PHARMA NEWS, MULTICHANNEL & CROSSCHANNEL MAKETING

NYC-based pharma company Pfizer currently has 15 apps in the US iOS app store, ranging from a chapstick companion app to an app for people with kidney cancer. At the HIMSS Connected Health Summit in National Harbor, Maryland, Pfizer executives talked about two of the company's apps and their broader strategy for developing mobile health interventions.

"We recognize that the data shows patients expect meaningful digital solutions from us, and it is our obligation to deliver that," Judy Sewards, vice president of data and digital innovations, said. "When we think about it at Pfizer, we’re not thinking about what's the next shiny thing, or what's the next widget or what everyone else is doing, but looking through the lens of our patients as people."

For instance, Pfizer's app for smoking cessation, called Quitter's Circle, was developed in partnership with the American Lung Association. Dennis Hancock, Pfizer VP of global commercial solutions, said all the features of that app were driven by insights into the quitting process.

"It would be really easy to talk about buzzwords -- telemedicine, crowdfunding," he said. "While they’re important features to the app, they had to be driven by insights into what the smoker would find useful. I don’t think chasing features is a really good idea in the mHealth space. Let’s start with insights to know what people want and overcome those barriers using the best tools available."

Further Reading:

• “Pfizer Joins the #Pharma Digital Accelerator Club: Offers $250,000 in Prize Funding for Metastatic Breast Cancer “Disruptive” Technology!”; http://sco.lt/6PtsTR
• “Pfizer and IBM Join the Parkinson's Disease ‘Internet Of Things’ Club”; http://sco.lt/7xdDP7

Pharma companies’ marketing communications to their target audience of healthcare providers are increasingly digital. That's not terribly surprising, considering the uptake in digital channels among physicians for professional use.

What is changing, however, is the way pharma reaches doctors, according to an annual report from from healthcare and pharma solutions provider Indegene. In 2016 in the U.S., brand promotional emails, healthcare provider portals and key opinion leader webinars are the top three ways pharma companies reach out. However, by 2018, KOL webinars, social media and mobile apps will top the list, with social media and mobile apps growing the fastest, by 50% and 27%, respectively.

The social media investment is already underway, which will power the expected usage jump, Urvi Mehta, strategic relationships manager at Indegene, told FiercePharma.

“Social media is a very powerful channel that can help in understanding the end consumers. It’s easy to make marketing decisions like segmentation, course of patient education, and influence adherence through listening and analysis of the social behavior,” she said.

While KOL webinar growth will be smaller at 8.8%, that channel was identified as the best return-on-investment generator by the more than 100 global pharma and life science companies that responded to the survey.

ROI, in fact, is an ongoing concern. Even among the rise in projected spending, seven out of 10 pharma companies noted that demonstrating ROI is the biggest barrier when implementing new communication strategies.

U.S. pharma companies are second globally in digital spending, with 31% of companies spending more than 20% of their budgets on digital. By 2018, Indegene expects that to increase to 40% of companies. China leads with 33% of its pharma companies spending more than 20% on digital, and that figure is expected to rise to 50% by 2018.

The dramatic speed of adoption of smartphones is making the fastest-growing marketing channel mobile; smart companies understand they need to be as mobile as their target audiences.

With mobiles apps, utility is king. Bearing in mind that only about 16% of people would try an app more than once, and up to 90% of downloaded apps are used only once then deleted, according to a study by Compuware, identifying users’ real requirements is key to the success of any mobile app.

Pharma can act strategically by creating apps that are centered on patients’ daily needs and integrating them into the broader health ecosystem.

To balance engagement and compliance, many pharma companies have launched non-promotional heath apps focusing on disease awareness and management.

This increasing adoption of mobile health apps presents a great opportunity for the pharma industry to truly empower patients and healthcare professionals, by providing apps that improve the ways they understand and manage disease.

For this shift to happen, new capabilities must be developed to unleash the potential of digital innovation in the healthcare industry.

Mohanad Fors, global director of Digital Marketing and Innovation, Novartis Ophthalmology Franchise, believes pharma is taking “powerful and serious strides” in digital innovation, especially mobile health apps. He sees two main areas where the industry can improve to achieve more success:

“In most cases, app development or production is done on a tactical level without an overarching strategic plan, which sometimes results in short-lived apps that do not achieve the desired success. Launching digital awareness and training programmes can help us build digital capabilities and embed the digital mind-set in the business.

“The second one, which I believe is more critical, is the need for dedicated teams working on the whole cycle of health apps creation, from idea to maintenance and follow up. If you look at any successful app on the market you will find a complete team working day and night on it to ensure user satisfaction and interest. This is slowly happening now as digital becomes a top priority on industry executives’ agendas.”

It’s hard to find a pharma or medical device company these days that doesn’t have at least one mobile app in development. And now that, as of February 2015, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued guidance on which apps need to be regulated and which ones don’t, it will be interesting to see if this almost exponential development trend continues.

Federal guidance alone doesn’t guarantee an app’s success, and there is still plenty of playing field for developers in the health and wellness space for apps that do not require 510(k) submission. Therefore, developers and marketers alike must keep in mind these three key drivers of mobile health app adoption.

Awareness

In a 2014 poll by QuantiaMD, only 37% of physicians surveyed said that they had recommended a mobile app to their patients. In another QuantiaMD poll, 42% of physicians said they would notrecommend a mobile health app to patients because there was no regulatory oversight (though the new FDA guidance should help with this). In addition, another 37% percent had no idea what mobile health apps are out there.

In spite of physicians being split on the utility of apps, consumers are downloading them at a rapid pace. In fact, it is estimated that within the next three years half of all smartphone and tablet users will have at least one mobile health or wellness app, like Lose It!, RunKeeper, or Glucose Buddy. But, downloading doesn’t necessarily mean they are using them! There is enormous opportunity for healthcare marketers to more effectively demonstrate the myriad of app benefits to patients and physicians alike.

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