Shock - Doctors want diagnostic and online disease management tools

EPG Health Media operate 24 disease knowledge centres at www.epgonline.org with another 10 in development at any single point in time, so it’s easy to see one of the most vexing questions for our medical communications and content development team - the Pharma customer too - is what to include in a new disease knowledge centre, how can we make the next one a little different, bring something fresh to the topic and further engage our HCP audience…

There's no question a new treatment or approach adds focus to any healthcare communication story, but our doctor research reminds us of the kind of back to basics lessons that will resonate with those who run training courses in almost any sales environment.

Listen to your customer (in this case the customer is the doctor) and if you get the fundamentals right both the digital communications project and the all important sale will have legs.

A recent study of physician digital preferences by EPG Survey should remind us about the importance of the basics.

A sample of the 322,000+ EPG Online subscribers were asked how they viewed a newly launched knowledge centre - in terms of value, quality, structure etc.

92% rated it somewhere between "above average" or "excellent" and "would recommend to a friend". That's great news for the development team, a sure sign they've come close to the mark in terms of overall content. But when the same doctors were asked how they thought we could further improve the content, 70% of respondents asked for additional diagnostic aids, patient resources and online disease management tools.

Okay, so you're thinking….hang on a second, aren't these the boring bits, we want to ring the bells about our brand?

Driving initial engagement through a useful story - for example a new treatment approach, or even a mature treatment with a different approach – provides a powerful call to action and will get market attention. Going on to place that “story” in an appropriate digital channel provides the opportunity to contact, but most would agree levering initial engagement and contact to a full blown relationship with the customer is key to long term success.

Part of what buys the long term relationship - web stickiness - is the ability to serve up good quality resources to support the brand story, resources that many marketeers have an abundance of in their digital archive - but rarely consider using in new web projects.

Some of EPG's most successful digital health projects have been about making the doctor aware of existing good quality diagnostic tools and resources, tools that are actually highly reliable and represent an excellent investment of their time.

So the "back to basics" lesson must surely be - consider what your audience wants, not what you think they want after one of those rigorous blue sky thinking sessions. If you are in any doubt, why not ask them?

Mobile device users more loyal than traditional web users, not where they were expected to be? (irony intended)

3 months ago we launched EPG Mobile (Beta), a browser detecting mobile device 'friendly' version of the disease and medicines knowledge base EPG Online

EPG Mobile has 20,000+ regular users in 3 months, 132% growth between July and August alone, all stats for a non-promoted, non-publicised test version of a service developed for a niche market that most web masters would give their right arm for. Yes of course we did link to it here and there (after all we wanted it tested), but basically we just 'turned it on' one day in May.

It's early days into what will be a 9 to 12 month beta test period with new elements and improvements already planned for later in 2009 and early 2010, but we are already learning new things about mobile device user behaviour.

First they are more loyal, they come back more frequently and more often. Okay they don't stay quite as long as a typical web user at EPG Online or view as many pages, so no surprises there then, but the loyalty perhaps is. Why so?

The explosion of iPhone usage and development of appropriate medical related Apps suggests there is plenty out there for the doctor on call or the med student at study, much of it - but not all - is good and some of it even free! Let's face it, even we are developing an App of our own (free to use of course). Maybe the devices themselves hold the answer. Despite the unquestioned success of the iPhone and despite the picture used above, in our first 3 months Windows based OS users out number iPhone users 7 to 1.

Early results from the Beta test also show us something else, not just about how this group of digital savvy, gizmo loving, head downer docs behave, but where they come from. Our results indicate the age of the mobile web service may have become reality in healthcare - but with a geographical region leading the growth curve we did not expect (outside the USA where it happened a while ago).

The usual suspects are at the top of the list, Germany in first place - interestingly for a currently English language only service - then the United States, UK, Sweden (they love their mobiles), Spain and so on. But the truly explosive growth and most loyal group of users are in the emerging markets China, India, South East Asia.

We know these are important markets, everybody does. But having spent the last 2 years working on localised versions of the web service for these very same users, in particular tackling some significant technical challenges with character set behaviour in the DB back end, maybe it's possible that while we were developing the (web) service, the emerging market(s) moved on.

Not quite back to the drawing board for us, as the web remains the number 1 channel for reaching the new markets and our technology affords delivery via multi-channels, but perhaps a sign of what's to come.