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?