The Key to Improving Healthcare? Thinking About Patients More Like Customers

In my work, I’m always looking at how various companies and sectors are making the leap to digital, and seeing what one could learn from another. What’s particularly interesting is finding industries that have similar profiles, but have embraced digital tools and channels at noticeably different rates. For example, both pharmaceuticals and financial services are highly regulated industries that are entrusted with sensitive personal information but are at very different stages in digital adoption.

So I was really interested to read a new e-book written by my colleagues, together with a team of digital marketers from the Wharton School and Google: "Pharma 3D: Rewriting the Script for Marketing in the Digital Age." Brian Fox, the lead author from McKinsey, said to me recently that the digitization happening in every other aspect of our lives, whether it be the “Uber-ing” of transportation or the “Amazon-ing” of retail, is fundamentally changing how consumers make decisions in pharma as much as in other sectors. This rewiring of decisions extends to how people manage their care when they’ve been prescribed a drug or therapy and how doctors make decisions when prescribing medications.

One thing that caught my eye in the book was the idea of the CareFlow. This is the healthcare equivalent to the consumer decision journey (you can see what I mean in the chart below). The authors talk about the importance of having a deep understanding of each step of the CareFlow for a given condition so that a pharmaco can be genuinely helpful to the patient or their physician.

How might the CareFlow work in practice? Let’s consider patients with hearing impairments, which is very relevant for certain pharma companies. A team analyzes online conversations around hearing impairment and they find that the majority of conversations occur in the “treated” stage (see the black section in the CareFlow exhibit above) when patients share and discuss their experiences around living with a hearing impairment. The most frequently discussed themes are around lifestyle management and quality of life.

With a deeper understanding of that stage in their CareFlow, a pharmaco could then create content that addresses the topics most frequently discussed by patients, i.e., advice on device choice, procedure protocols, and lifestyle options. Moreover, the team learns that hearing aid patients like to share stories and advice on reddit.com and dailystrength.com, so creates short blog posts and curates advice from key influencers on those sites.

Other industries are already far ahead of pharma when it comes to social listening and putting the insights into action. In the consumer industry, Johnson&Johnson's Clean & Clear brand used social listening to understand millennials to better target their brand messaging to them. What they found was that millennials are "very passionate about showing the world their real selves but because they live in social media, they feel very judged by it." J&J took these insights and created the "See The Real Me" YouTube platform curating content from YouTube influencers and Clean & Clear consumers.

The point of all this is that most patients are engaged across the CareFlow, but the nature of this engagement varies based on how their treatment is evolving. Pharmacos need to understand this evolution and tailor their marketing approaches accordingly.

Learn more this and other topics on our McKinsey on Marketing & Sales site. Follow us on Twitter @McK_MktgSales and @McKinseyDigital. If you’re interested in hearing more on Pharma Marketing, learn more on this on the Pharma 3D site and follow @Brian_C_Fox. And please follow me @davidedelman.