Blog

The New Engagement Channel: Physician Networks

Len Starnes, the Head of Digital Marketing & Sales, General Medicine at Bayer Schering Pharma, has long been regarded as a thought leader and trailblazer among Pharma executives when it comes to effectively leveraging social media.  He recently shared a fantastic article on the impact physician networks are having across the world and how Pharma is moving to actively engage providers through each network.

Len begins by reviewing the state of physician networks across the world and offers keen insight into what makes them tick.  As the Gobal Head of Digital Marketing at Bayer, Len has enjoyed a unique vantage point since the earliest days and has played a pivotal role in shaping Pharma's growing involvement. 

In the article, he explores the growing shift in mindset many Life Science firms are making as they move from market research to active engagement. As I have shared in the past and with Len during my visit to Bayer, the key to maximizing a return on investment with any provider targeted effort is to deliver timely information and value added services.

As Len likes to say, don't think like a traditional marketer.  Social Media is not another marketing tool, it is an engagement channel.  So use it the right way to enable physicians to engage with their peers and clinical experts in a trusted environment that delivers fast, simple, reliable answers to their product questions.

I've shared a few excerpts from the article below, and I encourage you to view the full story at InPharm.  Its worth the read!

The UK (home to Doctors.net.uk, pictured) and Germany lead Europe in terms of physicians' social networks

The last four years have seen an extraordinary growth in physicians' social networks and a rapid increase in levels of activity and interest.

I’ve been tracking them since day one, and have worked with many of the networks on a variety of projects.

These networks reflect the great influence the internet age is having on medical practice.

Research suggests that regardless of cultural differences, doctors around the world now view the internet as essential to how they practice. And around a fifth can be identified as highly ‘e-reliant’. One of the measures of this is where they get their clinical information, and more than 75% are saying they are getting that information online.

One of the key developments for the industry came in October 2007, when Pfizer announced a strategic partnership with US social network Sermo. Pfizer said the alliance was part of its commitment to engage in “peer-to-peer medical dialogue with physicians” to meet the mutual goal of helping patients. Jeffrey Kindler, the chief executive of Pfizer indicated that it wanted to put the ‘hard sell’ tactics behind it, as this is not what doctors wanted - instead it would try and build ‘a more open and honest’ discussion.

I was part of a group of pharma people who were invited by Sermo to a Japanese restaurant in Princeton in the week following the Pfizer deal. They walked us through everything they were doing, and their vision of the future, and this certainly caused quite a stir in the industry.

There are some who question the motives behind Pfizer’s move. Following the news, John Mack’s Pharma Marketing Blog carried a satirical cartoon depicting Pfizer as a predatory cat and Sermo and its online doctors as a bowl of goldfish. Its paws wrapped around the bowl, the cat says: “I for one am glad we can have an open dialogue.”

Whatever your view, the Pfizer/Sermo partnership represents a major shift in how medical information is exchanged, and this quite rightly caused a stir when it was first announced.

So that was October 2007, but where are we today? In those three years, the US has seen a proliferation of physicians’ networks. In terms of their number, diversity, success in raising venture capital funding and pharma participation, the US ones are still probably setting the pace, but less so than a few years ago.

The two largest US-based networks are Sermo and WebMD/Medscape. They both have around 112,000 members each - that is a lot of members. But there is a significant ‘long tail’, comprising many much smaller players, some of whom focus on specialities, such as radiology. One well known one is ‘Spine Connect’ which has a membership of only 2,000 members, but they are all spinal surgeons, and they are all very happy to talk to each other. Some specialise in other types of service; Ozmosis is one in which identities are fully revealed, similar to the general business sites like LinkedIn or Xing, where you know exactly with whom you are speaking. Europe’s networks are catching up with the US ones, although they remain somewhat heterogeneous and fragmented. The UK and Germany are certainly leading in terms of the numbers of networks, but there are fewer players than in the US.

The newest European network is called MedUniverse, it is based in Stockholm, and aims to serve all of the Scandinavian countries (UK-based Doctors.net.uk recently acquired a stake in MedUniverse). Another example is the BMJ’s Doc2Doc. This is a global network, which currently has members from 130 countries, and its aim is to integrate the network with BMJ group content, such as the eBMJ.

In the German speaking countries, there is a very dynamic network, called Coliquio, which has around 16,000 members. It recently launched a partnership with the leading German medical journal the Ärzte Zeitung, and is expanding quite significantly in 2010.

Understanding the different types of doctors’ networks

So how do you start to order and understand all these different sites? Two of the most important criteria are whether they authenticate users and whether or not pharma is allowed to participate.

Membership is authenticated and they offer partnership options for the industry. Some of these networks are for all specialities, and some just focus on one or two. Those are the ones that we should be looking at. Some authenticate, but they exclude pharma - there are networks in Canada, for example, which specifically do not want pharma to participate.

The other ones are where they don’t authenticate users at all, so frankly you don’t know who is in there. These networks are not of interest to the medical profession, because doctors are simply not prepared to open up and discuss professional issues if they even suspect that patients are listening in. The second dimension taxonomy is becoming important. Sermo started off as what I call pure play - a social network only - like LinkedIn or Xing.

The hybrid models that are now emerging mix the social network with an online medical resource, of various types. I believe these networks will be of most value to doctors, because if you can combine networking with content, services and tools that related to a doctor’s daily practices, then they will congregate there. And a lot of these models are beginning to emerge.

From market research to active engagement

So what can we as an industry actually do with these networks? The partnering models come in many shapes and sizes, but they boil down to three things:

1) Observation

Basically this is passive market research. You go in and you see what a community is talking about, and you can observe all these things.

2) Active market research

You go in and ask a specific question. You can select a cohort. I have done this many times. Typically my polls run a week, and I get the answers back within that time, I might pay doctors maybe $10, and my cohort is up to 100-200 doctors. It is tremendously efficient and very fast way to get feedback on anything you care to ask.

3) Engagement

This is really where a lot of pharma companies are moving into. This is where we send in our own medics and medical liaison people to engage with a community. The community must be aware at all times of pharma moving in, so they are flagged up, stating my name and that I am from the industry.

This gives our medical liaison a chance to talk to doctors directly. Doctors can ask our reps direct questions. We have the opportunity to post information and services that is germane to discussions. This is a new development and this is where the channel becomes extremely valuable.

So what have we learnt?

These are some of the top line features:

Membership is growing everywhere. For instance in the US in 2008, we asked doctors are you using networks - and 60% said they were.

This jumped up to 71%, a very significant growth, about 19% or so.

In Europe, we are seeing the same types of growth. Coliquio.de started out in 2007, it now has a membership of more than 30,000. The number of posts and activities is also increasingly rapidly.

Doctors.net.uk is the UK’s largest network, and they have a dedicated area for oncologists, and they registered an 18% increase in sessions.

You might say, this is all very well, but isn’t this is only of interest to younger physicians? The answer is absolutely not. On Sermo, the most active group is the 50-59 age group. The market research suggests that this group are very experienced, they have a lot to say, and they like sharing information. They also happen to have some the largest patient practices and some of the largest prescribers, so they are of particular interest to the industry.

We see exactly the same phenomenon in Coliquio. The largest and most active group is the 50-59 age group, and we are seeing this pattern right across the globe.

There are a few provisos. Doctors generally welcome pharma’s participation - I have carried out some market research on this myself - but they have to know exactly when and how pharma is participating, and they specifically do not want hard selling or advertising, that is strictly taboo.

Some of the market research from the US physicians found that nearly 60% agreed to pharma involvement, and those numbers have crept up over the last two years.

What are the specialities that are particularly interested in interacting with pharma? Oncologists are among those that are most interested in interacting. What do they really want? I have been talking to a lot of the networks. I had Joel Selzer, the chief executive of Ozmosis come and visit me at Bayer’s HQ, and he says doctors want fast, simple, reliable answers to product questions. And when he said ‘fast’ he meant ‘instant’ - we are living in an age where people expect things right away.

This is not a medium or a channel where if a doctor asks us a question, there is no point us going away for a week and then answering the query in PR speak. If that is the way you want to engage doctors, forget it. You have to empower your medical people to give those answers honestly, openly and right away.

They do value direct peer-to-peer engagement, and trusted feedback. So the people that you send in to these situations have got to understand the rules of engagement and understand when and how to be open and honest - and that is very tough to do.

They do like to have the rep-like services built into the network, the tools, the content and the services directly accessible through that network, so it is a place to contact pharma and use the services.

So what are the challenges that we face entering this kind of network? They are quite considerable. One of them is really about functional collaboration, if the initiative like this is driven by the sales department, then we are going to have to work very closely in a way that we have never done before, with medical and scientific, and inevitably legal and regulatory.

I am right in the middle of discussing many of these types of projects with these groups. It’s not easy, because we have never done this before, so when I say to my medical people, and say I want you to go into these networks, they have no idea what I am talking about. When I talk to my legal and regulatory people, they have no idea either, because we have never encountered anything like this before.

It takes a great deal of effort to explain this and create some ground rules. You may not have fixed ground rules, you might have guidelines, but the way we engage may be different on each individual network, so you may need guidelines rather than hard rules.

Last year, when I was analysing networks, I wondered if I had lost touch with reality, or allowed hype to overwhelm my thinking, so I posted a question on my LinkedIn page to well over 500 members. Within about five minutes I got a call from central Singapore, and my telephone and email didn’t stop for two days!

I asked: ‘Will doctors’ networks radically change pharma marketing and sales?’ Eighty per cent of my network said it will within the next 10 years, and the majority of those said within the next five years. So I felt reassured that I wasn’t just giving in to hype!

Overcoming internal hurdles

I started holding workshops with my brand teams on social networking three years ago, and these continue today. I have continuous dialogue with all the brands that I am responsible for. We bring in people from these networks to present to the teams, so they can understand what these networks are about. We have run workshops on social media for some very senior managers as well, but your most important internal audience is the brand team.

The brand manager needs to understand how they should view digital. I believe we should be viewing much of this work on a strategic level, not as a short term measure, but as a long term strategic investment. That means part of my job is to shift some of the thinking in the brand teams - and that’s not easy.