’, not ‘death’: we have used parody in an attempt to reduce or remove the ‘old style’ of rep from the face of the industry and make no apologies for communicating that in the most effective way we can think of. There are now plenty of examples of where a more mature focus on the differing types of customer and an individual level of communication has created great returns – for both the pharma company and patient. The changes within healthcare systems across the world provide an unprecedented opportunity to improve communication and rid this industry of its terrible reputation. But action, not sympathy, is required in order to make that happen.

P&P: What’s next for eyeforpharma?

PS: Well, connected to this film is the 10^th anniversary of our annual flagship event in Barcelona. This time we’re co-locating our eMarketing event with it, so we’ll have more than a thousand people in one space.

It’s interesting to me that whenever we’ve mentioned to the sales community that we’re bringing the online marketers to the same venue, they’ve welcomed this with open arms.

However, the opposite has been true of the online community. Their reaction has been either sheer ambivalence or more of a ‘what, those guys? What have they got to offer?’

For us, it’s clear that progress will only happen when both groups understand how to work together. And we’ve still got a fair bit of work to do in order to answer the question: ‘with 1000 pharma executives in one place, what together can we achieve?’ That’s the opportunity we have. Indeed, e would welcome input from anyone out there as to how to get the most out of this unique gathering. We may even let you take control!

Apart from that, we have a lot more initiatives in the pipeline. Some of them are even quite serious – for example we are currently running a mobile health competition which will really improve the lives of teenage cancer patients. It has backing from Livestrong and 9 other charities and we’re very excited about that.

P&P: And tell us… What will your next acting gig be?

PS: Hopefully none for a while! I hadn’t even intended to be in this one; clearly the camera crew decided I was the most Neanderthal-like and simply had to play the ‘alpha rep’. I guess it’s praise of a sort.