Pharma Creating Digital Platforms and Services

Interaction is a characteristic difference between previous healthcare mindsets and the way things are heading in the dynamic digital ecosystem.  Rather than reps hurriedly touching base with physicians on visits, and rather than periodic exchanges of information between patients and physicians during scheduled visits, all parties in a dynamic digital system will be able to consult and exchange information in a continuum across multiple channels in multiple directions, as required: pharma-physician, pharma-patient, physician-physician, physician-patient, patient-patient and combinations of all those.

The more dynamic the system becomes, the more it both encourages and enables stakeholders to use it; that applies particularly to patients with chronic conditions who are most likely to take an active interest in their health, day by day and at multiple points during the day. 

For health marketing professionals this continuum of interaction offers scope for timely, effective communication.  Analysis of different interaction patterns will make it possible to identify the key moments of different user types.  It’s at such moments that professionals have the potential to facilitate real conversations and mediate real human connections throughout any health journey.

The more consumers and professionals use digital technology – especially mobile – the more it becomes a functional intermediary between healthcare consumers, brands and physicians: delivering information, apps, tools, and support geared to answering questions, providing comfort, promoting adherence and fostering healthy behaviors.

For pharma the digital healthcare evolution offers the prospect of a seamless flow of communication and data for customer profiling and decision support.  It moves communication with patients and healthcare professionals beyond a website model into a distributed, inter-related ecosystem.  This will enable pharma companies to orchestrate an integrated customer experience across multiple touchpoints: to enhance customer engagement through access to information and services that advance the experience of care: to build a framework that directs perpetual innovation: and to drive performance through intelligence by aggregating execution and data capture from digital channels.