It’ll probably come as no surprise to find out that I’m a big advocate for the increased use of digital technologies in healthcare. And it’s not just in marketing where I think a greater use of digital is not only inevitable, but also in nearly every facet of the healthcare system. It’s essential to improving healthcare for everyone. Over the past five years, the industry has changed dramatically as more and more digital technologies have replaced “traditional” ones. Some have been for the better and others still have a ways to go before we can decide if we’re better off.
As we look into the future a bit, I’ve noticed that some of the things that we all stereotypically associate with our healthcare system are starting to go away and are being replaced with digital technologies. Some things have already been replaced completely or are close to being extinct while others are just starting their descent. I’ve tried to predict the future before with varying degrees of success (such as my paper “The Future of Pharma Digital Marketing” (1140 downloads), so here’s yet another look into our digital future. For each item below, I’ve given a guess at when I see each disappearing for good. Please feel free to leave your comments on what you agree or disagree with (I’m sure they’ll be plenty of the latter) and what you think I’m missing. Here they are in order of my predicted extinction:
10 Healthcare Dinosaurs Digital Technology Will Make Extinct
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1. Pharma Brand Facebook Pages — 2-3 years
My first entry in this forward-looking post is likely the opposite of what you expected. While more and more brands and pharma companies move onto Facebook (check out the full list on the Pharma and Healthcare Social Media Wiki), and as we await some guidelines from the FDA that could make it far easier for companies to participate in social media, I’m heading in the opposite direction. That’s right, dead before it even lived. To be clear, I’m not saying that all social media participation will go away, but just this one tactic. There are very few pharma brands currently on Facebook, as most have taken the “unbranded” or corporate approach where the drug isn’t mentioned. This is smart. Outside the regulatory hurdles and risks that exist, there’s another good reason not to have a Facebook page for your pharma brand. Recall that the main way these pages work is that people become “fans,” which essentially subscribes them to whatever content you put out via their News Feed. Many non-pharma brands have done this spectacularly well and gathered massive numbers of Fans on Facebook (like Pringles, the largest brand-created page on Facebook, which our agency, Bridge Worldwide, helped pull together). But, here’s the difference. When someone becomes your Fan, they announce it as an update to all their friends on Facebook automatically. That’s fine when they tell the world that they’ve just become a fan of Pringles. However, it doesn’t work for most other products, especially pharma drugs. Are you ever going to see this?
Doubtful. The biggest pharma Facebook page actually is for a brand, Gardasil. However, you’ll notice that people aren’t being asked to become fans of Gardasil, but rather “Take a Step Against Cervical Cancer.” Who isn’t against cervical cancer? It’s a clever way to make it more likely that someone will become your friend, but don’t take advantage of it. By the way, now’s a good time to join the Dose of Digital Facebook Page.
2. Paper “detail” aids — 3-5 years
You’ll notice that paper is going to take quite a hit in this list and it should. Not only is it incredibly expensive to produce (the final product, that is), it’s also completely inflexible. Once you print it, you can’t change it. Most pharma companies still send their sales teams out into the field with printed information to share with their physicians. Some have adopted electronic presentations that reps can show in their laptops. These have much more interaction and can include media such as video, which makes them far more engaging than paper. In addition, the information can be updated instantly when something changes at a negligible cost. One problem I do see here came while I was working with a major pharma company who adopted all electronic detail aids only to go back to paper. The system they were using was so unwieldy that it was prone to crashing during presentations on a very regular basis (not good when you have less than a minute to show something to a doctor). In analyzing why this was happening, it was pretty obvious. The system (which will go nameless, but is used by many pharma companies) used a massive amount of CPU resources meaning that it rarely ever worked the way it should. These proprietary platforms also mean that only a handful of companies can create content for them, which overly inflates the price and excludes some of the best creative shops from working with you. There’s no reason for this. Create a simple presentation shell and make the content in Flash (plus XML) and make it possible for anyone to create content for you. Some companies have ditched these proprietary systems and replaced them with what I just described and are much happier. Number 3 on this list should be “Proprietary electronic detailing platforms,” but it’s not…
3. Single-purpose medical devices — 5 years
People have begun to monitor more about their health than ever before. Whether you have some sort of disease or not, this tracking is becoming more common. This could be a simple analog pedometer or something much more advanced like Nike+. Either way, even completely healthy people are gathering data about themselves. Of course for many with chronic conditions, this type of tracking is an everyday affair (and hassle). Diabetes is a condition that immediately springs to mind, as many diabetics must regularly test and track their blood glucose levels. For this, they carry around a device that does this…and only this. Apple has already envisioned a future where this isn’t necessary. The testing is, of course, but carrying around another device isn’t. Many people (and many more will) already carry around a very capable computer in their pocket everyday in the form of a smartphone, so why not combine the two…a blood glucose monitor as part of your phone?
Apple introduced this concept when they released their version 2.0 software for the iPhone, but we don’t quite have this on the market yet. There are already integrations for the iPhone for sleep tracking and many other conditions, but expect many more in the future that are designed to eliminate single-purpose electronic devices.
4. Pharma Brand Websites — 5-7 years
Interesting prediction from a guy who works for a digital agency that, among other things, makes brand websites. I’m not saying that websites will go away, but I do think a certain kind of site will start to fade away. I’m talking about pharma brand.com sites (e.g., lipitor.com). Already, most people get their drug information from third party sites like WebMD or even product reviews from sites like iGuard. There’s really very little reason to go to most pharma brand website these days. Some of the sites out there do serve a purpose, but a sales pitch about the product isn’t it and isn’t why people come. Most visitors come to find very specific bits of information about our products, but we make it hard for them to find it. Perhaps they come to find out about a certain side effect or to find out if there’s some sort of co-pay assistance. Why do we hide this behind page after page of product messages and the same four types of stock photos (a subject for a future post)? Brand websites need to behave more like Google today than a product-selling page. That means that searching (and being able to find) specific items has to be a priority. Keep in mind that many of the people visiting are already on your product, so what are you trying to sell them? More of the content on disease conditions that pharma companies have accumulated at considerable expense will become the key focus. So, as brand.com sites go away or lessen in importance, disease condition sites from pharma companies will take their place.
5. Paper prescriptions — 5-7 years
Already common in many practices and institutions, little pieces of paper that we take to our local pharmacy in order to get our medications are destined to be a thing of the past in the near future. Electronic medical records (EMRs) will of course speed the death of this ancient practice, but it’s advancing on its own whether or not EMRs become the norm. However, there’s still quite a bit of inefficiency in this part of the system as you still have to drive to the pharmacy to pick up your pills. Mail order pharmacy services have increased dramatically, but have a long way to go, but will dominate in the future for those on chronic medications. Today, however, many of these programs are so difficult to sign up for that people simply pass on the option. For those of you out there that administer these programs and who are trying to convert retail pharmacy users to mail order, consider this: most people would call their pharmacy every month to get a refill, drive there, get out of their car to actually pay for the medication, drive home AND pay a premium to do all this versus having it sent to their house automatically at a lower cost via mail order. That ought to tell you that you need to fix the sign up process.
6. Massive healthcare portals — 5-7 years
Healthcare information online is dominated by a few players today. Sites in the WebMD and Everyday Health networks make up a big share of the healthcare-related traffic online. This is starting to change. There are a couple of factors at work here. First, search engines are getting into the healthcare content business by including basic information as part of the results for many healthcare-related searches. In fact, for many people, there’s no reason to go beyond the information that Google and Bing (Yahoo! is far behind here) serve up automatically (check out my post: “How Google and Bing Plan to Eliminate the Need for WebMD (and Your Website)” for more details on why). Since the search engines can supply much of the basic information about most diseases there’s no reason to look much further unless you need highly specialized information. However, for some conditions and some people this specialized information is going to be required. This might mean turning to a knowledgeable community that is full of others with a similar condition, such as Tu Diabetes or PKU.com. That’s community, but what if you just want information to research on your own? In most cases, highly specialized, detailed, credible, and unbiased information doesn’t exist. That is, finding very deep content on a specific condition that is approachable for your average person isn’t easy to find and certainly isn’t found in one place. There are two ends of the spectrum out there where most online content fits: general information written at a 5th-7th grade level and highly specific information written for physicians. Where’s the stuff in the middle for someone who wants more than what they get on WebMD, but doesn’t want to read the New England Journal of Medicine? This will come in the near future.
7. In-Office Doctor Visits — 8-10 years
Once again, a futuristic idea that already is happening. I talked about this in a post called “How Pharma Can Cut Out the “Middleman” (aka “The Doctor”). It’s already possible to see a physician without leaving your house at any hour of the day. By no means is this a mainstream idea today, but it will become more and more common in the future. For some conditions, you’ll still need to see a doctor in person so they can do some diagnostic things that require you being in the same room, but many chronic conditions and follow ups could be handled at a distance. Ironically, one other trend that is leading to fewer in-office doctor visits comes from the past. House calls. More physicians are starting to once again make house calls (at a price) just like they did fifty years ago. Some have even switched their entire practice to this model. When you combine these trends together, it leads to only one conclusion, which is a dramatic decrease in in-person visits to the doctor.
8. Paper medical records — 8-10 years
This was an obvious prediction, as it’s talked about quite a bit now in mainstream media. We’re already well on our way to never seeing another piece of paper in a doctor’s office. Some large institutions are already largely “paperless,” but many are much further behind. As part of the recent economic stimulus programs here in the US, a large sum of money (~$10-15 billion depending on who’s counting) was allocated to making our system paperless. We’ve got a long way to go, but the process is underway. Despite these government and local physician level efforts, many people have already given up on expecting their doctor or insurance company to keep their records for them so Microsoft HealthVault and Google Health have come forward to give you a free and easy way to do it. On top of this, some smart hospitals like Cleveland Clinic have already partnered with Google rather than expecting people to maintain their records in multiple places (e.g., Cleveland Clinic’s site AND Google Health).
9. Clinical trials — 15-20 years
Before all the scientists reading this get all upset, let me finish (or start). Clinical trials are an integral part of the healthcare system. They are used to define what medical treatment is the right one (or most right) for specific patients at a specific time. Without these trials, it would be anyone’s guess as to which treatments were the best option in a given situation. However, they are frighteningly expensive and take a long time. It’s possible to replicate some clinical trial results right now without the time and expense. To be sure, these don’t have the same rigor, nor, in most cases, the same scientific validity, but they could help prevent us from heading down the wrong path and wasting time and resources on a larger study. Sites like Patients Like Me and Cure Together gather a great deal of information on their users and make it possible to use “simple” math to find correlations between diseases or treatments. CureTogether has been able to do this (and matched the accuracy of much larger studies) simply based on the data of several thousand people. Imagine if everyone’s records are electronic and there are millions of people who volunteer their data for these types of analyses. There are links between diseases that we can’t even imagine today that will be found this way. Patients Like Me, where users input their progress on a regular basis, makes it possible to do “real-time” trials with large numbers of patients almost instantly (such as this one for lithium use in ALS). Read more about this in my post “Can Social Media Improve Your Health and Save Your Life?”
10. Healthcare Privacy — 25 years
I saved the most controversial for last because I think it will take the longest to achieve. However, I also think that it will have the biggest effect on our society’s health in the long-term. Recently, I was at an amazing brainstorming-type meeting held by a healthcare company that I wish I could tell you more about, but due to confidentiality agreements I can’t. What I can tell you is that I heard some amazing predictions for the future, but one really stuck with me. At one point, someone came out with this very eloquent quote that shut up a room of very opinionated people for a while (including me): “In the future, the less private you are, the longer you’ll live.” Think about that for a second. Imagine that you could choose (you don’t have to participate if you don’t want) to release information about your health and in exchange you’d receive highly personalized recommendations on treatments, which diseases you likely have already or are likely to get, and maybe even how long you’ll live. Would you do it? Our current society norms say to keep everything about our health private and today there are practical reasons for this (like insurance denials). But in the future, you might not be able to discriminated against because of preexisting conditions (it’s already part of Obama’s healthcare plan today). If you give up your data, it can be pooled with millions (or billions) of others that through some mathematical analysis can tell you everything about your current and future health. This would include which drugs are likely to work for you and which diseases you are likely to develop. It’s an extension of what CureTogether has just started to explore. Power their concept with billions of data points and it becomes a difficult to imagine database.
That’s my list of 10 for now. They’re sure to change when I look back on this next year. Some of these predictions will come true before my predicted dates and others might never happen. As a healthcare marketer, it’s important that you know what’s coming and to figure out not only how to prepare for it when the future does arrive, but what you can do to make it happen.
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