Spotlight On... Medical Communications

1Medical communications | www.wearecouch.com

SPOTLIG HT ON. . .

M E D ICAL COM M U N ICATION S

I N 2017

COUCH MEDICAL COMMUNICATIONS ©2017.

All rights reserved.

Inspiring audiences. Motivating change. Thinking beyond.

ISSUE 4

IN THIS ISSUE, WE COVER:

Everyone can be given a voice . When i t comes to diagnosis , t reatment and condit ion management , the voices of al l those involved – pharma, HCPs and pat ients – need to be heard. So i t ’s important that care processes and services are designed in such a way that every party can be included, l istened to , and can feel l ike they are in control . Lucki ly, you can achieve al l of this through co-design, also known as co-creat ion.

Targeting for real people . We’re al l aware how diff icult i t ’s becoming to reach HCPs through tradit ional market ing methods. In fact , recent research is showing that physicians are seeing less than 30% of reps who try to meet with them. So maybe 2017 is the year to forget tradit ion and strengthen your engagement strategy by making i t more targeted.

A deeper look into patient behaviour . In 2016, we’ve discussed pat ient behaviour in great depth, and we’re hoping that the conversat ion wi l l cont inue into 2017. With a topic as complex as this , there is always more to discover, understand and address.

Personalised approaches . Personal isat ion is predicted to be a hot topic in 2017 across many industr ies , including pharma. But what sets pharma apart from the rest is that the level of personal isat ion is required to go much deeper. With this in mind, we pondered what would be the simplest way to create a personal ised experience.

Better information is clear information . When i t comes to providing pat ients with information, c lar i ty is v i tal . Lack of clar i ty can lead to pat ients forming their own conclusions if information can be easi ly misunderstood, which in this industry, can be quite dangerous!

Within this in mind, I hope you enjoy this issue and as always I would love to hear your thoughts . You can emai l me [email protected] or tweet me at @ash_rishi .

Ti l l next t ime.

Ash RishiManaging DirectorCOUCH Medical Communications

2016 was certainly memorable, but now we look ahead and discuss our hopes for what 2017 may br ing for the industry.

For this issue of SPOTLIGHT ON… we are looking at strategies and tact ics the industry can better ut i l ise , and what we feel can improve engagement in medical communicat ions. This year our focus is on giv ing a voice to al l involved in healthcare, how is this achieved? We discuss in this issue.

NOTE FROM THE EDITOR

Patient co-design

Stronger engagement strategies

Understanding patient behaviours

Personalisation

Deliver better patient information

IN THIS ISSUE

4 | Medical communications

As the demand on health services increases, there’s an ever more pressing

need for three-way medical communications between pharma, HCPs, and

patients. Part of this need stems from the pressure on existing services,

but an equally large part comes from the fact that patients are now better

educated about their medical conditions and treatments than they were in

the past.

Patients want to be involved in the care process, to feel listened

to, included, and in control. Co-design helps pharma and healthcare

professionals find ways to involve patients in their treatment, prevention,

management, and understanding of the illnesses and conditions that beset

them. Gaining deeper understanding of the patient journey through every

stage of an illness also allows for more meaningful marketing interactions,

as well as streamlining and bringing about practical changes in the everyday

patient experience with drugs and services.

PATIENT CO-DESIGN

| Medical communications4


CONNECTING CLINICAL PRIORITIES WITH HUMAN NEEDS

No treatment or health care plan can be said to be truly patient-centric if it doesn’t involve the patient’s thoughts, opinions and ideas from the outset. Co-design takes into account the perspectives of both the patients (or service users) and the professionals who deliver them.

It creates a platform for shared responsibility, but does not move patients towards total self-management without medical care, or undermine professional, clinical expertise.

Conducted properly, co-design opens conversations between care designers and the end users. These conversations can change priorities, focus minds, and ultimately build stronger, more trusting relationships between pharma who produce the drugs, the clinicians who administer and prescribe them, and patients who use them.

PATIENT-CENTRICITY

Patient-centricity has become something of a buzzword, but it should be much more. Co-design, or co-creation as it’s also sometimes called, breathes life into the phrase, showing how pharma take medical communications with patients seriously: that they actually ‘walk the talk’, understanding problems and improving services and treatments.

Talking to patients can have many benefits to pharma, including:

CREATING REAL CONNECTIONS WITH PATIENTS: not just offering drugs or treatments, but demonstrating understanding of patient’s feelings that can lead to isolation, especially in cases of rare or chronic illness.

CREATING EMPATHY: pharma and patients are at opposite ends of the same pole, and co-creation can help them bridge the divide, bringing insights into each other’s contribution to treating and managing disease or illness.

CREATING ONGOING INTERACTION: co-creation isn’t a one-off exercise but an ongoing collaboration that involves patients at all stages of treatment, from diagnosis to recovery.

CO-DESIGN COMPLIANCE

Building trust with patients requires a high degree of authenticity in both attitude and practice, so co-design needs to be, and is, compliant. Involving regulatory and legal teams from the outset of the co-design process is vital so compliance underpins efforts to include the patient’s voice in building future care solutions.

When approached from this standpoint, pharma can see itself as a services company as much as a drugs supply company. As well as considering new drugs and strategies, the co-design process and community involvement creates a mutually beneficial foundation that brings customers and suppliers together to find new pathways that make things better.

As more healthcare practitioners and providers engage in co-creating services with patients, medical communications between all parties — HCPs, patients and pharma — will form an important part of treatment. Co-design ensures all voices are heard, not just those of the ‘professionals’, and gives pharma a wider understanding of public healthcare and health service needs, guiding them to develop drugs and treatments that make a real difference.

6 | Medical communications6 | Medical communications

For many pharma companies it’s becoming increasingly difficult to reach

HCPs with traditional marketing methods. But that doesn’t spell the end

of the familiar close relationship between pharma and their first lines of

contact. It just means the goal posts are in a slightly different place, and

a few changes in strategy are needed in order to gain better engagement

through targeted medical communications.

STRONGER ENGAGEMENT STRATEGIES

INFORMATION OVERLOAD

Recent research indicates most pharma marketing is still shooting towards the old goal posts, in that they’re not actively maximising the digital opportunity. The same research highlighted that doctors today estimate they spend around 84 hours a year dealing with pharma through non-personal channels. This works out to around 64% of their pharma interaction time, with 26,000 of the most popular prescribers on the receiving end of 2,800 pieces of communications every year from the pharma industry.

Time pressured physicians have cut down on the number of face-to-face meetings with pharma sales reps. Research data from sales

and marketing firm ZS indicates that far fewer physicians have time to meet with sales reps, resulting in many now seeing less than 30% of those who try to arrange meetings with them.

Clearly, medical communications must develop a fresh approach, with more emphasis placed on multichannel marketing efforts, delivering carefully crafted messages that build and maintain physicians’ trust. Despite the fact that the survey analyses indicate that around 75% of physicians don’t entirely trust pharma marketing information, an (almost) equally large percentage (around 65%) indicate a willingness to interact with pharma through social channels.


CRAFTING THE RIGHT MESSAGE

Thanks to online social interactions, patients are better educated about their own health conditions, and this newfound knowledge changes the way they communicate with HCP’s and navigate their personal patient journeys.

When pharma also understands that patient journey, they have a framework that can shift the focus from the product to the patient, and so create medical communications that are more patient focused, and therefore more helpful to physicians.

Deeper understanding of the patient journey allows pharma to:

Co-design effective patient support systems

Get closer to patients through storytelling

Recognise the patient needs, from initial symptoms through diagnosis to treatment and medication.

BETTER ENGAGEMENT THROUGH PERSONA DEVELOPMENT

Customer personas are the secret sauce. Done correctly, they’re incredibly powerful mines of information that can sharpen medical communications to achieve pinpoint accuracy.

One set of personas to cover all segments of a customer base, however, isn’t enough. HCPs deal with customers from all walks of life and at all different stages of their patient journey.

What’s needed is a persona for each segment that represents the customer at that particular journey stage, and which thus meets the need of the HCP to guide the patient through the stage at which they come together.

This can only be achieved with research that delves behind the clinical, into the realms of human needs and emotions, problems and challenges. Personas should represent real people more than they reflect groups of statistics.

Instead of promoting only products and solutions (which HCPs are already overloaded with) in non-personal communications, pharma can demonstrate patient empathy. They can become sympathetic guides to HCPs, recognising the moment in the patient journey when their product is most helpful.

ENGAGING THE PEOPLE BEHIND THE PERSONAS

In creating real people personas that go beyond statistics, pharma can also discover where those actual people can be reached:

Which medical journals they read

Which forums they populate

Online networks

Which social media platforms they use

Other places they turn for information

Knowing where HCPs look for information is also key to presenting medical communications in the right format so they’re read, heard, understood, and remembered at the exact time they’re needed.



Understanding the behaviour of patients: the why, where and how they

do things as well as the reasons that prevent them doing those things, is

key to successful medical communications. In today’s connected world,

patients are bombarded with information, much of it no more than a rehash

of information they’ve seen many times before regarding health and illness.

Communications is, therefore, far more effective when it delivers something

new, something the patient (or potential patient) hasn’t seen before.

This is especially important for those people who have conditions that are

not yet diagnosed. The majority of patients who request information or

medication from their doctors following exposure to marketing messages,

already know they have the condition the medication treats. Reaching those

in pre-diagnosis stages (estimated at up to three quarters of those with

certain conditions such as bipolar and depression) offers pharma a large,

currently untapped pool of potential new customers.

UNDERSTANDING PATIENT BEHAVIOURS



But beyond the benefits to pharma, better public health on a wider scale is also achievable because when conditions are diagnosed in their early stages, the prognosis is often brighter.

Designing medical communications that reach the heart of patient behaviour patterns, however, needs a less traditional approach. Delving under the surface, into the mind set and attitude that prompts any behaviour is necessary in order to effect behaviour change.

INFLUENCING BEHAVIOUR FOR BETTER HEALTH

In order to influence and change behaviour, pharma needs to understand and address the habits and mind sets that cause patterns of behaviour:

What motivates patients?

Which external factors need to come together to encourage patients to take up services or treatments?

What habits or emotional responses need to change in order to redirect patient behaviour?

Here are four aspects of human behaviour that drive actions, build habits and influence ideas and attitudes:

REMOVING BARRIERS. Even very small barriers can prevent patients accessing treatment. Barriers exist in all areas of life, and are often external to the patient. Simple things like transport availability can prevent someone attending a support group, for instance. Not being able to quickly find information on a website can induce patients to give up the search for help or education for a condition or medication.

BUILDING MOTIVATION. Medical communications can be used to reinforce a patient’s intrinsic motivation towards better health, boosting self-esteem through positive values, and recognising and celebrating small milestones. By understanding what motivates their target market to achieve their goals, pharma can design communications that underpin positive values.

THE SOCIAL ASPECT. By encouraging social connections, pharma can subvert the growing sense of isolation that besets many people with some health conditions. Being connected socially to others can lead to more timely treatment when it’s needed, induce positive behaviour through a sense of belonging and helping others. It encourages people to share knowledge and give support.

SELF-BELIEF. If people don’t believe they can do a thing, they probably can’t, so lack of belief in one’s own capabilities or abilities can quickly lead to abandoned health plans and a return to old, unhealthy habits. By providing tools that allow patients to record and document achievements and progress, pharma could encourage adherence to treatment programmes or fitness routines.

Incorporating behavioural approaches in medical communications can include information on support groups, social networks both face-to-face and online, community initiatives, and fitness programmes.

Getting undiagnosed patients to recognise and seek help with worrying symptoms is one thing. Encouraging them to then change the behavioural habits that lead to ill health, and maintain that change in the long term, takes an entirely different brand marketing strategy - one that understands aspects of behavioural science.


PERSONALISATION


Real personalisation comes about through understanding the needs of your

audience. It takes deep listening in order to truly grasp the difficulties they

face, taking in data and information from diverse sources that may include

statistics as well as the results of surveys, questionnaires, and face-to-

face interviews. When all this information is synthesised through accurate

analysis, the equation between patients, healthcare providers, and pharma,

balances. Medical communications should address the needs of the target

audience more than the needs (or end marketing goals) of pharma.

COMMON GOALS, COMMON GROUND

With a typical working day running at around 12 hours, GPs don’t have much spare time to engage with pharma representatives or read branded medical information. In fact, statistics reveal that branded pharma materials are not accessed on a regular basis. And yet, doctors still need to read up on medical matters to stay abreast of drug and treatment innovations, and pharma still needs to promote their goods and services. Both sides of the industry are offering what the other needs, and yet they’re often like ships passing in the night, close but not actually connecting. This disconnect provides an opportunity for pharma to do better.

Medical practitioners, of whom there are almost 240,000 in the UK, work in all kinds of different environments:

They see patients at differing stages in their illness or treatment

They’re of different ages

Have varying levels of experience

Have different educational needs

Specialise in different areas

Deal with varying demographics, some more challenging than others

Have differing learning preference


We live and operate in a multichannel world, with many avenues down which to explore and find information. Personalising education and information materials by creating them to speak specifically to an audience within an identified group is the most effective way pharma can ensure they reach their target market.

A PATIENT-CENTRIC APPROACH

Putting the patient at the centre of marketing activities demonstrates understanding of the challenges that face HCP’s on a daily basis, and a willingness to help them create meaningful services.

Take, for instance, non-adherence by patients. It may be resistance to taking medication for fear of side effects, reluctance to adopt a new lifestyle or stick with a new diet, and can have many points of origin. It’s an ongoing problem that creates mountains of unused prescription drugs in the UK, and costs around $600 billion every year to the pharma industry.

The pharma industry, with its access to data and technology, and through the creation of detailed patient personas, is ideally positioned to tackle the issues concerning adherence and non-adherence, whether it is intentional or accidental.

Analyses that target known areas of conflict such as this can aid pharma in the creation of customer personas built around an understanding of the issues behind non-adherence. What motivations, fears, beliefs, or priorities drive a patient to ignore or disregard a prescribed treatment programme? Devising medical communications around this issue alone would benefit both pharma and HCPs if it resulted in fewer wasted drugs and provided doctors with a fresh way to approach patient non-adherence, or a way of offering stronger patient support.

BRINGING DATA TO LIFE

Personalisation represents the real people whose lives, actions, attitudes and beliefs or practices inform the bulk of statistics. Information gleaned from both primary and secondary data can be broken down into market segments to create smaller, more concise groups. Within these groups are the small details that make up real lives, complete with specific problems and challenges.

We may talk about market segments and personas, but let us not lose sight of the fact that medical communications are most effective and most personal when they’re devised and written for real people in real life situations.

11Medical communications |


DELIVER BETTER PATIENT INFORMATION

We all have different preferred learning methods and ways we like to access

information. Even those who haven’t given the issue much thought will, if we

think about it, realise we either like to see pharma content and instructions

in written format, or we prefer pictorial diagrams to indicate a course of

action. Most of us like a mixture of the two.

There are other aspects that either promote or hamper learning too, and these revolve around how information is presented — its format. Enough research evidence exists to make some features accepted practise when formatting printed or web-based info:

Font sizes and typeface

Use of headings

Bold or italic text to highlight salient points

Plenty of white space

Judicious use of bullet points

These physical aspects exist because we understand human behaviour when reading: how we skim text, how we dismiss text that seems hard to read or dense, jargon-filled or complex, for instance.

One aspect of human nature that’s often overlooked, however, is the tendency to ask

questions and make up our own solutions if the answers aren’t clear. This human behavioural trait is of particular relevance to pharma in all marketing stages, but can especially help with the creation of patient information leaflets (PILs).

BETTER PILS

Patients read PILs like they read anything else. A quick skim down for the bits that apply to their personal situation, then backtrack to the parts that stand out. Any information that appears unclear, ambiguous, or doesn’t answer the question ‘why’ is likely to be passed over or ignored.

Examples include such instructions as ‘do not take with alcohol’ or ‘always take with food’. Why? What will happen otherwise? If patients don’t see the need to follow directions, they’re far more likely to disregard them, which can exacerbate the non-adherence problem and lead to ineffective medication or worsened side effects.



CLARITY, DEPTH, AND BREADTH IN SCIENTIFIC PATIENT INFORMATION

As patients become better informed on their conditions, the need for clear medical communications in PILs, grows. A recent survey conducted among cancer patients and care groups across 39 countries revealed a significant 60% of respondents complained that the science behind treatment innovations was not clearly explained. While the patients they are intended to support are aware of scientific advances, the majority of patients felt left out of the communication loop.

They wanted to know more about how offered treatments worked, why they worked, and how they affected personal outcomes. Almost 55% of respondents to the survey agreed that an improved understanding of the scientific concept behind a new treatment improved a patient’s quality of life and their clinical outcome.

One of the biggest barriers to patient understanding was a lack of familiarity with scientific concepts and language. Simple, clear, jargon-free scientific information that patients could access easily, such as online or through social media for example, would reach more patients.

PROVIDING BETTER INFORMATION THROUGH CONTENT MARKETING

The survey demonstrates the clear need for pharma to simultaneously simplify and extend the information made available to patients. But before pharma can produce the kind of content patients or their HCPs need, there has to be an understanding of the questions, doubts, and concerns clamouring for answers. A sound way of digging into the most pressing issues is by creating personas. The insights gleaned can then be used to build content marketing strategies that engage, educate, and inform.

It is not, of course, a ‘once and done’ strategy. Market segment needs change, ways of accessing information appear and vanish just as quickly, changing people’s behaviour accordingly. So there’s also an ongoing need to measure, evaluate and analyse response in order to gauge content effectiveness.

When the medical communications generated by pharma align with the questions being asked or concerns being raised, the result is always better information.





© COUCH 2017.

At COUCH, we create content that responds to the known needs and preferences of your target audience, and elicits the desired response from them.

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Spotlight On... Medical Communications