Posts Tagged ‘healthcare marketing’

Marketing 101 Revived: A New Healthcare Consumer Report

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April 25th, 2012
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In my previous post, I discussed the need for healthcare companies to take a more market-focused approach to the healthcare consumer, including a more concentrated effort to segment the market and tailor strategies to different consumer groups.

Today, I’d like to explore the growing power of the healthcare consumer.

Overall, healthcare costs – both on the societal and the individual level – are increasing. Consumers are required, one way or another, to pay a greater share. So they are starting, albeit slowly, to ask questions about value. And they are interested in the value to themselves, individually, not to the population as a whole. How the consumer perceives healthcare value is an area that needs a lot of further exploration.

At Popper and Company, we have observed that an empowered consumer, armed with more information than ever before, is using this information to demand more tailored, customer-centric treatment from practitioners and institutions and from the tools and technology used. This customer demand is starting to move information from large centers accessible only to physicians, researchers or engineers to mobile devices, web sites and social media platforms accessible to nearly everyone.

How might healthcare innovators respond to such changes in customer demand?

  • Create new metrics, like the popular Consumers Union of the U.S. rankings, that measure how customers rate a product (high/low acquisition costs, maintenance costs, product lifespan) according to their preferences. This would require healthcare providers and technology developers to consider customer input in their products and services. More significantly, it would require them to be able to describe their products and services in a way that’s comparable to a competitor’s (and in ways that consumers will understand).
  • This new “report to consumers” would require the development of information systems that can read customer behavior, wants, and needs. Seeing patients as customers means considering how these customers will react to products or services, and taking those reactions into account when designing a product or service, or when developing a new treatment strategy.

Certainly, this would require quite a paradigm shift in the life sciences industry, but it’s the way our colleagues in the automobile, electronics, and durable goods industries work every day. Now, as in these other industries, consumers can educate themselves and retrieve information easily. Therefore, it’s probably time that our industry joined those other industries in putting consumer perceived needs first or a the very least on a par with what the health care providers think is “good for them.”

Do you think a consumer ranking system is possible broadly in healthcare? How readily are you now able to capture your customer’s ratings and opinions of your company or its products? Are there any other ways those developing healthcare solutions can integrate and embrace the changing role of the customer? Please share your thoughts with us.

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Does the Healthcare Industry Need to Revisit ‘Marketing 101’?

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April 16th, 2012
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Healthcare practitioners and technology developers alike are experiencing new pressures to either reduce delivery costs or to consider cost-effectiveness when developing new products. As an illustration of this new pressure, nine medical societies recently listed 45 procedures that they believe need to be streamlined, or eliminated, to reduce costs associated with patient care.

We at Popper and Company believe that many of these recommendations are fairly obvious, such as not ordering a CT scan or antibiotics for someone with uncomplicated sinus inflammation, or forgoing routine annual electrocardiograms for low-risk, asymptomatic patients.

But these medical society recommendations addressing patient care point to an important issue for life science companies in the business of developing new health products—a need to get away from building revenue projections based on a population-based “screening” mode, and an urgency to shift to ensuring desired ROI based on a personalized one.

The idea of personalized medicine always leaves me with the indelible impression that developers and deliverers should return to Marketing 101—Lesson 1: separate and segment your markets. At the 40,000-foot level, personalized medicine is little more than a specialized way to segment a market. This kind of marketing segmentation—whether it’s ordering tests only for patients who exhibit a strong need or designing a regimen based on a patient’s individual proteomic profile—can be a boon for the whole diagnostics industry, which finds itself at the sharp end of the segmentation spear.

For new product developers, the focus on personalization opens the door to integrate a new information infrastructure. New information system products should be able to capture and analyze costs on an “episode of care”  basis, and integrate patient outcomes. Rather than evaluate cost-effectiveness of an individual procedure, an information system should be able to track quality, outcome and cost over the whole disease episode, from the patient’s initial reporting of symptoms to treatment.

This is not the future of health care; this is happening now. It would behoove us not to ignore the segmentation trend; instead, our industry can borrow techniques from others that routinely segment their markets (e.g., automobile manufacturers that make both electric vehicles for short commutes and large trucks for transport), consider total cost of use (e.g., energy consumption over the life of a dishwasher), and integrate outcome and customer feedback (e.g., a consumer report rating).

Have you started to segment your market? If not, how would you start? What impact do you think this will have on costs and their reimbursements? Tell us what you think.

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