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GCI Health President Jill Dosik’s Insight Featured in O’Dwyer’s Magazine
GCI Health President Jill Dosik analyzes approaches and strategies for communicators to consider regarding personalized medicine in the O’Dwyer’s Magazine feature, “Educating Media, Patients to Personalized Medicine.”
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October-21-2011
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Healthcare Game Changer
This story originally appeared in PRWeek Insider on 04/23/11 (subscription required).
More People are playing Farmville than Watching Dancing with the Stars. More people are playing Texas Hold'em Poker than are watching Glee.* And Zynga, maker of Farmville, has about half the monthly active users that Twitter does - 135MM versus 283MM.*
Clearly, gaming is a big part of American life. People are choosing gaming for entertainment over all the other immersive options out there. As smartphones become even more ubiquitous, that puts a powerful gaming machine right in everyone's pocket.
Gaming is not just for kids. 18-49 year olds make up the largest percentage of gamers at 49%, and the average age of the most frequent game purchaser is 40 years old. There are more people over 50 that play games (26%), than children under 18 (25%).*Gaming for Healthcare?
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Anyone who has observed their teenager in the death grip of level 10 of Angry Birds recognizes the complete concentration and immersion that experience offers. Could some of that focus and engagement be used for healthcare?
The Journal of the American Medical Association took a look at the impact of health gaming and found that: "Sufficiently engaging games might enhance the effectiveness of health messaging, allowing individuals to practice useful thought patterns and behaviors and encouraging them to explore and learn from failure in safe virtual environments." JAMA reported that recent games had positive outcomes, such as Re-Mission, a game for adolescent and young adult patients with cancer, which improved adherence; and Wii Fit for obesity. Now, if that language sounds a little academic, consider the tone of most healthcare educational materials, which tend to be dry and impersonal. Gaming can blend education and entertainment, so you can learn while having fun.
It comes back to your marketing objectives. Can you educate through a gaming experience? Can you motivate through a system of goals, feedback and competition? Could gaming be another way to tell the story and get the message across? If so, gaming could be an emerging avenue worth trying.
Gaming clearly has advantages on the social web for sharing of scores, competition, and team play. From a news perspective, there are many angles, from the patient, to the disease, to the game itself. Gaming offers multimedia assets that can be used in news releases, YouTube, or Facebook.
What works for consumers, works as well with healthcare practitioners. What better way to teach a doctor about a new mechanism of action than an immersive and interactive game/learning experience? With the increasing use of tablets and other devices in detailing, the opportunities will only increase.Posted by: mark.davis@gcihealth.com
April-22-2011
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Blogger Outreach, PR and Healthcare
This story originally appeared in PRWeek Insider on 04/20/11 (subscription required).
With the emergence of today's digital space, it is safe to say that bloggers are the new reporters and journalists. Their content reaches many at once and is easily accessible by a click of the finger. What bloggers choose to feature on and write about can go beyond just sharing light on a particular topic. Their opinions are well trusted by faithful readers, and their posts have the ability to persuade and most importantly, greatly influence perceptions. Blogging was one of the first Web2.0 technologies and it changed the dynamics of influence.
What does this mean for PR?
It is important to find bloggers who address the same audiences as your company. Once you find them, research their dos and don'ts. There's nothing more wasteful than spending a significant amount of time reaching out to a number of bloggers and pitching stories, services and/or products that turn out to be of no interest to them. Also, make sure that these bloggers are people who do want to be contacted and if indicated, make note to follow their particular guidelines on how they would like to be reached. These initial steps can make the difference in unanswered emails, one-time features, or a series of professional partnerships based on lasting, trusting relationships that successfully introduce many to your company and the work that you do.For Healthcare PR?
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Bloggers have become a frequently referenced source of healthcare information. So, finding and reaching out to influential bloggers in your category is a critical component of your outreach. Bloggers themselves are individuals, and should receive customized communications instead of mass mailed press releases - they should be targeted to their blog and their community. Blogs should be analyzed to determine relation to the disease state, influence, and on-label suitability.
Special considerations may be necessary for healthcare. Some pharma companies are only comfortable reaching out to bloggers with journalistic credentials - those who have established a presence in traditional as well as online media, or are otherwise recognized as an authority in their area. Blog monitoring may need to be carried out to monitor the conversation and gauge response by the community. This, in itself, can lead to useful insights for companies. And understanding bloggers' rights to make honest statements regarding products is a hard pill for healthcare companies to swallow.
However, the reward is a more personal interpretation of your news, told in an engaging way to a very interested community. Sometimes, it is through these posts that a person might first hear about a new procedure or drug. Ultimately, your company will engage in impactful relationships with people who have very personal connections to the stories shared.
When it comes to blogger outreach, make the effort. But do your homework first.Posted by: mark.davis@gcihealth.com
April-22-2011
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Rx for Pharma Tweeting
This story originally appeared in PRWeek Insider on 04/18/11 (subscription required).
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Two weeks ago a Marc Jacobs intern publicly melted down on Twitter and then quit. Two weeks before that, Chrysler experienced some Twitter road rage, and an agency was fired. And two weeks before that, the Red Cross had to confiscate the keys from their tweeter for #gettngslizzerd.
Imagine if these accidents had happened in a healthcare setting? We don't need FDA guidelines to understand the hot water we'd be in.
Pharma company Twitter feeds are heavily stage-managed. Posts are vetted by an army of regulatory and legal staff, and updates are timed like Obama's inauguration. The few branded Twitter feeds are even more tightly controlled. But who tweets and how? It's usually a junior staffer copying and pasting the approved post and frequently using their own choice of software. That's the weak link. The examples at the beginning are a cautionary tale of people inadvertently mixing their personal and professional profiles, and of tweeters going off the rails.
Software Rx: Twitter feeds are frequently handled using a dashboard like Hootsuite which can manage a number of feeds at once and offers analytic capabilities for tracking tweets and mentions. It can handle Facebook pages as well, enabling you to easily syndicate content selectively across the social platforms. Even multiple clients can be set up. The lure is strong to add your personal accounts, and create a mothership dashboard so you can be complete master of your domain. Resist it, it's a bad idea. It's all too easy to click the wrong icon and post to the wrong account - especially late at night or in a busy airport. One wrong click and you blast your personal tweet about that new band to your client's followers. Or, you might post that handbag website to your client's Facebook page. Amusing, yes, but it's not as funny the next morning.
The best practice is to create separate dashboards for work and personal accounts using different email addresses and logins. Then using themes, give them radically different colors and backgrounds so you can easily distinguish between them, no matter how flummoxed you might be. For added safety, consider using different browsers, like Chrome for work and Firefox for personal.
Mobile Rx: The same goes for mobile devices. For tweeting on the go, use a different mobile app for your clients and personal tweets. Put them on different pages or folders. Don't tweet and drive.
Content Rx: If you're tweeting for a pharma company or brand, your hands are already tied and the blinders are on, just carefully press 'send,' per the above. If you're fortunate enough to be tweeting for a hospital or association in a less structured way, you need to have some guidelines for the voice of your feed. You are the spokesperson of the brand, and while you want personality and authenticity, behave as if your every tweet could be on the cover of USA Today, because if you screw up, it will be. Consider using a workflow where tweets are approved before they are issued.
So take your medicine and tweet me in the morning @markhdavis.Posted by: mark.davis@gcihealth.com
April-22-2011
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Patient + Education Does Not = Compliant Patient
Cathy Fink
It might seem counter-intuitive for someone in the patient education business to say that too much information can be the enemy of compliance, but all too often that is the case. As marketers, we believe that an educated consumer makes the best patient and by extension, providing patients with good information will inevitably lead to better outcomes.
But with all the information readily available to patients on the Web, it is more important than ever to develop education that acknowledges a patient's need to take ownership of their condition. A sense of some control, after all, is the key to compliance. This means taking a more sophisticated/customizable approach to patient education - one that puts the flow of information in patient's hands, ideally supported by physician education that runs on a parallel track.
Any diagnosis, especially that of a chronic disease, requires a huge shift in one's perception of oneself. Even if the diagnosis initially comes as a relief, none of us wants to accept the fact that we may be unwell or aging. As we ask people to go through that process, we have to do it in a way that makes sense to them and acknowledges their reluctance to view themselves in a different light.
Regardless of the stated goal of a patient communications program, on some level we as marketers are also asking a patient to change their behavior. But creating behavioral change is a process and to be effective, it needs to have elements that enable the individual to feel that they are in control of their condition, with compliance as evidence of that control.An effective program is one that includes messaging to support each of five fundamental steps that are part of successful behavioral change: pre-contemplation, contemplation, preparation, action and maintenance. By acknowledging a patient's ambivalence to changing their own behavior, we take the first step in helping them to "own themselves, rather than ceding ownership to the disease." (Dana Jennings, NY Times blog, October 13, 2009)
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And the end of the day that is what we all want.
Posted by: mark.davis@gcihealth.com
March-02-2011
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