The newest weapon in the healthcare arsenal isn’t a blockbuster drug or a billion dollar machine — it’s actually gaming. The same concept that has millions of people slinging bird heads at wooden posts and shooting peas at zombies is now being tapped to improve health & wellness. Commercial and research institutions are exploiting the power of interactivity, feedback, immersiveness, compelling characters, and simulations innate to video games to take on some of the biggest healthcare challenges.
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Every pharma sales/marketing forecast highlights the fact that sales reps’ access to physicians will continue to decline over the foreseeable future. For the most part, pharma has adapted to this shift and has been apportioning an ever-growing pool of marketing funds towards non-personal promotion (NPP) and eMarketing. As the portfolio of multi-channel NPP & eMarketing tactics grows and collides with the explosion of emerging media & technology (social media, mobile, tablets, etc), so swells the challenge of measuring performance. The good news: most of pharma has built and fostered in-house analytics capabilities that are capable of capturing and analyzing growing volumes of clickstream & digital data. The bad news: most of pharma struggles to separate the wheat from the chaff and build a cross-functional, harmonized measurement strategy that equally caters to operational and executive stakeholders.
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In previous posts, I mused about healthcare IT and where health system dollars will and need to be allocated. Now, I’m shifting my focus to the other half of the healthcare puzzle- the payer market, i.e. health plans. I’ve worked at a few health plans and know first-hand how sluggishly health plans have reacted to adopting innovative solutions that challenge existing paradigms, primarily as a result of the plethora of mainframes and legacy systems, archaic project management methodology, subpar business analysis processes, and not best-of-breed talent pool. Until recently, health plans in general viewed technology as a commodity, not a strategic asset or competitive differentiator. Through the late 20th century, health plans had indoctrinated a philosophy of “if it ain’t broken, just patch it”, and decades of slapstick patching (alongside the ‘re-purposing’ of existing personnel into “pseudo business analysts”- folks who fundamentally lack any type of system skills but just need a role where some value can be added) seemed to work when digital technology didn’t play such a pervasive role in healthcare. But payors can no longer ignore the role of digital in the service experience and the imminent, game-changing regulatory waves that are about to hit the payer market are all the more reason for these companies to build a digital portfolio that differentiates. (more…)
Not that I’m much of a history buff, but there have been times where I’ve become overly raptured by a historic character and have pushed to learn about the life and times of the person. Such is the case for Spartacus, the Roman slave who led a revolt against the Roman empire in the second century B.C. My deepdive began with ”Spartacus and the Slave Wars: A Brief History with Documents (The Bedford Series in History and Culture),” a comprehensive collection of documents about Rome’s major slave wars. (more…)
A study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project and the California HealthCare Foundation (released on March 1, 2011) finds that one in five Internet users goes online seeking others with similar health concerns. More importantly, after receiving a diagnosis, especially ones of an insidious nature, an increasing number of people are referring to the web; Pew has coined this growing trend “peer to peer health care”. (more…)
