Archive | June, 2012
Jun 26th 2012 

Healthcare & Technology – Where Does Pharma Fit In?

Even as the Supreme Court continues to debate the legality of the Obama health care law, most specifically the Affordable Care Act’s individual health-insurance mandate, many key initiatives of the plan’s overall intent are here to stay.  Critically, they are already changing the entire healthcare landscape and cannot be ignored.  To ensure a full share of the benefits, Pharma needs to engage with HIT now and fully understand the new landscape unfolding.

Better living through technology

While most other major industries such as music, publishing, and banking have already seen the disruption and reinvention of the digital revolution, healthcare has been characteristically slow to the party.  Fortunately, the HITECH ACT of 2009, designed to promote the adoption and meaningful use of health information technology, has helped to greatly motivate the digitization of healthcare.  

HITECH is the first big push into digitization and it is accomplishing its goals.  Over $6 billion of the $27 billion allocated has been spent to date.  According to recent CDC data there’s been a 33.8% adoption rate for EHRs in NY and over 60% of physicians are using tablets in daily practice (presumably to view EHRs).  And judging by the hundreds, even thousands of presenters, exhibitors, and attendees of eHealth conferences such as HIMSS, Health2.0, and the mHealth Summit, the overall market for HIT is extremely robust.  Until you walk the many miles of the HIMSS exhibits it’s hard to understand the growth of this market.  EHRs are just the tip of the iceberg as entrepreneurs launch new apps and sites while major players like Phillips, Cisco, GE, Dell, and countless others line up to help drive the connected future of healthcare.

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Jun 18th 2012 

The Value of Responsive Design

First let’s start with a simple definition of what responsive design actually is. Without getting too technical, responsive design is a relatively new way of planning, designing, and developing a website so it automatically fits to the screen size of any media device. Whether for a laptop, cellphone, or tablet, responsive design will automatically adjust how the content, images, and/or videos on a webpage are displayed so the site is easily maneuverable.
No more screaming obscenities on the bus while pinching and swiping just to find the number for late-night pizza because the page won’t fit on your mobile screen!

The Good

Ordinarily, a website can take anywhere from 2 to 3 months to build. In the pharmaceutical industry, with all of its lovely regulatory processes, it can take ages. And according to the numbers, (an expected 657 million smart phones will be sold just in 2012) millions of people are browsing the Interwebs on the their mobile phones, which means as soon as your website has its basic design down, you have to start right back up and begin working on a mobile site in order to stay competitive in the digital world.

With responsive design, the website is built only once and is viewable on any digital gizmo you can get your hands on.

The Bad (but not really)

Before you get too excited and post comments about how wonderful this all sounds, be aware: Responsive design requires more upfront work than just building a website designed for a laptop or desktop. Usability experts (aka UXers, or Mind Mappers) have to spend additional time drawing out the different dimensions of each webpage before the designers and developers get their hands on the goods. Ideally, UXers, designers, and developers should all be working together during the construction of a responsive design project so at every turn, one team member can point out whether or not the proposed design or action is feasible.

However, this also presents the opportunity to create a more functional (and, in turn, profitable) website. With this methodical development style, more work is done upfront between all types of website engineers, creating the possibility for increased collective ingenuity.

Cha-ching

Along with the potential to save time, there’s also the possibility of saving money with responsive design. If you plan on building a website and a mobile website, it may be in your best interest financially to consider building the website using responsive design. Instead of designing and developing two sites, you’re only creating one site. Instead of maintaining and hosting two sites (more costly than some might think), developers only have to manage/update one site.

Always build in Responsive Design?

Not necessarily. Some websites are specifically designed for desktop/tablet/laptop viewing only, as they should be. Take for instance the NIKEiD website. Amazing site but the mobile site has a completely different interface. The smaller mobile screen forces developers to organize all of the website functionality in finger-happy grids thus; granting easy access to mobile users who need answers on the go. The same can be said for the Priceline website. The mobile version is vastly different from the original version because the real estate on a mobile screen does not allow for calendars, apps, or advertisements.

Responsive design is a great, efficient way to increase the marketability of a website. In the healthcare industry with so many competing brands combined with the increased accessibility to the Web through multiple devices, responsive design is an innovative technique to design and develop websites that increase interaction among users that gives an edge up on the competition.

 

Jun 15th 2012 

Will Penguin Freeze Out Pharma?

For pharmaceutical brands in today’s market, search engine optimization is a critical component of every web initiative. Research by ComScore (2010) suggests that over 80% of all Internet sessions start at a search engine and, when we say “search engine optimization,” we generally mean “optimization for Google.” Google searches account for over 80% of search traffic to our client sites; while the second most popular engine, Yahoo, drives less than 10% of that volume:

A major goal for any website project, and the purpose of SEO, is to get the site listed in the top few results on the first page of Google’s results for the most common search terms—the keywords that HCPs are typing into the search engine’s interface around the site’s content.  Unfortunately, many sites that have aggressively pursued that goal – or worked with unscrupulous SEO vendors – have recently been severely penalized by Google.

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Jun 4th 2012 

EVERYBODY PANIC! Overcoming Cultures of Fear in the Age of the Attention Economy

Prior to joining WPP, I had the experience of working at an agency that was in the midst of trying to change from a traditional mindset to one more focused on digital and emerging technologies. What was fascinating to me was not how resistant our clients were to this change, but how flummoxed the internal culture was by these deviations from the ‘norm’. In ways that I could have never anticipated, I watched people react irrationally and illogically to the pending ‘threat’ of change, oftentimes based on assumptions that were never based in reality.

Pharma has this same issue. It’s terrified of change. I mean mortally terrified. And that presents a problem because, as we all know, change is inevitable. In ways you may not realize, the inherent terror that pervades the industry may be the reason why innovations fail to take root on a consistent basis.

Think about it. All innovations have change as the underlying common denominator. Since most people working in the digital, social or the technology fields are often asked to be agents-of-change, we deal with the results of fear-based risk-assessment all the time. Too often in that process, discussions will drift to analyzing the consequences of sometimes wildly speculative assumptions in order to determine what the worst-case scenario may be. When conversations head down the fear path, they are rarely productive.

So as innovators how do we overcome these sometimes-irrational responses? Are there better ways to evangelize new ideas? Will more data or facts help correct the problem? Hopefully better understanding the causes will better arm us all to more effectively drive change.

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