The Trust Gap in Healthcare Digital Marketing

In a previous post, we discussed some of the challenges that prevent Healthcare Marketers from adopting and embracing Digital as part of their marketing efforts. The focus there was on the regulatory and systemic restrictions.

However, the Healthcare Digital Marketing environment also suffers from another important challenge - The lack of trust regarding Pharmaceutical companies among both patients and physicians.

Patients don’t trust Big Pharma.

Although Pharmaceutical companies see themselves as knights in shining armor, helping patients deal with debilitating disease and other conditions, this is not the way patients view them. Given the ever-rising costs of pharmaceutical formulations and regularly-breaking headlines about drug price manipulations, this sentiment is understandable.

Consider these instances from the recent past:

Martin Shkreli’s staggering 5,000% price hike for AIDS-drug Daraprim instantly turned him into the Poster Boy for Pharmaceutical greed. The fact that he continued to remain unrepentant, and even confrontational on social media, did not help matters along.

Mylan’s EpiPen has been increasing in price for years. However the revelation that it has more than quintupled in cost since 2007 for no incremental benefits has raised the hackles of patients and policymakers.

Teva Pharmaceuticals has increased the price of its Multiple Sclerosis drug – Copaxone – by 118% since 2001. This, despite the fact that a far-cheaper generic version of the drug has been available for over a year now!

Pharmaceutical companies’ responses have ranged from justifications like:

• Recouping investments in failed drugs
• Supporting ongoing R&D efforts
• Paying for clinical trials to broaden the use of approved drugs and
• That medications actually prevent costly hospitalizations!

People simply aren’t buying the excuses though!

Physicians don’t trust Big Pharma

Information source Preference

When compared to Pharmaceutical outreach programs that remain largely in the realm of direct marketing (think sales representatives, Continuing medical education, direct mail etc.) most Physicians are increasingly active on digital media channels offered by third-party information providers. Medscape, Epocrates and SERMO are reported as being the networks most commonly used by physicians to meet their professional needs. Similar offerings by Pharmaceutical companies are either not credible enough, likely to be biased or downright untrustworthy!

Lack of usability/credibility

When compared to the exploding demand for consumer focused healthcare apps on platforms like the Google Play Store, the Apps developed by Pharmaceutical companies that are targeted at Physicians show extremely low numbers. Consider this:

• Pharma Apps targeted at Physicians: 100 to 5,000 downloads
• Apps developed by 3^rd Parties for Physicians: 1M – 5M downloads
• Consumer Healthcare Apps: Up to 5 Billion downloads!

This clearly suggests that the information being offered by Pharmaceutical companies to Physicians through digital channels is simply not compelling enough. View this with the community’s distrust of Big Pharma, and the problem is compounded.

Direct-to-consumer Advertising

Most developed countries have historically banned Direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription pharmaceutical products. They only two countries where this continues to be legal are New Zealand and the United States of America. Physicians have long-complained about the negative impact of such advertising and call out that this leads to avoidable exposure and self-medication by patients. In the light of other issues plaguing the industry some action on this front is clearly warranted.

Healthcare Digital Marketing can offer more transparency, enhance trust factors and speed-up research and treatment options. However, in order to reach that ideal stage, all the stakeholders in the Healthcare Digital Marketing ecosystem need to work closely to first eliminate the trust gap.