All medical businesses tend to educate both the HCPs and patients to give both the best knowledge about the product, thus leading to purchase.
However, patient communication seems to be underestimated, according to the materials I see from the different brands across the industry. We all believe that providing basic information about the disease or condition, unclear or very basic explanation of treatment options and saying 3-5 our product benefits will help. It will, to a certain extent, but efficacy will be very low.
Patient communication is way more complicated than we may think. And we do have a big issue communicating with patients nowadays.
First of all, we never think about the basic information, available in the patient's head, the patient's perception of his situation, and alternative information, the patient may already have or which the patient will get later on from other sources. Moreover, we even do not think about these "other sources". Adding to this issue is the fact, that the vast majority of businesses tend to talk about their "best solution" and are too much focused on themselves, on their solution key points, that they simply forget the customer's perspective and the customer problem makes this problem even bigger, than we may estimate.
From another point, the HCP side, especially in the private sector have to not only believe in the product you are marketing but have to understand how that product will fit into their clinic portfolio in terms of convincing patient to use the technology.
In other words, from HCP side we have different but similar issue - they do not see an evident and clear way how to promote the new technology and it became
- too expensive
- similar to other alternatives
- not convising..
And, as you understand, the real problem is not one of the reasons listed above (not always, but in many cases!).
As a result, we have a lot of great technologies, but despite that, we are not able to overcome bureaucracy in the public sector, and we are not able to enter new markets in the private sector, or we are able to do this in a very limited scope.
Thus, as a result, we have a number of negative factors affecting the industry, the HCPs, and the patients:
the industry lose money due to a lack of sales
HCPs lose the ability to access new technologies and lose money and
the patients are not able to benefit from the valuable new technologies and lose the health, quality or duration of life
How to resolve that global issue?
I know, that the proper patient strategic communication approach is the key.
What is patient, strategic communication?
It is a multi-dimensional approach in communication, where our communication model has to be built based on the intersection of real science and technologies, basic knowledge of real-world patients about certain decease and the scope of information available 1-click away from the appropriate request to search engine.
I know 2 biggest mistakes the majority of marketing managers or strategists make:
They know what patients know about the disease. Basically, 2 options - "nothing" or certain basic data, could be found in the first 5-10 words on Wikipedia's relevant page.
They underestimate the volume and influence of the information available, especially that which is wrong, funny, stupid of even dangerous to patients' health.
Having this in mind, we never think about the factors I mentioned above.
My story of a patient, strategic communication started in 2014 when my distribution company faced a new crisis in our market. Thinking about possible ways to win the market share of my distribution portfolio I realized that a proper patient communication approach could be the key. Moreover, the forthcoming COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine of 2022 confirmed that our approach is a winning one.
It took me 5 years to try different models of communication and the scope of business processes covered. As a B2B company, we had to provide our customers with certain support, and I wanted to target consumers directly. My team worked on copyright, SEO, design and business process optimization, customer journey mapping and clinical integration processes.
We have used different instruments, and one which gave the best efficacy in terms of deep direct analytics and what is more important ability to have direct feedback is a YouTube channel. YouTube is number 2 after Google, the most visited website, it has a great recommendations algorithm, and it took time to find a way to understand how to use the best part of it.
We have started a niche YouTube channel, related solely to cataract surgery and IOLs, nothing else. And such a narrow niche grown to 7 millions of views and 100K subscribers in 3.5 years. This is a great achievement, I am proud of. As a result, we now know a lot more and were able to use the approach we found to increase our market share in the distribution significantly.
The Silver YouTube Button is a great milestone, which confirms that the one of the most efficient instruments we use is not simply a tool but a valuable tool. And apart of that, we have a great influence channel for Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Germany, Moldova, United States, and Israel - the countries in the top 10 by traffic on our YouTube.
I want to share with you 5 key insights, which are not evident for many of us in the industry
We are trying to “educate” the patient with no idea of what that person really knows about the eye. Yes, all the materials we release are medically correct, compliant, and so on, but none of them give the value that real people need. Think deeper about what your target patient knows and what are his/her fears and desires.
We do underestimate the power of SEO (google search results) and the number of fake information available. Despite the fact that we know about this, and even last year’s session at EGS in Athens had some presentations, we do not use this knowledge in patient education materials. Investigate the information available, and do not ignore the "untrusted sources".
Stop thinking about your product, despite all of its advantages. Put yourself in the customer's shoes, they do not need your product. It is a starting point.
Investigate the most common customer journey map, and keep an eye on the touch points of patients with the medical personnel. Look for non-obvious, unevidenced points of influence or information sources.
Have a global picture of the "information cloud" about the disease you treat and the solutions available. Try to understand the global society consensus and what exactly you want to change in it. It will be the core of your strategic move.
I wish your product to be the global leader, and I am ready to help to achieve this. Contacts are on the main page, feel free to contact :)
Oleksii Sologub
Visionary, inspiring leader and innovator.
Merging the worlds of industry-clinics-patients for business success.
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