eMedFusion -- Digital Innovation for the Healthcare Community

eMedFusion -- Digital Innovation for the Healthcare Community: The Digital Communications Channel – Why is a unified strategy key?

2011-03-31T01:17:00.000-07:00

eMedFusion -- Digital Innovation for the Healthcare Community: The Digital Communications Channel – Why is a unified strategy key?

The Digital Communications Channel – Why is a unified strategy key?

2011-03-31T01:13:00.000-07:00

Over the last 18 months many of you will have attended a pharmaceutical conference in Europe or the US, subscribed to any number of pharmaceutical industry publications or followed industry leaders on Twitter. Across these channels there is a general consensus that the digital landscape is growing in both size and importance for our industry, and that this growth spurt looks set to continue to expand in the foreseeable future.

With this rapid development in mind, many brands have produced medical education and brand.com websites, each with varying degrees of success As an agency we work with many clients who desire to create websites, twitter feeds or mobile applications as quickly as possible to maintain their competitive edge in this space.

Although many of these tools are often viewed as “must-have” steps in the development of a digital communications “strategy,” our experience highlights that there is often a disconnect between a clear digital strategy linking, the tactical delivery of items, and a definitive path for future developmental success.

As an agency tasked with providing superior advice to our clients, our approach is often to first take a step back, and second, to ask questions that may not fit intuitively in the traditional sales process: 1) Why does the client want this tool? 2) What unmet need is this tool fulfilling? 3) How has the unmet need been established? 4) How will audience be generated? 5) What are the key performance indicators to measure success?

The above questions will help us to map a unified strategy based on concrete objectives, ultimately providing our clients with a clear path and an improved return on investment for their digital initiatives.

Integral to a foundational digital strategy is the concept of future proofing our clients’ assets. Any recommended framework must take into account the evolving goals and objectives throughout a brand’s lifecycle, and future digital and multimedia channels.

At eMedFusion, we have developed a proprietary methodology called e-Path to ensure our clients are well positioned to capitalize on the ever evolving digital space. For further information about e-path please contact David Hogben david.hogben@emedfusion.com

eMedFusion's Hans Wernke Discusses e-Path in PM360 Online

2011-03-25T11:00:00.000-07:00

Developing a Path to Digital Success
By Hans Wernke

An examination of the universal digital marketing principles practiced by other industries resulted in a digital strategy that can be applied to the biopharmaceutical industry.

Rarely a week goes by without an invitation to yet another congress dedicated to social media, digital marketing, and mobile communications in healthcare. Don’t get me wrong, I like a good pharma e-marketing congress as much as the next person, but after a while I can’t escape the feeling that I’ve heard much of it before.

There’s an abundance of strong solution-specific case studies, but taken together, these presentations have begun to feel disconnected from a foundational strategy. Where are the discussions on the broader methodologies that anchor the whizz-bang tactics to the brand’s existing marketing plan? What about answers to fundamental, critically important questions: What does “success” for a digital approach look like? How is success communicated upwards to the C-suite and across an organization? How do other brands do it? How do other industries do it?

It is not surprising that the factors driving digital marketing success are in fact the same as those that are fundamental to the success of any overarching marketing plan. Methodologies such as OASIS, ACES, and KUDOS all focus on the same basic principles: know your marketplace, set clear and measurable objectives, engage your target audiences, develop a plan, measure the outcomes, and make adjustments where necessary. What these concepts do is provide a road map, a clear plan to achieve success in the digital marketing channel. Viewed individually, each of the steps seems painfully obvious (“I have to set objectives…? Really?”), but taken together, they provide the clarity and direction to achieve success.

Applying Process Knowledge to the Biopharmaceutical Industry
What’s wrong with applying an off-the-shelf, universal digital marketing methodology to our particular industry? Perhaps nothing, but we wanted to take a closer look and test that hypothesis. We wanted to get some client feedback, to apply our biopharmaceutical experience, and to see if the core principles could be optimized to work better with our client’s digital assets.

The end result is e-Path, a digital marketing methodology specifically developed to incorporate the digital fundamentals applied in other industries, and to place them within a framework that factors in all the nuances of the biopharmaceutical industry. Made up of five steps, e-Path forms a path to digital success.

Step I. e-Analysis
First things first. Before we start thinking about tactics, it is important to assess the landscape. This evaluation provides a clear view of the existing marketplace. It will also guide our internal discussions on the key performance indicators (KPIs) we want to measure the success of our efforts.
Online resources available to HCPs and patients in the relevant therapeutic area
Major websites and communities, and their perceived influence on physician and patient behavior
Physicians and patients who are the key drivers of online discussions in the identified areas
News, wikis, blogs, micro-blogs and life streams, YouTube, online conversation, and comments on forums and message boards
Competitor activity
Gap analysis
Naturally, the e-Analysis is not a one-off project, but an ongoing process.

Step II. Prioritization of Objectives
While the need to set clear, measurable objectives is well understood, the reality is that this critical procedure often does not get the attention it deserves. Different stakeholders have different expectations of what success looks like. Projects close to completion often get derailed because those involved were never aligned on final outcomes.

This is the phase where the internal stakeholders come together to determine the following:
Brand objectives
Stakeholder objectives
Agreement of KPIs
Completing this phase before discussing strategy, much less tactics, will avoid many headaches down the line.

Step III. Audience Requirements
It is interesting to note that many digital marketing plans presume audience response through intestinal evaluations (ie, my gut tells me this will work).

Why not conduct market research, surveys, focus groups, and advisory boards? If you want to be confident your audiences will use your solutions, engage them in the development process.

Step IV. Targeted Planning
Based on the work conducted in the three previous steps, we develop the actual path, focusing on connecting tactics to specific objectives.

Using an amalgamation of the data from the first three phases combined with digital and healthcare expertise, a flexible targeted plan is produced. This planning phase is built with a level of flexibility to incorporate progress within a drug lifecycle, ongoing digital trends, technology advancements, and updates to the overall communications plan.

We plan our campaigns, educational activities, and digital solutions within the context of the brand objectives. All digital touch points are evaluated through audience assessments. KPIs are built into each tactic and calibrated to our initial e-Analysis.

Step V. Holistic Sustainability
Why holistic? Well, aside from the fact that it serves as a nice conclusion to our e-Path acronym, it illustrates a level of sustainability that transcends the methodology and captures brand growth, voice, and influence. The objective here is to answer the following questions:
Based on the KPIs set at the beginning of the program, and the objectives we agreed on, how did we do?
Did all activities go as planned? If not, why not and what should we do differently next time?
Given the evolving landscape, are our objectives still on target?
Summary
As you listen to presentations at the next digital pharma congress, consider how the tactical solutions are being positioned. Success in the digital healthcare space relies on one’s ability to strike a balance between innovation, exploration, and common sense marketing. As is the case with activity across the marketing spectrum, the key questions we must be able to answer are the following: What does “good” look like? How does this plan help me get there? How do I know if I have met my objectives?

If the answers to these questions are not clear, take a step back and reconsider your approach. Perhaps e-Path can help you challenge your presumptions, and navigate a path to Digital Success.

Hans Wernke is Vice President, Digital Sales & Marketing at eMedFusion (a division of KnowledgePoint360 Group). Hans partners with pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical device companies to help them optimize their communication with healthcare professionals through a broad range of strategic and tactical digital healthcare solutions. Contact him at Hans.Wernke@emedfusion.com.

Click here to access original article in PM360 Online

Following the herd actually shifts your opinion

2011-03-04T07:49:00.000-08:00

Following the herd actually shifts your opinion

Fascinating look at what happens upstairs when we compromise our initial appraisals. Obvious connections to marketing: success breeds success.

ALL your friends praise a film you just watched. Instead of admitting how dull you found it, you agree. We all sometimes mute our own beliefs like this, but it seems there is more to this than a little white lie. Conforming to others' views can cause a real shift in your own opinion.

That's the conclusion of Jamil Zaki at Harvard University and colleagues, who asked men to rate how attractive they found a series of photos of women's faces. The men were then given the average rating for each photo, said to be determined by a previous group. In reality, these ratings were randomly generated by a computer. Thirty minutes later, the participants reassessed the same photos while having their brains scanned using fMRI.

As expected, the men's ratings changed to match the consensus scores more closely. However, Zaki's team found that if the participant decided a woman was more attractive than they first thought, there was a spike of activity in the orbitofrontal cortex and nucleus accumbens; if they decided she was not as pretty, activity decreased in these areas.

Previous research has shown that the higher the activity in these brain regions, the more a person values a certain stimulus. In other words, the researchers argue, the participants were not just modifying their appraisals for the sake of appearances: the so-called average results had genuinely changed their opinion of the photos. The work will appear in Psychological Science.

"We know that we adopt the beliefs and perceptions of people around us, but one of the big issues is whether conformity represents a true shift in opinion or just a kind of a white lie," says Zaki. "The brain regions [we studied] specifically track how you regard something and they recapitulated the shift in opinion," he says.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20928024.600-following-the-herd-actually-shifts-your-opinion.html

White House Press Conference via Twitter

2010-10-29T10:33:00.000-07:00

Twitter goes even more mainstream.

The first question at a White House press briefing goes to a wire service reporter as a strict matter of seniority and custom. President Obama’s Press Secretary, Robert Gibbs, hasn’t exactly disrupted that time-honored tradition but has begun fielding what he’s calling the “first question” on Twitter — aka #1q.

Read More

How do adults learn -- or why you're bored by company training exercises

2010-08-25T11:22:00.000-07:00

At eMedFusion, we're occasionally asked to explain the reasons for including highly interactive components in our training and education platforms.

"Wouldn't it be easier to simply present the curriculum as a didactic video?" we're asked. And, it most cases, they're right--it would be easier. But, not necessarily better.

Below is a succinct presentation highlighting adult learning tenets. It's helpful to think of these concepts and theories when evaluating the potential efficacy of online training and learning applications.

Former FDA Official to Pharma Marketers: Don’t Expect Much Regulatory Guidance on Social Media

2010-07-22T12:33:00.000-07:00

Former FDA Official to Pharma Marketers: Don’t Expect Much Regulatory Guidance on Social Media

Although on my night table for quite some time, I just finished up Malcolm Gladwell's book "Outliers" Actually, I ate it up.

After reading this interview, complete with skeptical things-aren't-going-to-change-much opinions, I sighed a big sigh.

The two, Gladwell's book and Tobi Elkin's post, seem related.

Outliers: The Story of Success

Talking Demographics in Social Media

2010-07-08T12:56:00.000-07:00

Interesting article from eMarketer on the demographics of social networking:

How age, income and ethnicity affect time spent social networking

The Nielsen Company reported in June that, on average, the global consumer spends about 1 in every 4.5 minutes online on blogs or social networking sites. According to a report by market researcher Morpace, among US Facebook users time on Facebook rises to 1 in 3 minutes spent online.

Unsurprisingly, despite Facebook’s growing appeal to older users, 18- to 34-year-olds spend the most time on the site per week, at 8.5 hours out of 22.4 spent online. Weekly Facebook time drops to 4.6 hours among users ages 55 and older, representing a lower proportion of that group’s average of 21.5 hours per week on the internet.

Broken down by race and ethnicity, Morpace found Facebook usage heaviest by Asians. Not only did that group spend the most hours per week on the site, but they also devoted the greatest percentage of their weekly internet time to Facebook (39.6%, compared with 35.1% among blacks, the second-highest group). Hispanics spent the fewest hours on Facebook, and even compared with their low average time online came in last.

While the Morpace report showed a decline in both total time online and time on Facebook as incomes rose from less than $50,000 up to $100,000, affluent Facebook users making at least $100,000 annually spent the most time on the site and on the web as a whole.

In Q1 2010, comScore found that the visitors who spent the most time on Facebook also spent the most money online. Targeting users who not only spend large amounts of time on the site but also devote a large proportion of their total online activity to the social network could translate to going after the most lucrative portion of the audience.

View original article at eMarketer http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007797

Social Media Primer

2010-07-08T11:30:00.000-07:00

If the polls are correct, most people simply don't understand what social media is. Below is a wonderful primer from the New York Times that's sure to be dated in about a month. Notwithstanding it's "Sell date," it's a great place to start if you want to get up to speed on all this "Twitter MyFace" stuff.

FACEBOOK This is the biggest social networking service, with almost 500 million members — 22 percent of everyone on the Internet — and it’s growing by 5 percent a month.

It’s a glorified “facebook”— name-and-photo directory — of the sort that colleges distribute to incoming freshmen. (In fact, Facebook started out exactly that way, as an electronic facebook at Harvard.) You answer as many questions about yourself as you feel comfortable sharing: your name, contact information, relationship status, favorite music and maybe a few photos. Then you search for friends, past or present. When they accept your friend invitations, you can now see their Facebook pages and they can see yours.

Why you’d bother: Facebook is great for sharing news, photos and videos with people who might care; for finding long-lost friends (or snooping on old lovers); for joining groups that support various causes or interests; for sending messages (it’s somewhat more streamlined than regular e-mail); and for playing games with each other (FarmVille, Mafia Wars).

Why not: Facebook keeps making policy and programming blunders that expose personal information to other Web sites. It also lets its advertisers place ads on the pages of very targeted members: divorced 45-year-olds in Texas, for example.

Similar: MySpace (a teenage and preteenage crowd, heavily focused on pop music and do-it-yourself page designs), Bebo and many others.

LINKEDIN It’s Facebook for the professional set. Here, the concept is establishing a “who you know” network of current and former business colleagues.

Why you’d bother: LinkedIn is especially useful when you’re looking for a new job — or a new employee, which helps explain its 70-million-strong global membership — because you’re no longer limited to asking your immediate colleagues for referrals. Now you can ask colleagues of colleagues, which greatly expands your reach. LinkedIners can also vouch for one another as references.

A popular feature called Answers lets you ask business-related questions of people who might know — advice on everything from résumé formatting to business software.

Why not: As with Facebook, not all connections are legitimate. When people accept “friend” invitations from people they don’t actually know, the whole trusted-colleague concept weakens.

TWITTER This is the service that lets you send tweets — er, brief, 140-character updates that feel a lot like text messages. They can be news, jokes, observations, links, gripes, questions, anything.

Except instead of sending them to just one person’s cellphone, you’re sending them to a handful, or thousands — as many as have signed up to receive them from you. Meanwhile, you’ve signed up to receive other people’s postings (to “follow” them). Once you’ve signed up for a few good ones, the messages scroll up your screen, like the transcript of a global cocktail-party conversation.

You can use Twitter on its Web site, but it’s much easier if you do it using a free Twitter-reading app for your computer or phone, like TweetDeck, Twitterific and Twitter (the official Twitter app for the iPhone, formerly called Tweetie).

Why you’d bother: News frequently breaks on Twitter (by being passed around so fast that pretty soon, everybody’s heard it). It’s fun to follow famous people; the stuff they (or their minions) type appears directly on your phone or computer screen, without any layers of interpreters in between.

Using search.twitter.com, you can find out what the world is saying about you, your company or any topic that interests you.

And if enough people, or the right people, follow you, you can get something truly revolutionary: expert, instantaneous feedback on questions or opinions.

Why not: Twitter can be a lonely place when you first sign up. Figuring out whom to follow, and how to get people to follow you, takes time and effort. And Twitterites use a lot of conventions and shorthand codes that can be confusing at first.

Similar: Google Buzz, FriendFeed, Facebook updates.

FOURSQUARE As cellphones with GPS become more popular, crazy new possibilities pop up — like Foursquare.

It knows where you are. So when you open the Foursquare app on your iPhone, Palm, BlackBerry or Android phone, you see a list of restaurants, bars and shops near where you’re standing. By “checking in” (tapping the name of the one you’re in), you broadcast your location to your friends. There’s a game element, too: you earn points whenever you check in. In fact, whoever visits a certain place the most becomes its “mayor,” and may be rewarded by a giveaway from that business.

Why you’d bother: You can see where your friends are right now, making it easy to meet them. Businesses can offer you free products as you walk by (“Since you’re right outside, how ’bout a free coffee?”) — win-win marketing. And your buddies can leave pointers about an establishment (“avoid the halibut”) that appear right on your screen as you enter. Really cool concept.

Why not: With not quite two million members — mostly bar-hopping twenty-somethings — Foursquare isn’t for everyone. Most people don’t use it, and most businesses aren’t listed yet.

Similar: Gowalla, Loopt, Brightkite.

YELP It’s a huge database of restaurants, shops, hotels, doctors, museums and attractions, all easy to find, with store hours, directions and phone numbers, covering 34 cities. But the magic is in the customer reviews: 11 million of them so far, mostly helpful and articulate.

Why you’d bother: Armed with those reviews, you have no excuse to go to a terrible restaurant or shady shop again.

Why not: There’s always a chance that the reviews are being manipulated (although the company says it’s diligent about filtering out suspicious ones).

Similar: OpenTable, Urbanspoon.

THE BOTTOM LINE These sites all derive their power the same way: We, the people, provide the information — not the Web site owner. Some of these services establish lines of communication between people who might otherwise never meet, joining them by interest rather than geography. Others connect you with people you do know, or once knew, so that you can help each other out.

You may find absolutely nothing of value to you in these sites, and that’s fine. But isn’t it better to make that decision now that you know what you’re ignoring?

New York Times
For Those Facebook Left behind
David Pogue

Wikipedia, the physician, and the elephant in the room.

2009-12-08T11:02:00.000-08:00

This post was contributed by David Moore of eMedFusion. View David's bio here.

Wikipedia holds an increasingly uneasy position in our online consciousness. Derided and sought out in equal measure, the free encyclopedia continues to represent much of what is heralded and feared regarding a collaborative online shift which favours consensus over credentials. Love it or loathe it, Wikipedia is playing a significant role in our information seeking and sharing behaviours. Occupying the #1 spot in Google for everything from ‘aspirin’ to ‘zygomatic’, the site continues to grow in popularity and attract information-hungry searchers.

Wikipedia describes itself thus: “a multilingual, Web-based, free-content encyclopedia project….Wikipedia's articles provide links to guide the user to related pages with additional information….Wikipedia is written collaboratively by volunteers from all around the world; anyone can edit it.…”. Attracting more than 684 million visitors annually; with in excess of 75,000 active contributors working on more than 10,000,000 articles in more than 260 languages, Wikipedia is a behemoth of information.

The full article is available here.

So why should the pharmaceutical industry care?

The reason is simply that of the 684 million visitors Wikipedia receives every year, are we really to believe that healthcare professionals are not amongst them?

A recent Manhattan Research study revealed that two-thirds of physicians online use Wikipedia as a medical resource monthly or more often - and they're recommending it to patients.

Wikipedia’s collaborative channels are also increasingly attracting healthcare professionals with diverse learning and information portals:

• Wikiproject Medicine
• Wikiproject Pharmacology
• Wikiversity

There portals are enabling discussion and promoting ongoing refinement of community-driven content.

The phenomenon and influence of collaborative content has influenced the recent growth of a myriad of wiki sites aimed at healthcare professionals. Wikidoc, AskDrWiki, Ganfyd and the recently launched but hugely significant Medpedia are all examples of the desire for physicians to participate in medical information creation and sharing with professional peers. This trend towards physician use of wiki sites has been the subject of significant discussion within the healthcare community – examples of recent publications on the subject can be found at the BMJ online.

Like the rest of us, physicians are increasingly turning to Wikipedia and other wiki sources for medical and pharmacology information. Recent studies have concluded that search engines such as Google are an increasingly effective diagnostic tools within the physician’s bag and that this trend will be evermore important as medical content online matures and develops through collaborative content creation (http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/333/7579/1143).

Those involved in communicating with physicians must seek to understand the potential of wiki sites as channels. The fear and ignorance of this new model of content sharing can be overcome through understanding and education.

As physicians continue to turn to turn to Wikipedia and its imitators for clinical information, the accuracy and origin of the information provided pertaining to pharmaceutical brands and disease states becomes increasingly significant.

Content within Wikipedia is created immediately, by anonymous authors, without consultation and outside of the traditional medial journal peer-review model, yet is consumed by thousands of physicians and patients daily.

Have you considered the impact of wiki sites on your client’s communications?

Do you know the rules for email promotion?

2009-12-07T10:10:00.000-08:00

This post was contributed by Natalie Nolan of eMedFusion. View Natalie's bio here.

We often need to send emails to large numbers of people. Whether you are inviting healthcare professionals to take part in a survey or sending an email blast to potential customers, it is vitally important to stick to the rules. This type of email communication is covered by a range of national legislation, industry regulations and guidelines, so it’s easy to feel daunted.

So what is acceptable? Some of the key regulations are as follows:

The CAN-SPAM Act (US law, 2003) sets out the requirements for commercial emails whose primary purpose is advertising or promoting a commercial product or service. Its main provisions are to ban false or misleading header information and deceptive subject lines. It requires that recipients are given an opt-out method, that the email is identified as an advertisement and that it includes the sender’s physical postal address.

In Europe, the EU Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications (2002) requires recipients to opt-in to receive email communication. However, if there is an existing customer relationship, it is permissible to send emails which market similar products and services, as long as an opt-out mechanism is included. The sender of the email must be identified and a postal address included.

EU Member States implement the directive via national legislation, and the interpretation varies by country. For example, business-to-business emails require a mandatory opt-in in Austria, but may be sent to some companies on an opt-out basis in the UK. Countries also differ in how they interpret the wording of the directive.

So although the EU documents give you an overview of the base standard in Europe, you still need to check each country's local email marketing laws on a case-by-case basis. On top of this, of course, we must consider industry guidelines relating specifically to the healthcare industry.

In the UK, the ABPI Code of Practice (UK, 2006) prohibits the use of email for promotional purposes unless with the prior permission of the recipient. The wording of the agreement must be such that health professionals are able to give fully informed consent. The Information Commissioner’s Office in the UK has produced guidance for marketers on the EC Directive (see link below). They point out that if you are processing personal data (that is, if you know the name of the person who will receive your message) you must also comply with the Data Protection Act (UK, 1998).

The content of all mailings must comply with all relevant industry guidelines, such as the IFPMA Code of Pharmaceutical Marketing Practices and the PhRMA Code on Interaction with Healthcare Professionals (it is now a legal requirement in some US States to adopt this Code.

This article contains top-line information only. For further information, please see the following:

CAN-SPAM Act

EC Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications (summary)

EC Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications (full text)

EC Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications (discussion article)

The Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (Canada, 2004)

The Data Protection Act

ABPI Code of Practice

IFPMA Code of Practice (2006)

PhRMA Code (2009)

Pharma through the tube.

2009-08-31T10:05:00.000-07:00

This post was contributed by Helen Marr of eMedFusion. View Helen's bio here.

Marketers at two of the biggest pharma companies, AstraZeneca and sanofi-aventis have been embracing web 2.0 by launching channels on YouTube.

YouTube is a video-sharing website where users can upload, view and share video clips, including movie clips, TV clips, and music videos, as well as amateur content such as video blogs and short original videos.

According to Lynn Crowe, senior product manager, metabolism marketing at sanofi-aventis, the company is planning to update content frequently on it’s first-ever YouTube channel. The launch “is indicative of our belief that expanding social media platforms will play an increasing role with patients, and can be used to effectively deliver information on the risks and benefits of diabetes treatment and care,” said Crowe.

The AstraZeneca channel differs from sanofi-aventis in that AZ are allowing users to upload their own video clips to their My Asthma story website which are then reviewed by a panel of legal and regulatory experts prior to being published on YouTube. Unlike most other videos on YouTube, visitors to both channels are unable to comment or rate videos negating the need for continued approvals from regulatory authorities. Since the channels launch a month ago, nearly 19,000 have visited the channel.

This is a brave step into the unknown for these pharmaceutical companies, allowing their videos to be posted on to such a site and allowing users to copy into their own websites and other social media sites such as Facebook. Could this be a channel you could explore with your clients?

eMedFusion's David Moore quoted on Pharmafocus.com

2009-08-19T10:31:00.000-07:00

David Moore of eMedFusion was recently quoted in an article on Pharmafocus.com, discussing pharma's social-media shyness. Read David's bio here.
David Moore, vice-president eMedFusion, KnowledgePoint360, provides another insight into why his agency's pharma clients can seem shy to engage. He suggests there is scepticism surrounding the translation from a personal origin to a professional application of the approach: "The stigma of this being associated with an adolescent Facebook/pop music superficiality is difficult to shake off [and] that social media are in-vogue but lack depth which is completely alien to the clinical-trial/data-demand culture that pharma are required to operate in."

Read the full article here.

eMedFusion Launches Innovative Healthcare e-Marketing Website

2009-08-19T08:34:00.000-07:00

Originally published on August 9, 2009 via PRWeb

eMedFusion, a division of KnowledgePoint360 Group, has launched a next-generation Web 2.0 website highlighting nearly two dozen products, services and other "e-Solutions" aimed at meeting the needs of pharmaceutical, biotech, diagnostics and device companies, and other stakeholders operating in the virtual healthcare landscape.

"The eMedFusion.com website was built on a foundation of extensive market research," says David S. Stevens, Director of Product Management at eMedFusion. "Online Medical Marketing and education is as much about 'knowing' as it is about 'doing.' Not unlike science, eMarketing is fast paced and technological advances come weekly. If you're not up on the latest news, your eMarketing strategy (dependent on search algorithms and Web 2.0 applications) becomes obsolete over night. eMedFusion is an active participant in this world. With an eye toward your success, we consult with you and remain at your side, step by step."

The new website is an exciting platform showcasing eMedFusion's wide array of economical off-the-shelf e-products such as: PowerPoint Slide Sorter, Talking Papers, MDInvision, Message Manager, MDPROFILE, and MDViewPoint. In addition, eMedFusion.com harnesses the functionality of Twitter, YouTube.com, and Facebook.

eMedFusion has been a market leader since 2000, offering best-of-class online marketing plan development and execution; outcomes measurement consulting; viral marketing and online communication programs; strategic and creative visual services design; website development services, publication planning tools, online though leader development expertise, email marketing services; offline campaign synchronization; comprehensive metrics and ROI reporting.

Its parent company, KnowledgePoint360, is a global leader in education for healthcare professionals, offering medical communications services, publication planning, live educational events ranging from international congresses to dinner meetings, strategic consulting, exhibit design, speakers bureaus, and medical education. Through all of these activities, KnowledgePoint360 offers "Insight, Innovation, and Integrity in Healthcare Information."

Other KnowledgePoint360 divisions include ACUMED, BlueMomentum, Clinical Bridges, CodonMedical, FireKite, Gardiner-Caldwell Communications, GeoMed, Medex-Media, Physicians World, Physicians World Europe, Scientific Connexions, Physicians World Speakers Bureau, and StemScientific. Headquarters are in Secaucus, N.J., with additional offices in Macclesfield, Maidenhead, and London, U.K.; Newtown, PA, New York, Chicago, and San Bruno, Calif.; and Mannheim, Germany.

Contact Information:

In the US

David Stevens
david.stevens@emedfusion.com
+01 201 271 6042

Jon Bigelow
jon.bigelow@kp360group.com
+01 201 271 6122

In the UK

David Moore
david.moore@emedfusion.com
+44 (0) 1625 668 320

Viv Adshead
viv.adshead@kp360group.com
+44 (0) 1625 664 000

Who's the boss? The conscious vs unconscious

2009-04-23T07:38:00.000-07:00

Fascinating article in the Economist about what you know and when. It appears many of your decisions are made by your unconscious long before your conscious mind is aware. The classic experiment on the subject was done by Benjamin Libet of the University of California, San Francisco in the 1980's.

I found this video on Wikipedia to articulate the experiement.

Here's an excerpt from the updated article by Joydeep Bhattacharya at Goldsmiths’ College in London and Bhavin Sheth at the University of Houston, in Texas.

A piece of research about to be published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, by Joydeep Bhattacharya at Goldsmiths’ College in London and Bhavin Sheth at the University of Houston, in Texas, suggests that although people are not consciously aware of it, their brains have to be in a certain state for an insight to take place. Moreover, that state can be detected electrically several seconds in advance of the “aha!” moment itself.

The question of where insights come from has become a hot topic in neuroscience, despite the fact that they are not easy to induce experimentally in a laboratory. Some researchers have used getting the punch line of a riddle as an example of an insightful outcome. Critics complain, however, that this is less an insight than an “outsight”. Other experiments have used word tasks. In these, a person might be given three seemingly unrelated words, such as “skirts”, “black” and “put”, and asked to come up with a fourth that can link to each of the other three. (In this case, “out”.) But those tasks may say more about lexical ability than true insight.

Dr Bhattacharya and Dr Sheth have taken a third approach. They have selected some brain-teasing but practical problems in the hope that these would get closer to mimicking real insight. To qualify, a puzzle had to be simple, not too widely known and without a methodical solution. The researchers then asked 18 young adults to try to solve these problems while their brainwaves were monitored using an electroencephalograph (EEG).

A typical brain-teaser went like this. There are three light switches on the ground-floor wall of a three-storey house. Two of the switches do nothing, but one of them controls a bulb on the second floor. When you begin, the bulb is off. You can only make one visit to the second floor. How do you work out which switch is the one that controls the light?

That light-bulb moment

This problem, or one equivalent to it, was presented on a computer screen to a volunteer when that volunteer pressed a button. The electrical activity of the volunteer’s brain (his brainwave pattern, in common parlance) was recorded by the EEG from the button’s press. Each volunteer was given 30 seconds to read the puzzle and another 60 to 90 seconds to solve it. If he had not done so in the time allotted, a hint appeared. In the case of the light-switch puzzle, the suggestion was that you turn one switch on for a while, then turn it off.

Some people worked it out; others did not. The significant point, though, was that the EEG predicted who would fall where. Those volunteers who went on to have an insight (in this case that on their one and only visit to the second floor they could use not just the light but the heat produced by a bulb as evidence of an active switch) had had different brainwave activity from those who never got it. In the right frontal cortex, a part of the brain associated with shifting mental states, there was an increase in high-frequency gamma waves (those with 47-48 cycles a second). Moreover, the difference was noticeable up to eight seconds before the volunteer realised he had found the solution. Dr Sheth thinks this may be capturing the “transformational thought” (the light-bulb moment, as it were) in action, before the brain’s “owner” is consciously aware of it.

As I recall, when Libet’s data hit, the dialogue spiraled into a debate on free will (ie, the lack thereof).

It really does make one pause to think (wait, my brain already “thought” that before I became conscious of the thought — even before I assumed authorship of the thought!)

This REALLY makes me wonder about rhetoric and how this unconscious thing inside us making decisions deems what is or isn’t compelling. Are there universal rules at work we’re not, ahem, conscious of? Powerful stuff.

Have you tweeted today? An introduction to Twitter.

2009-04-15T09:40:00.000-07:00

You may or may not have heard of Twitter, but it is experiencing a surge in activity as it becomes the next big thing. Users of Twitter range from Martha Stewart to Medscape, and in Detroit last month, a surgery was live-tweeted!

What is Twitter, you ask? Twitter is a micro-blogging services; services post updates of 140 characters or less. The messages, or "tweets," can be submitted via the web, SMS, IM, or a third-party client. They are received in the same way. People "follow" you and receive your tweets as you send them. "Twitter in Plain English" explains the personal uses of Twitter and provides a short tutorial.

What are the potential uses of Twitter for our business? Twitter allows us to have a direct line of contact to target audience members. You can develop and promote your brand, see what people are saying about your brand, and create buzz about new content on a website or an upcoming live event.

Twitter is only one tool in a whole set of web 2.0 resources available to us. Here are a few more resources with information on Twitter:

The Twitter Power Guide (ebook)
How to Use Twitter for Business: A Beginner's Guide (ebook)
A Strategic Approach to Using Twitter (image)

What do physicians have in common with the typical teenager?

2009-04-13T11:01:00.000-07:00

If you answered, “fast cars, fast food, and a lot of social networking,” you’re at least partially correct. Social networking, Podcasts, RSS feeds, and other Web2.0 applications are experiencing unprecedented adoption rates among physicians. During the past ten years, we’ve been observing ~100,000 registered healthcare professionals as they interact with accredited and non-accredited content on our Clinical Bridges disease awareness websites. And as recent as 18 months ago, we’ve seen some big changes in physician behavior on the Web.

And we're not alone in our observations. Check out these data from analysts Manhattan Research, Inc.

• 300,000 physicians read blogs or forums at least weekly
• 25,000 physicians participate in professional blogs by posting or commenting
• 508,000 physicians watch video content online weekly
• 100,000 physicians subscribe to Podcasts
• 60,000 US physicians post routinely post content to the Internet

In the past, doctors bookmarked resources of high-quality content so they could return to them again and again. That’s no longer the case. Today, physicians and other healthcare professionals are far more likely to start their Internet journeys using Google Search rather than clicking on a bookmarked link to a known website. (This practice underscores the imperative of Search Engine Optimization in all our website campaigns). Similar to behavior we see in teenagers, physicians have learned through experience the value of regularly searching the Internet for content, even content they’re familiar with, because of an expectation that something new and better likely exists.

This change in behavior may partially be attributed to the fact that physicians have been trained to habitually search out better ways to execute their jobs. They are unusually open to new products and methods. This mindset is of course advantageous in the field of science where advances are made daily. Not coincidentally, it’s also a beneficial mindset in the world of technology, which may be the only discipline that eclipses the pace of science.

Physicians are joining Social networking sites such as Sermo, Physician Connect, Within3, and SocialMD (just a few among the dozens that have recently sprung up.) These platforms provide a richer more satisfying experience for doctors and healthcare professionals as they engage with content and one another. As evidenced by their popularity among the general public (Myspace and Facebook have a combined 425 million members—to put in context, this represents 6.3 % of the world's population), social networking sites meet a need not realized by traditional websites.

Over the past 18 months, online physician behavior has changed. Doctors are incorporating Google Search into their daily workflow; they are abandoning traditional didactic websites in favor of new platforms that offer a more satisfying user experience, empowering them to collaborate with and influence others; they demand timely information (think in terms of minutes—not hours and certainly not days); and they want all this content to be given freely with no stings attached. Remind you of any teenagers you know?