Print“I think there's a growing awareness that patients are increasingly using social media to seek information, to exchange ideas, and to gather to talk about their health, says Murray Aitken, IMS Institute's executive director. ”
Healthcare companies and providers too timid to engage with patients in the unpredictable wilds of social media need to become less risk averse in order to remain relevant in online discussions, suggests a new report.
In the most in-depth appraisal of Big Pharma’s standing in social media to date, the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics calls for pharmaceutical companies to apply the knowledge of their medical departments to help customers and improve health outcomes by engaging with them on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.
“I think there's a growing awareness that patients are increasingly using social media to seek information, to exchange ideas, and to gather to talk about their health,” says Murray Aitken, the institute's executive director. “In that sense, it’s an important part of the landscape for pharmaceutical manufacturers to understand and be a part of.”
Looking at the 50 largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, IMS found that just half of them have some sort of presence on social media networks oriented toward patients. The company created its own index to assess the extent to which the companies are engaging with patients. It analyzed the reach, relevance, and relationship of each company's social media interactions as well as those of regulators and healthcare providers.
Johnson & Johnson scored best among the drugmakers in the index, with a ranking that placed it well ahead of other companies in all areas measured. The company stood out for its high score on the index's relationship category, a measure of interaction with users. Though other pharmaceutical companies performed well in terms of reach and relevance, most fell in the rankings for broadcasting messages rather than engaging in true conversation with users.
IMS found that mid-sized companies, such as Novo Nordisk, Boehringer Ingelheim, and UCB are also using social media effectively—and often with greater impact than even the ten largest pharma companies, something that Aitken attributed to social media's equalizing character.
Produced prior to the U.S. Food and Drug Administraton’s recently issued draft guidance on how drugmakers should use social media, the report describes “a disconcertingly vague environment” that has made navigating social media challenging for the pharmaceutical industry. “Ironically,” it notes, “regulators are often more effective in their own usage of social media, in part due to fewer restrictions.”
Despite social media's rise as a resource for health information, Wikipedia remains the leading single source of healthcare information for patients and healthcare professionals, IMS found. Patients and healthcare professionals alike gravitated to the site to access what they largely perceive to be valid and neutral information that can provide additional context for more official sources of health information on specific diseases.
Notwithstanding social media's rising profile, IMS notes that people who use healthcare services the most are among the least engaged in using the online services it reviewed. Younger people tend to conduct online investigations before the start of therapy, as measured by prescriptions or sales of medications, it found. By contrast, patients age 50 or older tend to begin their treatments prior to seeking information online.
Aitken urges drugmakers to take heed of the gathering of patients online. If they look closely, he suggests, they may find it is too large and important to ignore.
January 22, 2014
http://www.burrillreport.com/article-ims_urges_big_pharma_to_dive_into_social_media.html
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