There has been a lot of information bombarding DTC marketers lately, from e-books to studies on mobile health, but how are DTC marketers supposed to make sense of it all and what do you believe and use versus what is just nice to know. Realizing that time is short here are the key trends that every DTC marketer should understand to develop and execute a strategy that is patient focused and provides ROI.
Category: in the news
“It’s better than nothing at all”. That seems to be the consensus of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The ACA is far from perfect but if we believe as a nation and people that everyone is entitled to health care and that nobody should be denied coverage or dropped because of a health condition than we should take the current bill and make it better. It would involve a lot of hard work but it can and should be improved. Here are my recommendations..
As Congress continues to be stuck in time David Sirota points out that it, the Affordable Care Act, most definitely is the legislative manifestation of the insurance industry’s biggest wishes of all, providing massive no-strings-attached subsidies to the industry, and using government power to force citizens to become the industry’s permanent customers. Since the passage of the Affordable Care Act the stock-price graphs of major insurers like United Health, WellPoint, Aetna, Humana, Cigna, WellCare and Magellan Health Services (for starters). They all show the same thing – a sky’s- the-limit curve up to profit heaven. Forbes’ Robert Lenzer notes that in just this year alone, “The value of the S& P health insurance index has gained 43%” – aka more than double the gains of the S&P 500 as a whole . ‘
As information gatherers, physicians want to receive information from pharma. In fact, they want to receive it across multiple channels – increasing greatly from year to year. While their increasing preference towards the use of more channels grows, we also see that individual channel preferences tend to fragment and disperse based on channel adoption and experience as well as the type of information provided by pharmaceutical manufacturers.
Once again healthcare, via the Affordable Care Act, is taking center stage in Washington DC. The House has voted to continue to fund the government but not the Affordable Care Act. John McCain told CNN on Thursday: “In the United States Senate, we will not repeal, or defund, Obamacare. We will not. And to think we can is not rational.” Senator Richard Burr, Republican of North Carolina, said of the House Republicans’ strategy of threatening a government shutdown to force the defunding of Obamacare, “I think it’s the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard of.” Even though the public opposes the Affordable Care Act they do because the majority of them believes it doesn’t go far enough.
Google is launching Calico, a new company that will focus on health and aging in particular. The independent firm will be run by Arthur Levinson, former CEO of biotech pioneer Genentech, who will also be an investor. Levinson, who began his career as a scientist and has a Ph.D. in biochemistry, plans to remain in his current roles as the chairman of the board of directors for both Genentech and Apple, a position he took over after its co-founder Steve Jobs died in 2011. In other words, the company behind YouTube and Google+ is gearing up to seriously attempt to extend the human life span. But it’s a monumental task that’s going to require a ton of money as well as people who understand how consumers view health.
I recently returned from vacation and was able to go off the grid but not completely. The grid is the tangled web of the multiscreen universe that we all live in. The closest I came to going off the grid was going without TV for an entire 4 days. So basically, going off the grid in this case was eliminating one screen –but was I really off the grid? I was still Facebooking (especially after Sir Paul McCartney waved hello), Tweeting and LinkingIn on my smartphone and tablet. A guest post by Adam Scott Roberts, Senior Vice President, Group Media Director, Communications Media Inc