When it comes to targeting healthcare professionals, physician social networks provide a valuable resource for studying the behaviour of doctors, and engaging them in relevant and well-targeted ways. However, the sheer number of physician networks, and the range of capabilities, can make for complex strategy planning and implementation across international regions.

Today, however, a brand new service has been announced that allows pharmaceutical companies and healthcare organizations to research and engage healthcare professionals in eight European countries, promising ‘integrated programme management and measurement’.

Networks in Health is an alliance between Europe’s largest online physician communities: the UK’s Doctors.net.uk; France’s Egora and La Revue du Practicien; Medcenter in Spain and Portugal; coliquio in Germany, Austria and Switzerland; and Sweden’s MedUniverse. The combined network represents over 600,000 registered physicians.

Networks in Health Development Director, Gareth Thomas, says that the immediate benefits for organizations seeking to engage physicians across Europe are the consistency of approach and the ability to measure across all the networks centrally.

“We can provide real insights – not just quantitative; we can track user journeys so we know which kinds of doctors are engaging with content and how. But also, all these communities have some form of discussion forum, so there is a huge amount of knowledge about what doctors are talking about and how they’re behaving and interacting with online content.

“Through the market research and analysis tools that we have, we can provide insights back to customers pre, during, and post programme, to see the impact of what they are doing.”

Cultural diversity

An essential factor in pan-European healthcare engagement is the need to incorporate local cultural and language insights into a regional strategy. Networks in Health has been launched with this in mind – Thomas says that the power of the alliance is that it is not a ‘one size fits all’ international network but recognises the diversity that exists between individual countries, languages and cultures: “The strength that each partner brings to the alliance is not only the reach to their members, but also local understanding and knowhow of market standards, culture and regulation.”

All the communities that make up Networks in Health use fully-authenticated membership, making the network a unique international platform to engage a community known to comprise solely registered doctors. This is especially important for pharmaceutical companies operating in Europe, where direct-to-consumer marketing of medicines is forbidden.

Centralised analysis

Networks in Health analysis tool
(source: http://networksinhealth.com/reporting-analysis-insight.html)

Networks in Health provides a single point from which to launch and deploy a physician engagement initiative across any of the member communities, and provides centralised measurement.

“On the quantitative side, we will provide real-time dashboards to regional and local brand teams so they can compare the results of campaigns, and can see which messaging is resonating  in real-time between markets”, says Thomas.

In the complex world of healthcare engagement, the role of key opinion leaders (KOLs) in influencing the behavior of healthcare professionals is becoming increasingly important. And as with any healthcare engagement strategy, there is more to working with key opinion leaders than simply adding another channel to the mix.

Why consider KOLs?

With so many new ways of connecting with and influencing healthcare professionals, why consider working with KOLs at all? If you are responsible for a pharmaceutical product then I would suggest the primary answer to this is quite simple: doctors trust each other (more than they trust pharma).

The effect of this is seen in the growth of physician-only networks over the past decade. Doctors on these networks talk about anything from clinical matters to all kinds of topics completely unrelated to their professional lives. The reason for this is simple – the mutual respect that exists amongst healthcare professionals for the opinion of their peers.

Another good reason is that experts add credibility in a time-constrained world. Of course a good KOL is not necessarily a healthcare professional, but they must certainly be a credible, trusted expert. It is quite possible that the trusted experts you choose to collaborate with as KOLs will find it easier to gain the ear (whether in published form, via doctors’ networks, at conferences, or via any other channel) of other healthcare professionals than your medical sales team will.

Five questions to start your KOL strategy

As an example of the role of KOLs, consider the launch of a new pharmaceutical product. As a component of your engagement strategy, KOLs could have a significant impact upon the success of the launch. Yet without the right approach, significant resources may be wasted by everybody.

Some simple questions to ask yourself when developing a KOL strategy include:

1. Why are KOLs important to us?
2. What do we want them to do?
3. How will we support them in achieving our goals?
4. How will we define and measure success?
5. Who do we want to engage (which experts should be our KOLs)?

Understanding influence

In order to identify and prioritise the right key opinion leaders, it is worthwhile understanding the relative impact of any professional or expert on their peers. Here are three areas to consider:

• Connectedness: How well connected is the KOL with their peers?
• Expertise: Is the KOL known as a leading expert in a particular therapy area relevant to your product?
• Credibility: Credibility is likely to be a function of connectedness and expertise, and may be measured by examining the effect of the KOL’s activity on others in the past.

Learn from your peers

Creation Healthcare’s publication for leaders in healthcare, Healthcare Engagement Strategy, is partnering with KOL & Stakeholder Engagement Europe conference which takes place in Berlin, 4-5 May 2011. As a reader, we are delighted to offer you a discount of €300 to attend the event. Simply book your place using code ‘CREATION’.

Meanwhile, for confidential advice about integrating emerging healthcare engagement channels into your business goals, contact Daniel Ghinn on +44 (0)207 849 3167.

As increasing numbers of healthcare companies and government organizations turn to dedicated social networks to engage healthcare professionals, business models for interacting with doctors are changing. But can these networks really improve outcomes for healthcare companies, and what is the future for the pharma rep?

Len Starnes, Digital Marketing & Sales Manager at Bayer Schering pharma in Berlin, says that he has been looking at the growth of dedicated physician networks, and he is convinced that these are the places where the healthcare industry should engage professionals. He says:

“I’m personally convinced that [dedicated physician networks] will play a very significant role in the way that the industry engages the profession in the future. If you look at the phenomenon globally, the numbers of doctors that are using networks, and if you look at behaviours and expectations of young doctors, they are all using social networks in some way and will expect to continue to use networks professionally.

“That poses the question, ‘are these platforms more suitable platforms for the industry to engage?’ And I’m absolutely convinced that they are.”

Doctors.net.uk

When it comes to connecting doctors to each other, to other health stakeholders, and to the Internet, Doctors.net.uk was amongst the first and is today one of the largest and most active networks of doctors in the world.

Formed in 1998 (the same year that Creation Healthcare started out), Doctors.net.uk has grown to over 170,000 members. All of these are GMC-authenticated UK doctors, of whom over 60,000 actively use Doctors.net.uk every month, and over 35,000 every day.  In 2009, Doctors.net.uk saw record levels of doctor engagement, with 25 million web sessions during the year.

In this video we explore how Doctors.net.uk has changed the landscape for engaging doctors online, with Doctors.net.uk’s Head of Pharma, Carwyn Jones

What do doctors do there?

Interaction between doctors is an important component of Doctors.net.uk, with an average of 907 visits per member to the social network’s forum during 2009.

The network is also seeing an increase in access to multimedia such as podcasts. In the final quarter of 2009, more than one in eight members accessed podcast interviews from medical conferences.

Opportunities for engaging doctors include medical education, eDetailing, and market research surveys, all of which doctors readily engage with, thanks to one or two innovative approached by Doctors.net.uk.

Members receive eSR (electronic Surfing Rewards) when they complete market research surveys. These can then be exchanged for merchandise or vouchers. Taking part in market research can earn a member between £5 and £80, and Doctors.net.uk says that last year over £1,000,000 in eSR points were earned by its members.

A product webcast, sponsored by medical equipment manufacturer GE Healthcare (source: Doctors.net.uk)

Why does this matter to healthcare companies?

If you are in a pharmaceutical or medical devices company and you want to inform doctors about a new product, then you will be aware of how difficult it can be to engage doctors. In a recent online poll by Doctors.net.uk, members were asked “When a drug is launched what is the most trusted source of information?” Only 6 (1%) of 571 respondents identifed “Pharma company sponsored fact sheet” as the most trusted source.

Whilst this figure can at best only be said to be representative of Doctors.net.uk members, it provides a clue that perhaps there are better ways of engaging healthcare professionals than traditional fact sheets.

In another member survey, the majority (58%) of 1,000 respondents named Doctors.net.uk as their preferred channel for receiving information about pharmaceutical products and medical devices, ahead of ‘local meetings’, ‘by reps’, and ‘conferences’.

Another important insight from member surveys is the level of trust that doctors place in Doctors.net.uk. Asked about the most trusted sources for health information, respondents named ‘medical publishers’ first, followed by Doctors.net.uk ahead of journals and the Department of Health, and with the pharmaceutical industry in last place.

This lack of trust amongst doctors will not be news to many in the the pharmaceutical industry, who understand the challenges that the industry has in gaining the trust of either healthcare consumers or professionals. Dedicated doctors’ networks like Doctors.net.uk provide an opportunity to engage through a trusted platform.

According to Doctors.net.uk, when AstraZeneca targeted doctors through Doctors.net.uk with an eDetail campaign in 2009 for their Symbicort SMART asthma management product, 6,425 GPs engaged with the campaign, and 71% said that they would increase their prescribing of Sybicort SMART.

AstraZeneca Symbicort SMART case study on Doctors.net.uk (source: Doctors.net.uk)

A platform for engagement

I spoke with Carwyn Jones, Doctors.net.uk’s Head of Pharmaceutical Sales and Marketing, at Healthcare Engagement Strategy 2010 in London earlier this month, and I asked him what makes Doctors.net.uk so successful.

He said that the 35,000 unique Doctors every day participate because of Doctors.net.uk’s core values: Trust and transparency about interaction with doctors; independence; and collaboration – allowing doctors to collaborate with each other to improve their clinical practice.

Carwyn said that there are over twenty different services that doctors can use on Doctors.net.uk, and the way individual doctors use these varies by speciality. He said that the most popular services are continuing medical education, forums, the email service, medical news, journals and conference highlights.

I asked Carwyn about why commercial healthcare companies work with Doctors.net.uk. He explained why their sponsors engage with an existing and active network of doctors:

“The commercial sponsors that we work with have understood that there are a large number of doctors on a trusted network, that they can use to collaborate with and communicate to these doctors.

“With any online strategy, one of the key things is content, however even more important is engagement. Many companies have fallen foul of the ‘build it and they will come’ philosphy that says ‘if we build it, then surely many of our customers will come’ and that doesn’t happen.”

Carwyn does not claim Doctors.net.uk to be the ‘silver bullet’ of healthcare professional engagement, though. He says that when it comes to healthcare sales, nothing beats a real, face to face interaction by a rep with a doctor:

“Rep interaction is still the most powerful thing. Face to face interaction, I think, still beats an online interaction, but the costs and the resources that go behind the sales force are huge so companies are looking at other ways of getting that access.”

Earlier this month, hundreds of business leaders and communicators in healthcare met in Paris for the first Health 2.0 Europe conference. Some may have been asking themselves whether Europe really needed yet another conference about digital engagement in healthcare, but it soon became clear that Health 2.0 was unlike any other healthcare engagement conference in Europe to date.

Denise Silber introduces the pharmaceutical panel at Health 2.0 Europe in Paris.

To European delegates, the conference’s US roots were evident in what was a packed agenda of fast-moving, if sometimes awkward, stage performances. Matthew Holt, Inda Subaiya and Europe’s own Denise Silber co-hosted presenters and panel sessions, and added their own insights and reactions to each day’s events.

For those still wondering what Health 2.0 is all about, Matthew Holt kicked off conference with a definition in just four points and set the pace for fast-moving presentations, stating that Health 2.0 is characterised by:

1. Personalised search
2. Communities
3. Intelligent tools
4. Integration of data with content

Pfizer’s Sylvie St Laurent speaks at Health 2.0 Europe in Paris, about
Pfizer’s private public partnership model for improving clinical trial
recruitment through social media.

Delegates were asked both at the start of the conference whether they believe that Health 2.0 services in Europe will be different to the US, and the majority of participants said they do. After two days of Health 2.0 presentations and discussions, the same question was asked at the end of the conference and again the majority of participants felt that Health 2.0 services in Europe will be different to those in the US.

For those of us working in healthcare engagement internationally, this was no surprise at all – Europe has a unique healthcare and cultural landscape, with its own challenges and opportunities for healthcare engagement. It is very different from the US not only because it exists in a different regulatory environment, but because it has a different approach to innovation.

Take for example Doctors.net.uk, the world’s first major social network for doctors which was set up in 1998 in the UK, years ahead of US equivalent Sermo which was founded eight years later. Health 2.0 Europe conference allowed delegates to see both of these alongside the likes of the British Medical Journal’s doc2doc network.

Overall, an incredibly broad range of topics was covered at the conference, although none in any real depth. For speakers, innovation was a must. I supported my own brief presentation of Pfizer’s Real Danger digital strategy with series of simultaneous tweets linking to other campaign resources.

I explain that the Pfizer ‘Real Danger’ digital engagement campaign
was about more than a man vomiting a rat, at Health 2.0 Europe in Paris.

For me, conference highlights (selected from live tweets I sent during the conference) included:

• Pfizer says MyHealthRecords is available for iPad
• Pew Internet’s Susannah Fox (@SusannahFox) says that patients with chronic disease are more likely to engage online
• PatientsLikeMe‘s Jamie Heywood presents their pharma interface and shows the correlation between drug use, efficacy and safety
• iWantGreatCare‘s Neil Bacon shows a real-time dashboard analysing patient reviews of doctors & clinics
• Miguel Cabrer gives an excellent medting.com demonstration of clinical case collaboration amongst healthcare professionals, including integrated language translation
• British Medical Journal’s David Payne shows their international healthcare professional community doc2doc.
• World Health Organization highlight health divide between poor & wealthy
• Paul Hodgkin demonstrates patient review site patientopinion.org.uk “Your story can change the NHS”.
• Bupa’s Annabel Bentley (@doctorblogs) brings a timely reminder that “Remember what we’re looking for here is better health outcomes for patients” and later goes on to give an example: “At Bupa we believe that intelligent use of healthcare data will help reduce cost of healthcare”
• And my last tweet, after 68% of respondents said they still think Health 2.0 will be different in Europe to the US:  Europe WILL be different from the US because it IS!!! One size does not fit ALL location / culture / language / regulatory…

Following Paul Grant’s recent video conversations at ePharma Summit in Philadelphia, I interviewed delegates at the Pharma eMarketing Summit in Berlin. Like Paul, I asked delegates what healthcare engagement meant to them.

The responses, from people at the forefront of engagement in Janssen-Cilag, Bayer, and Pfizer, show some of the current trends amongst pharmaceutical communicators. Patient engagement is an important theme, whilst engaging healthcare professionals in a way that is relevant to them, using social media, is also a key area of focus.

Irina Osovskaya, e-Business Manager at Janssen-Cilag talks about engaging healthcare professionals in a way that is relevant to them, using channels that they want. Bayer Schering Pharma’s Head of Digital Marketing & Sales, General Medicine, Len Starnes points out the value of dedicated social media networks for this kind of engagement.

Alex Butler, Communications Manager with Janssen-Cilag points out that senior managers in pharmaceutical companies now realise that they have to engage online, and are facing up to the challenges of doing so.

René Neubach, eMarketing Manager with Pfizer in Europe reflects on an increasing focus on strategy rather than simply digital tactics in this year’s eMarketing Summit.

You can also view this video, and others, on our Creation Healthcare YouTube Channel.

If you would advice about how to develop a successful digital engagement strategy, why not speak with one of Creation Healthcare’s international team of consultants? Contact us to find out more.