Hive Health

The more voyeuristic of you may have heard of a little internet sensation launched in 2009 called ChatRoulette. For those of you who haven’t, ChatRoulette is a website that pairs random strangers from around the world together for webcam-based conversations. Visitors to the site randomly begin an online chat (video, audio or text) with another visitor. At any point, either user may leave the current conversation and initiate another random connection. ChatRoulette is naturally littered with many people channelling their inner Johnny Knoxville, but this hasn’t stopped over 1.5 million users a year from logging on and taking part.

Last year the concept of ChatRoulette was combined with the need many people feel to connect with others who have similar health conditions or illnesses to them. The result? HealCam.

HealCam is all about “talking to patients like you”. Users are invited to select a disease or medical condition (such as Crohn’s or HIV) that they’d like to discuss, and are then connected with another user with the same condition.  The site founders wanted to create a place where people can exchange information, moral support and advice on a face to face level.  Since its launch last year the feedback from patients has been overwhelmingly positive. Users feel that HealCam offers them a personal platform from which to have a genuine, one-to-one chat with someone else like them.

As with ChatRoulette, the potential for misadventure is high. However, the biggest problem facing this relative newborn is a lack of traffic. According to Dr. Ostrovsky, one of the founders of HealCam, the site is currently only receiving 2,000 visitors a day.  It’s unclear whether this is due to an unwillingness on the part of patients to chat face to face, or a lack of awareness that the site exists.  Despite this, HealCam has demonstrated the need online patient communities have for connection and offered a unique solution, making it one little start-up to keep an eye on.

It’s been a roller coaster week this week, filled with elation, reactivity, worry, drive and planning. Midst way through the week we met with a future star of our group to fine tune a new venture. It’s exciting stuff, and its writ large that out culture is playing a big roll in the decision to move forward and make something happen. It got two of us ‘loudly discussing’ culture and what drives it on a very long trip back from Hampshire. Two hours on culture, midst the fairly hefty after effects of a ‘draining’ meeting was enough for both of us. The thoroughness of the debate was facilitated by my inability to pick a road that wasn’t snarled up or moving at more than the pace of a mortally wounded snail.

We netting out (I think?), with a conculsion that cultures a bloody difficult thing to define – but it drives all the organisations we are involved with. Our digital innovation agency Ebee’s culture is pretty unique and different from ourselves at Hive, yet both add terrific value in terms of our identification and cohesion. Its been interesting recently for us, as over the next few months we have a mate in the office setting up his own agency and sharing the space. Dom’s been really interesting to chat to on this – to see a partisan view on what makes us tick, in terms of a clear perspective on our ‘working environmental soup’. How ‘it’ maintains itself in the absence of us, hows it’s intelligent and spirited, how our philosophy connects us all. How its what makes ‘beapart’ not just ad toss.

At hive we manage this with a mixture between individual behaviour, spirit, personality and a collection of ad hoc and planned occurrences that drive all that we want our business home to be. I came out of the van (still not considered a business expense by the guys – despite its clear status as our mobile boardroom), with a better understanding of another perspective.  I had prioritised a proactive event supported culture (but definitely not compulsory fun or timetabled pizza) over individual behaviour and the impact on the environment we create by being us. Both sit within a framework  of unwritten rules, that we could take months to define and hone, but we are probably better just getting on and driving it by being us and not being too bothered about the minutiae of our special soup’s recipe.

Its the sum of these parts that make us dead special and a our space a destination for new entrepreneurs, the best talent in the business and some seriously good times.  Its not the cliche of pizzas at meetings, but effort to be constantly bothered, to behave and deliver what feels the right way.

So what did you do to drive culture today?

In 1993 George Ritzer described the concept of McDonaldisation. He suggested that the principals behind the world domination of McDonalds had relevance far beyond fast food and were enabling globalised fast living in all sorts of different ways.

In 2000 Harding and Taylor took this theory and proposed that the big high street/ supermarket chains represented the McDonaldisation of pharmacy. ‘Fast-pharmacy’ was built on traits of efficiency, calculability, predictability and control opposed to a service based offering in smaller chains or sole-owned pharmacies.

While these 4 traits remain readily identifiable within, in particular, supermarket pharmacies other large chains (such as Boots) appear to have moved on. In 2006 Ritzer elaborated on his theory to describe the process of Starbucksisation as a variant on the McDonaldisation model. In this incarnation the focus is on promoting a premium product and the customer experience while still benefitting from a streamlined business model. In Starbucks we are encouraged to ‘hang out’ and have meetings on comfortable sofa’s while drinking ‘premium’ coffee in porcelain mugs. In reality however the experience is highly rationalised. Coffee beans are bought in bulk, the vast majority of customers take-out and don’t participate in the ‘community’ offer and barista skill is replaced by standardised protocols. Ritzer argues that Starbucks represents a case of emperor’s new clothes. The apparently individualised and locally determined offer cannot disguise the mass marketing strategy and the critiques of McDonaldised society still apply.

For pharmacy this shift towards a Starbucks-like model is perhaps more significant than it might at first seem. In the drive to reposition pharmacy within the British healthcare system there are calls for pharmacies to become ‘healthy living centres’ at the ‘heart’ of local communities. While the McDonaldised offer finds it difficult to answer to these demands a ‘Starbucksised’ model that provides an ersatz ‘consistently local’ experience seems to be a perfect fit and it is these chains that are most keenly exploring this new direction for pharmacy.

Whether or not this move presents a problem depends perhaps on your perspective.

For pharmacy as a profession a number of concerns associated with a business model that remains strongly determined by centralised management include: decreased personal involvement and autonomy of the individual pharmacist resulting in de-skilling, the need to place shareholder interests over and above potential patient benefit and the fact that the ‘brand‘ sits as a higher level communicator with the consumer and defines the professionality or otherwise of the pharmacist on his/her behalf.

Added to this, with just nine McDonaldised and Starbucksised pharmacy groups now holding around 50% of all pharmacy contracts in the UK the influence of this model in determining the direction of future pharmacy policy cannot be ignored. How the Starbucks model shapes the ‘healthy living centre’ will, in particular, have an impact on the types of environment pharmaceutical products are sold/ dispensed within and the type of expertise and services that are offered alongside medicines.

Food for thought next time you grab a latte…

The advertising industry gets some pretty tough press but for some reason when we parody ourselves it’s an uncomfortable delight to experience.

I remember giving out copies of E by Matt Beaumont, an email based novel to help graduates understand the unique culture big agencies have. I dont think there has been one person who has read it that doesn’t recognise a colleague. With the exception of us at hive of course!

I stumbled upon this today looking for images prior to a board meeting presentation tomorrow. It’s a ‘tongue and cheek’ look at the state of advertising, produced by some recruitment guys in Sydney; Step Change. Googling them I found some background to this film. ”We wanted to attract staff who love the industry but hate the politics, egos and rigid, demarcated roles of the big agencies” explained Step Change’s General Manager, Jeff Cooper. “It’s ridiculous to the point of offensive that only ‘creatives’ are capable of great ideas or that only ‘suits’ know how to talk to clients, so we’re looking for people to do both in the one role; something we’ve called ‘Creative Solutions’.”