Archive | 2012
Dec 17th 2012 

What To Watch For In 2013

“The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” – William Gibson

2013 is already shaping up to be a groundbreaking year for health technology. In just the past few weeks we’ve seen stunning technology announced, including LCD contact lenses, iPhone enabled EKG monitors, and brain controlled artificial limbs. I’m pretty sure we’re just at the beginning of a tidal wave of advances that push the human experience forward dramatically.

What follows are a few things I think will reshape our expectations and experiences in healthcare, some for better, some for worse.

The Zettabyte

For a sense of scale, the size of the data we’re talking about is as follows:

1,000 Megabytes = 1 Gigabyte. 1,000 Gigabytes = 1 Terabyte. 1,000 Terabytes = 1 Petabyte. 1,000 Petabytes = 1 Exabyte. 1,000 Exabytes = 1 Zettabyte. By 2015, global IP traffic is expected to pass 1.3 Zettabytes per year, with 39-45% of all that traffic happening wirelessly. 51% of that traffic will be video based, with HD video compromising 79% of that. For all of the talk about big data and how healthcare marketers can use it, the fact remains the industry is woefully under-resourced to create or leverage the kind of sophisticated algorithms needed to analyze and predict trends in order to stay relevant with customers. And, given the scale of the data involved, the problem is only going to get worse. Read More…

Dec 3rd 2012 

Is Passbook the Future of Pharma CRM?

No offense to Android or Windows 8, but when it comes to healthcare, it’s still an iOS world. As the FDA announced today that it has approved the AliveCor iPhone based EKG monitor (http://ht.ly/fM1n2), I’m left to wonder about another recently announced technology, Apple’s Passbook. Is this the future of Consumer CRM for pharma?

For those of you that are unfamiliar, Passbook is Apple’s built in coupon and payment card organizer. Passbook enabled apps, like Starbucks and Fandango, allow purchases to be added to Passbook for later use. No printing tickets or getting cards in the mail any more. Have a $25.00 Starbucks card? Scan it into the app and it appears in Passbook. Just bought tickets online to Skyfall? Open Passbook and there they are. In practical terms, this solves an enormous problem for users, namely organization and integration into your mobile life. And that integration isn’t just about keeping everything in one place. As a system level app, Passbook interoperates with most of the other functions on the device. Let’s stick with the Fandango app for a second. Let’s say you bought tickets to a Friday night show. Not only are the tickets waiting in Passbook for scanning at the theater, but you can automatically add a reminder to your calendar and text friends the show times. With location based services activated, users can receive proximity based notifications about traffic conditions on the way to the show or be notified of offers as you walk into the theater. Given it’s relative infancy, it’s safe expect the Passbook’s feature set to get more sophisticated and more valuable for users and brands alike.

 

The holy grail for any digital marketing program is the often-touted, rarely-validated ROI calculation. I’ve seen ROI for programs touted all over the industry, but the dirty little secret is this: if you can’t tie any program back to a validated sale, you can’t truly calculate ROI. Brands correlate ROI all the time, but correlation isn’t a true indicator of actual sales. This is why redemption and coupon cards are so important, as they give marketers direct numbers that validate the performance of a program. Brands can talk engagement until they are blue in the face, but if digital is ever to be taken seriously as a business driver, ROI calculations must be accurate and proven.

 

It’s estimated that almost 50% Rx brands will have some form of coupon or discount card program by 2021. And why not? Even by modest calculations coupon programs typically generate a 4:1 return. So, why don’t all brands have discount card programs? The answer to that is a simple one. Discount card programs are insanely expensive. 
Nov 16th 2012 

Friday Follow Ups – Post Sandy Edition

Smoking Will Kill You

Good morning and happy Friday everyone. For all of you on the east coast, I hope you’ve made  it through all of the weather related chaos safely and without too much drama. We’ve been a bit quiet here at DOD, but before we get to the Friday links, I wanted to give a brief update on what’s been happening and what 2013 will look like for this humble blog. Some of you may have noticed that we’ve had some kinks in our overall tech experience. Jonathan did a magnificent job building this site to what it is now, but when I took over, it was a bit like getting handed the keys to a nuclear sub and not getting the drivers manual to go with it. Needless to say, during some of the change over, I may have mis-wired a few things here and there, so I appreciate your patience and support. I’m in the midst of working on a complete overhaul of both the look of the site and the Wiki section that accompanies it. The Wiki now is a tremendous resource, but updating and adding to it is a laborious task. I’m planning to launch something that will hopefully be far more useful and flexible for all our readers and will include a mobile compendium to it as well. Yes, there are already a number of great healthcare mobile wikis out there, and I hope that ours can add to the conversation. My goal is to have all of this done by January 1, but for those of you who work at agencies know, the end of the year can get tricky to get things out the door.

Read More…

Oct 15th 2012 

Predicting The Future Of Medical Terrorism

WILE E. COYOTE - GENIUSRecently I had the privilege to yet again attend WPP’s technology and innovation conference, STREAM. Held in Marathon, Greece, the setting provides its own magic, but the attendees are an eclectic group that leaves me inspired and always sends me home with all kinds of new ideas. Exactly what you want from a conference such as this.

On the last night there, a bunch of us were fighting it out playing Mindflex, a concentration game where you battle for control of the game piece by wearing a headset that measures your brain activity and concentration. I did not do well. (I blame the cocktails). I was struck about how quickly science fiction level tech is becoming a mainstream reality. We all can probably remember a time when we dreamed up some fascinating gadget or gizmo that was controlled merely by thinking about it, but it always seemed impossible.

Yet here I was, sitting in Greece, trying to focus my way to victory by playing a game with my brain. Welcome to the year 2012. Where mind control devices are now affordable retail hardware.

When I was done with my turn, I left to apply some alcoholic salve to my humiliating loss and struck up a conversation with a few techies that worked at various start-ups. Each was telling a story or two about how they knew someone who tried hacking into this site or that server. Mostly harmless stuff, but it fostered an idea. In the age of seamlessly integrated network technology and data collection software appearing all over the healthcare space, are we asking for trouble? More importantly, could an organization like Al-Qaeda or Anonymous hack into medical technologies and wreak havoc on a large scale?

Read More…

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