Hive Health

These days pharmaceutical companies are faced with shrinking sales forces and reduced access to healthcare professionals. With less time to learn about products and meet with reps, they’re increasingly turning to the internet for information. To help keep up, pharma brands are being pushed to find more effective ways of promoting themselves digitally.

To help solve this problem, Physicians Office Resource (POR), a trusted digital and print resource for over 360,000 US physicians, has launched a new site: PharmaCONNECT. It allows pharmaceutical brands to actively engage the right healthcare professionals, at a convenient time and in a trusted context. The site offers physicians and pharma companies a place to connect in real time or by appointment, in a product agnostic or neutral environment.

By giving digital space (impressions) to pharma brands for free, PharmaCONNECT only charges for successful, active engagements. Active engagements are the types of interactions that can truly impact on prescription decisions, such as a healthcare professional scheduling a rep visit through the POR site, getting eDetailed, clicking to chat with a rep, or a variety of other engagement options.

PharmaCONNECT hopes to create a space where healthcare professionals can have meaningful and measurable engagement that will help pharma companies to get their message across.  The site will also include a resource section and a frequently asked questions page. The site works on the Android and iOS platforms while mobile apps are in development, including a click-to-call feature for iPhone, so healthcare professionals can connect to a rep right away.

Since its launch at the start of this month Novartis, Genentech, Abbott, Bayer Schering, AstraZeneca, BMS, Roche, Pfizer and Boehringer Ingelheim have all already established a multiple brand presence, and POR claims to have 15 to 20 other pharma companies set to join by end of the year.

PharmaCONNECT is currently only operating in the US; it will be interesting to see if it expands globally, and if pharma companies continue to embrace this new platform.

In the news today, NHS Scotland is being lobbied on the mass intake of newly qualified doctors into healthcare posts. This happens in August every year. Now the Royal College of Physicians (Edinburgh) links this practice to higher death rates and is proposing a more staggered approach of rotations.

Come back with me to February 1, 2002. The isle is burning in a cold storm. A South African disembarks in Durham City. Note the sleet melting into her clothing as she hauls 20 kg of backpack up a cobbled street. Hey Isle, it’s me! Luugging his own baggage up this hill, quite immune to my whining, is my fellow émigré Greg. Here we are in the picture on a Skype chat.

Greg was newly qualified in medicine and had secured a urology house officer post in Durham’s teaching hospital. I was a copywriter with an ancestral visa (4 years – sweet). We were best mates. We rented a stone cottage. I got a job helping farmers claim foot & mouth compensation. I also waitressed and went clubbing with my new friends. Come July, we had to get serious. I had to write, and Greg had to get on the proper rotation scheme. I was going to Ealing. He was going to Croydon for August intake. We divided our cups and spoons and we parted.

Greg is now almost in his consultant brogues and I’m doing pretty well my stuff too. I offer you this story because it frames the August system in a ten year period, a good time to assess whether it is working.

The firmament of the NHS is its focus on the patient. If the patient is dying, there is the rush of reflexive action. If the patient has died, there is, ideally, calm reflection. Studies like this one will now be pulled into many different shapes. The focus spreads to the carers and the cash. You have to keep the doctor on the most effective, least expensive training path. Staggering teaching would be difficult. If it means more red tape, the government probably doesn’t want to know right now.

You can read this training story here and do some reflection of your own. With all the cuts and punches, note that it hasn’t made the mainstream health news. Remind yourself that in 2012, training will be absorbed into the new Health Education England and NHS Trust Development Authority. And watch this space to see how our little Scottish study stands up in the storm.

Two newsworthy events from last night: one, I got injured. Two, I attended a do-shop run by the Young Creative Council: how to brief in illustration. The story unfolds thus.

I am not very young, but a mere stripling in the wider creative world, so I cleave to such opportunities with gusto.   The YCC was established by advertising students from the London College of Communication. These guys have no funding but plenty of pulling power with local agencies. They teamed up with production house Jelly London, who described their process and dazzled us with an excellent reel.

Then we assembled in small groups and bent to our task: creating a TV ad animation from a radio script for Twinings tea. No objective, no strategy, no target audience – all had to be surmised from the script.  The picture was a familiar one:  the things people do things differently across the planet. In China you start the day with a bland gruel, in Russia you’d prefer to be gently whipped awake with thin branches. In the sensible UK you naturally hit the kettle. Could Twinings make this concept as refreshing as a morning brew?

Tea is fundamental.  All our funny little rituals show people are fundamental too.  We pored over a scrapbook of illustration styles, wanting to parody these urbane rituals as simple, endearing – uniting not dividing. Humanity appeared as line drawn animals in suits. Perfect:  we build cultures but we’re also just animals in clothes and we need looking after. Give us sustenance, give us tannins.

We’d need a panda (China), a black bear (Russia) and a bulldog. (I preferred a fox.) The style would be simply a linear slide through the characters with the steamy cuppa as finale. Honesty, it was more exciting than described. Hey, genius doesn’t come for free.

The Jelly people did the rounds, helping out with execution. I want to be a storyboard artist! The speed, the ease!  Our stuff was liked and encouraged. I took a break to sip a beer on Cavendish Square. Unfortunately I sat on a chair that was covered in broken glass. I punctured my thigh in two places and began to bleed vividly.  I decided to avoid group alarm by transporting my injury quietly home. I’m cool like that. Plus I needed a Rooibos.

We’re pretty lucky here, I think today i would bolt on privileged to this. Every now and then you get a moment to sit back and say blimey. This is good.

This evening sees the end of a 6 month training session with Geoff Clarke focusing on communication and change. Today saw us all change a little. Our final module was rounded up with a session with John Peters. John aged 29, on his first mission during Operation Desert Storm was blown out of the sky when his Tornado jet was hit by a surface to air missile. John came to the world’s attention in January 1991, when his bruised and battered face flashed onto television screens around the world.  This disfigured image became a potent symbol the war.

I have been struggling to write a description of our evening. I will borrow some better words “his dramatic and sometimes harrowing experiences reached deep into our innermost minds, showing us how we can overcome even our worst fears and nightmares.  His war was not all as he expected – it became a seven-week ordeal of torture and interrogation, testing him to the absolute limit and bringing him close to death.”

I remember John’s picture vividly. It haunted many of us who were of TV watching age. Bringing us sharply back to human reality midst a culture of war that now seems so macho, Gung ho and media driven. John’s talent for communicating his experience held us all, one moment with touching humanity and the next with laughter. From moments of panic, mid crash calm, object fear and protected dignity and onto the surreal world of a global celebrity. From concrete cells, and cigarette burning guards, to a first free meal -. chocolate in Baghdad’s Novotel. Tonight it’s been an honor to be guided through his experience.

John’s honesty on his ‘failure’ as a pilot sits uncomfortably with me now. To john the image above is one that reminds him of a failed objective. An unsuccessful mission. The man before us stood with no agenda or ego, and made us better people for it. The choice John’s made to take this time and use it  to help us develop is pretty awe inspiring. To writ large ones emotions for others to learn from is a sign of courage and a generosity of spirit that is pretty unique.

For me tonight has been one of those golden moments at Hive. Thank you.