Hive Health

…breaking my heart this month. I can’t move for workshops. The delights of post it notes, flip charts and democratic strategy. All facilitated with patience and joy.

My bugbear with these multi day extravaganzas is with the foundation icebreaker sessions. This is more rant than thought through critique. (I am sugar rushing from some charity cake from brought over by the guys at The Nursery)

Surely we all get paid to attend, think and deliver. Surely we all consider it a default to work within a team, even an unfamiliar one. Whether that be off the cuff or after permitted thought. At no point is the voicing of ideas, public thinking and discussion considered god given, it’s not easy or natural for anyone. But it is a paid for requirement. The day job.

I increasingly struggle with the rationale for;  sharing the content of my wallet, climbing through imaginary tires, providing public facing previously unknown facts and almost feigned cardiac stress prior to a ‘colleague’ shoulder massage.

Are we all caught up in the entertainment aspect of this lunacy? This initial agenda item is slowly morphing from a simple required introduction into a corporate versions of Big Brother. I wouldn’t be surprised if the next meeting started with us all having to milk a boar. It’s getting a bit unnecessary.

You can’t manufacture or facilitate intimacy, if anything this can achieve the opposite of what’s required. Strangers soon become partners once you are midst a task. Is it unreasonable to consider human beings a social species?

As we haven’t had a poll in a while I though I would take this to you our reading public.

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I took a solo trip to the Egyptian peninsula for scuba diving and sun. I had this in abundance, and I also had a glimpse of how they do healthcare over there. I was not conducting fieldwork, I was having fun. So here are some simple stories.

1. The GP

At the dive centre I had to fill out a medical pre-assessment form. I ticked two boxes – chronic medication and asthma – and so I was advised to seek counsel from Polyclinic Dr Sadek.

I was fascinated by Dr Sadek and his polyclinicians from the moment my pickup car cruised into Dahab. At the entrance to town you see the pride in their billboard. The eye is focused magnificently on the sun bleached promises of “cosmotic dentistry” and “supervised TB treatment”. On the drive from the airport, sleepy and thirsty, I’d watched the desert. The hessian coloured mountains slid slowly off the highway. Polyclinic reminded me that I was still on the earth, and I should probably brush my teeth soon.

So I took my diving form to Dr Sadek. The waiting room was humble and dusty, with two chairs seating a Bedouin woman and her daughter. I was ushered straight into an even tinier consulting room.  A young Egyptian doctor greeted me, certificates wonky on the wall behind his head. We communicated well. I sat on the bed while he fitted a thin, saggy BP cuff to my arm. He listened to my chest and stuck a thermometer in my armpit. He asked, what is your medication for? I felt like an affluent idiot, ashamed to talk about the antidepressant I have taken for 10 years. “Western neurosis.”  Tell me about your asthma? “It is very mild and only happens when I run.” The doctor signed me fit to dive. I shook his hand and gave him the fee of 40 egyptian (4 quid).

2. Behaviour change

Like most of the world, Egyptians pay insurance for their family’s healthcare. A dive instructor in Dahab earns about $500 American a month. I’m not sure how much medical insurance costs, but a box of 20 fat, short, filtered yet lung exploding cigarettes is 50¢. My dive instructor Emad, consummate professional of recreational scuba and corny jokes, told me how he’d managed to kick cigarettes.  “I used to smoke 40-60 a day!  Quitting was hard. I couldn’t stand that I was going up to people I didn’t even know to ask for a smoke.”

I relate completely. How did he quit? “I said to God: I’m dying. I prayed and prayed. And I asked my doctor to help me.”

3. The pharmacy

Every day a different driver took us out to the dive site. One day I was in the back of an open jeep, crunched in amongst the cylinders and other diving getup. We always had a rolled up plastic carpet to lay the gear on when assembling it pre-dive. On this day, as we were streaming along the desert road, the carpet flew out of the jeep. I yelled and grabbed it. Emad, in the front seat, freaked out thinking his student had hit the dirt. All was well and he got a new magic carpet joke out of it.

We had a day’s diving. Every time we removed gear from the jeep, the driver warned me about the hot exhaust pipe. Every time I was cautious, until we did the final unloading and I seared a strip of calf flesh. There was a sound like barbecue taking to the edge of a steak. There was pain flying like a burning plastic carpet. It was actually not a serious burn, but with all the diving, the dressings didn’t last. So I went to the pharmacy in the main drag of town. Each time, the guy put betadine on the wound and a nice clean dressing.

It was exactly the same as a pharmacy in the UK.

I sneaked peeks at the behind-the-counter stash. I couldn’t really make sense of the drug names. Most stuff was locally packaged and unbranded. I saw a blood glucose monitor, the same leading brand we have here. I saw boxes and boxes – huge boxes – of orlistat. I think the Egyptians have a lot of metabolic disease even though they eat lots of beans. Could well be the cheap fags.

More later. Go to Egypt and check it out. Don’t smoke the cigarettes, they’ll kill ya.

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.

The window of opportunity for a brand to interact is a small one with pure product benefit marketing. The moment of differentiation is going to be tied to the point that the product/molecule has to do its work. With symptomatic conditions that moment is likely to be small, discreet and reactive. When you move away to the chronic therapy the opportunity to pass the ‘brandy around’ becomes increasingly tiny. Especially with therapies that are treating illness that are asymptomatic with products that are preventative. Is it any wonder that compliance to brands is low when their end benefit is miles away in some distant future? This coupled with a consistent need by our industry to focus on the dealer –  any emotional benefit often has been communicated miles away from the end user.

By expanding the brands ‘to do list’ beyond the molecule and finding places where a need exists the brand can start to deliver on many different levels and drive the experience much earlier. In my minds a delivered package across the patient lifecycle means further places to be different, and many more opportunities to develop a relationship with the patient. These opportunities needs to sit alongside the molecule delivered benefit, but could be considered a better place to focus our efforts, given our hard wired agency led molecule out tradition.

I am not wanting to drag into this article the pre prescription period. (Although its about time that we manned up and said that without industry the route to a medicine would continue to be a mess of inefficiency and chaos with out ‘market shaping’ activities). There is enough to do from initiation throughout the journey.

Writing this makes me think of a case study I read recently looking at airlines and the increasingly commoditised world of executive travel. When faced with price pressure (£3.5k/flight and falling) and parity of product experience (no delays, a la carte menu, wine list and smiling hotties). Virgin’s first port of call was to proliferate its services on board, from masseurs to manicures. Martinis to menus. It’s second step was a re-look across the entire journey from booking (parity with the script initiation?) to kicking off your inevitable PowerPoint presentation at your destination. This understanding presented a number of opportunities and new spaces to deliver in. Spaces where insight allowed undiscovered needs and frustration that although weren’t traditional spaces for an airline, were competition free territories. Conversations that hadn’t been had by anyone yet; a guide to your destination; a limo to the airport or pre processed luggage all drove differentiation.

For me this feels right, initially focus on the environment closest to the product customer interaction, move outwards into newer more radical territory. The approach is one that doesn’t seem beyond us? Does it?