We recently had the chance to speak with Jill Balderson, Managing Partner of HealthEd On Demand about their new offering that benefits patients and physicians alike.  And yes, you can get it on your iPad.

Kevin: You recently launched HealthEd On Demand. What is it exactly?

Jill: HealthEd On Demand is a flexible, web-based platform that lets healthcare professionals provide personalized, high quality education and support for patients in seconds-extending the care they provide patients without extending their working hours.

Kevin: How does this benefit healthcare professionals?

Jill: HealthEd On Demand can benefit healthcare professionals in many ways. First, it allows for more effective communication with patients-healthcare professionals can access a library of education and support materials that are certified by Health Educators and trusted by doctors. Then, they can share these resources with patients through a secure portal with just a few clicks (or taps!) They even have the option to add their own resources to the library.

Second, it provides healthcare professionals with tools to measure and maximize care. HealthEd On Demand automatically documents when materials are sent to patients and when they are accessed. The reports tool, for example, shows which materials are shared most often and viewed as most helpful. Healthcare professionals can also send group messages to patients for communications like screenings or seasonal health topics.

Third, it saves healthcare professionals time. They can have more focused office visits, because patients will have resources like instructions and educational support available in between visits. It also reduces the hassle of making photocopies or searching a supply closet or the web for patient information-not an insignificant chore in busy practices.

And finally, HealthEd On Demand is very easy to use-sign up takes less than five minutes. And it can be accessed from any device with a browser including smart phones and iPads.

Kevin: And how does it benefit patients?

Jill: We’re finding that patients feel more engaged and supported with HealthEd On Demand. They get information and answers in an organized and easy-to-use format that comes directly from their healthcare professional, so they know it is trustworthy. And by giving patients the personalized support of educational plans that are tailored to their needs, they will be better equipped to reach their goals.

Kevin: Rather than making this a direct-to-patient portal, you decided to target healthcare professionals. Why?

Jill: When we first started planning HealthEd On Demand two years ago we saw an abundance of direct to consumer content publishers. And while these serve a purpose by providing relevant, condition-based information, we did not see anyone creating a bridge between the provider and patient. To us, this seemed like a gap, as well as an opportunity.

In many ways, healthcare professionals are already acting as a content management system, delivering key information to patients. So we wanted to provide them with a tool that will increase retention rates (80% of information exchanged in a clinical setting is forgotten) and improve communication with patients-something providers tell us they want and need.

Kevin: HealthEd on Demand is a robust platform, how can it be offered as a free service?

Jill: We are able to offer this as a free service thanks to the support of sponsors who provide some of the educational resources and templates. The platform can also be licensed to power private label solutions for larger healthcare provider organizations.

Kevin: Are there social components to HealthEd on Demand?

Jill: At its roots, HealthEd On Demand is social. Healthcare professionals are able to see patient rankings and feedback on the materials, as well as patient progress, so they can gain a greater understanding of what works most effectively. They can also import resources for patients from the Web, such as a YouTube video of a patient sharing his or her experience with a disease or treatment. And by giving healthcare professionals the ability to add their own content, and share it with other professionals, we are creating a healthcare content community.

For patients, they are able to share valuable resources with family and friends, and most importantly, build stronger bonds with their healthcare providers.

Kevin: I know you just launched this year, but what has the feedback been so far?

Jill: Feedback has been great. It seems that we’ve really filled a need with HealthEd On Demand. One of our internists recently told us that his patients tell him how useful they find the resources he sends them. He said it’s like an “extra measure of support once my patients leave the office.” It’s always extremely gratifying when we hear how we are making a difference in the lives of both healthcare professionals and patients.

Kevin: Are you still taking applications for membership?

Jill: Absolutely! Healthcare providers are always welcome to join online at www.healthedondemand.com

Jill Balderson
Managing Partner, HealthEd On Demand

A member of the HealthEd strategy team since 2005, Jill serves on the company’s executive leadership team as chief strategic officer. She’s responsible for leading HealthEd On Demand’s simple, web-based system that enables healthcare professionals to “prescribe” personalized health education action plans for their patients.

Jill’s background includes integrated marketing leadership roles in several industries, from pharmaceutical and consumer healthcare to financial services, travel, and technology. Prior to HealthEd, Jill was the digital marketing practice leader for DVC Worldwide, where she led strategic planning efforts for Web site and e-marketing campaigns for companies like Schering-Plough Consumer Healthcare, The Gillette Company, AT&T, and Pfizer Consumer Healthcare.

Jill once spent 30 consecutive days at sea without sighting land, navigating from Cape Cod to St. Lucia by the stars on a 134′ schooner.

The National Psoriasis Foundation has launched the first website focused exclusively on kids with psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis.

PsoMe.org includes many kid-friendly features:

• Age-appropriate articles and condition information
• Downloadable PDFs materials that can be shared with kids and teachers at school
• Recommended books for a school library
• Drawing contest
• An online bulletin board that lets members communicate together

This site is a great offering supporting kids with psoriasis. Given the target audience it would be great to see the addition of videos and health games.

To learn more, visit www.psome.org.

ADHD Allies Facebook Page: Unbranded Social Media, Tricia Geoghegan (14 minutes)
Watch the video and please visit our video sponsor, Klick Pharma.

Johnson & Johnson’s Tricia Geoghegan reveals all the details behind their ADHD Moms and ADHD Allies Facebook pages.

• Shows the business case to sell senior leadership
• How they created a moderated discussion board
• Importance of Terms of Use
• Handling AEs in Facebook comments
• Ads pull better than SEM efforts
• Hard metrics including fans, page views, and screener downloads
• Triggers that spike page views

• Social Media for Pharma - Just Announced! (May 18, 2010)
• Ask about in-house workshops for e-patient strategy, social media compliance and metrics

• Social Media for Pharma - SOLD OUT! (Feb 23, 2009)
• Social Media ROI for Health Marketers - 5 Seats Left (Feb 24, 2009)

SAVE THE DATE: e-Patient Connections 2010!
=====================================
September 27-29, 2010, Philadelphia Hyatt Bellevue

• Social Media for Pharma - SOLD OUT! (Feb 23, 2009)
• Social Media ROI for Health Marketers - 5 Seats Left (Feb 24, 2009)

SAVE THE DATE: e-Patient Connections 2010!
=====================================
September 27-29, 2010, Philadelphia Hyatt Bellevue

This new, free 40-page guide for health marketers and communicators has just been released. In Using Twitter for e-Patient Communications you’ll get:

• Social Media for Pharma (Feb 23, 2009)
• Social Media ROI for Health Marketers (Feb 24, 2009)
• January e-Patient Connections Distance Learning & Briefing (By invitation only; limited to Kru alumni and clients)
  • Friday January 29, 2010 * 1pm EST * Dial-in info to be emailed

SAVE THE DATE: e-Patient Connections 2010!
=====================================
September 27-29, 2010, Philadelphia Hyatt Bellevue.

The topic of social media return-on-investment (ROI) continues to be popular as innovators look to justify their efforts and laggards look for excuses. Compared to more tried-and-true marketing campaigns, the return on investment involved with social media can be hard to quantify.

Think Interval has contributed to the conversation with their white-paper, “Yes We Can: Measuring Marketing Performance for Hospitals and Health Systems.” It reassures health-care companies that while setting up consistent and useful measurement standards can be a difficult and time-intensive project, establishing a system of gauging marketing results in a Social Media (SM) environment is not only possible but crucial. They recommend a three-tiered system of “Marketing Performance Measurements.”

Financial Metrics provide the traditional ROI. How much money has your campaign brought in versus how much it cost? Financial metrics, if you have them, are the easiest to draw conclusions from, but getting them can be difficult, often requiring customer and patient actions to be tracked over long periods of time.

Action Metrics lack the bottom-line punch of financial metrics, but still deliverable measurable, concrete results. For example, a hospital offering a free booklet on the risks of arthritis can measure the number of requests for the information. Often these actions can be roughly equated with a financial outcome. Any campaign that can’t efficiently provide a financial metric should take care to track as many actionable angles as possible.

Attitudinal Metrics simply measure the attitudes and opinions of a selected audience. These could be the results of surveys, polls, focus groups, interviews, or even anecdotes. While these can be a useful gauge of what people are saying about you, it is important to keep in mind that attitudes often do not correlate with behavior. As a result, attitudinal metrics are usually the least useful of the three.

With definitions of what you can measure in hand, the paper goes on to discuss how to measure the success (or lack thereof) of a campaign. The first step, the micro-level, is concerned with figuring out how to measure the results of specific marketing activities. To quote the paper, “your goal is to answer the question ‘Did this campaign work?’ with a definitive ‘Yes, and here’s the evidence to back it up.’” The report offers a fairly detailed run-down of what you should be measuring as results vs. actions, and how exactly you should look at these results. First, define what actions you will be taking. An action can be anything, the paper says, from a simple one-sheet brochure to an expensive television spot. If your metric is your end-goal, then try to include as many activities in this metric as possible. Open-houses, phone reminders, promotional websites-it all counts.

Make sure to set an objective (for example, “200 new appointments this month”) and take note of your current baseline (”75 new appointments last month”) to compare the results of your campaign to (”225 new appointments”). Make sure to look into the relative results of previous attempts to boost the same or similar branches of your organization, and make sure the source of your metrics and whose responsibility each aspect of the campaign falls to are also noted.

We’ve written in the past that at Kru we think social media ROI needs to be based on the purpose of your social media efforts. For example, using social media to “listen” is akin to conducting a focus group, and proving ROI isn’t necessary or practical. But if your goal is to get them to buy your product, or visit your website, then hard ROI metrics are possible and should be pursued.

Kru Research used the ListenLogic social media monitoring platform to monitor social media comments and measure sentiment for two cholesterol lowering drugs, Lipitor and Crestor, for one month (August 2009). An influence ranking of 5+ was used to reduce the amount of spam and irrelevant posts.

The questions we sought to answer were:

1)      What is the total number of comments for each of these brands?

2)      Which sites generate the most chatter (eg, Twitter, Blogs)?

3)      What is the overall sentiment score for each brand?

4)      Is there a difference in the topics or issues that are being commented on for each brand?

Share of Voice: Lipitor beats Crestor 2.3 to 1

After tracking 180 million websites and cleaning out the promotional chatter, we see that market class leader Lipitor had 695 total mentions and Crestor had 302 mentions. Lipitor has been on the market longer than Crestor, and is considered the best selling drug in the world, so it isn’t surprising that it has more activity on the social networks.

Little Difference in Sentiment-Mostly Neutral

When you look at all the conversations and comments about Lipitor and Crestor the vast majority, about 94%, is labeled “Neutral.” This is because most mentions picked up by listening platforms has to do with general corporate news, lawsuits, and investor related articles that mention the blockbuster drugs as part of their description of Pfizer and AstraZeneca. When you look only at health related comments, the picture changes.

Lipitor’s positive sentiment was approximately 9% versus Crestor’s 1%. Negative sentiment was 27% for Lipitor and 18% for Crestor.

Another way to look at sentiment is the ratio of positive to negative comments. Using this approach Lipitor scores .33 to .05 positive to negative sentiment.

Comment Cloud Analysis

The cloud tags shown below reflect that the brand names are being used in a variety of discussions that go far beyond the management of cholesterol.

Websites with Most Activity

Using a 5+ influence rating corrects for a lot of irrelevant chatter that happens on Twitter. However, both products unfortunately have most of their social comments happening on pharma gossip site CafePharma. Major sites that these chole

Of the 695 comments for Lipitor:

• 46 (7%) came from CafePharma.com
• 36 (5%) came from wikio.com
• 22 (3%) came from medhelp.org
• 18 (3%) came from Boards.webmd.com
• 13 (2%) came from weightwatchers.com
• 11 (2%) came from Twitter.com
• 10 (1%) came from blogspot.com
• 9 (1%) came from diabetesdaily.com
• other

Of the 302 comments related to Crestor:

• 17 (6%) came from CafePharma.com
• 12 (4%) came from medhelp.org
• 11 (4%) came from technologyquestions.com
• 10 (3%) came from wikio.com
• 7 (2%) came from Boards.webmd.com
• 6 (2%) came from blogspot.com
• 5 (2%) came from weightwatchers.com
• 5 (2%) came from diabetesforums.com
• 4 (1%) came from Twitter.com

Almost all social media strategists recommend that companies and brands begin their journey into social media by “listening.” But how do you monitor the chatter on 180 million sites, including Twitter, the blogosphere, YouTube and Facebook? And more importantly how do you make sense of the aggregate data?

To answer these questions we used the most advanced, real-time social media listening platform available, ListenLogic. We monitored the social network activity for two competing insomnia products, Ambien and Lunesta, for the month of July, 2009.

Human analysts were used to train the listening platform how to disregard all the spam messages related to “get Ambien cheap” and how to determine if a comment could be considered positive or negative. While other listening platforms only achieve 60% accuracy on “sentiment analysis,” ListenLogic is able to achieve over 90% accuracy in this measure.

The questions we sought to answer were:

1)     What is the total number of comments for each of these brands?

2)     Does one brand have more social media activity than the other?

3)     Which sites generate the most chatter (eg, Twitter, Blogs)?

4)     Are there any people or sites that could be seen as key influencers in the online space?

5)     Overall, are people saying good or bad things about each brand?

6)     Is there a difference in the topics or issues that are being commented on for each brand?

7)     What do the some of the specific comments look like for each brand?

Here’s what we found…

Ambien beats Lunesta 7:1 in Share of Voice

After tracking 180 million websites and cleaning out the promotional chatter, we see that Lunesta had 764 total mentions and Ambien had 5265 mentions. Ambien has been on the market much longer than Lunesta, and in fact is now available as a generic, so it isn’t surprising that they may have more activity on the social networks. But the size of the gap is greater than expected especially given that the two products are roughly comparable in current sales. What would be interesting to see is if the total number of prescriptions for Ambien is seven times greater than for Lunesta-this is data I don’t have.

Twitter Accounts for the Majority of All Online Activity

The data clearly shows that Twitter by far carries more comments than any other social media platform.

Of the 5265 comments for Ambien:

• 3666 (70%) came from Twitter
• 226 (4%) came from ehealthme.com
• 89 (2%) came from bluelight.ru
• 78 (2%) came from community.babycenter.com
• other

Of the 764 comments related to Lunesta:

• 3666 (46%) came from Twitter
• 70 (9%) came from ehealthme.com
• 25 (3%) came from omgili.com
• 24 (3%) came from cafepharma.com
• other

What’s interesting is that after Twitter, there is then a divergence in terms of what other sites are most important in terms of volume. And we can see that for the month we looked at, a full 3% of Lunesta activity occurred on the pharmaceutical rep gossip site cafepharma.com.

No Patient Opinion Leaders Emerge

We dug deeper to try to identify who are the most influential bloggers and Twitterers but no clear pattern emerged. In this particular drug case, in this particular month, there was nobody that emerged high on the “influence scale.”

Ambien Has More Positive Sentiment Than Lunesta

Not only are there a lot more people talking about Ambien than Lunesta, what they are saying is more positive too.

Much of what people say about a brand is neither positive nor negative, so it’s just classified as “neutral.” There are far fewer neutral comments as a percent for Ambien, 41%, than there are for Lunesta which has 84% of all comments being neutral.

For Ambien, 36% of the chatter overall or just over 50% of the non-neutral chatter is positive.

For Lunesta about 4% of chatter overall, or 25% of the non-neutral chatter is positive, with 75% being negative.

Comments Reveal DTC Ad Confusion & Pregnancy Questions

When reviewing the comments for Ambien, many consumers are seeking additional information and clarification.  Common topics:

• Confusion by the Ambien TV commercial and all the side effects listed - with an ongoing debate over whether the ad announcer is saying “aggressively normal” or “more aggressive than normal”
• Confusion exists over the safety of taking Ambien while pregnant, with chatter focused on “new mommy” blogs.
• Others complain about the “Ambien Hangover.”
• 5%-7% of posts discussed “what I did on Ambien” including sleepwalking and unintentional communications.

With less volume, it was harder to pick up trends in comments for Lunesta. What was noted:

• Comments about Lunesta being less effective than Ambien
• Lunesta leading to feelings of depression
• And Lunesta reps (supposedly) chatting on blogs about how to push Lunesta to doctors

Conclusions

First, you must monitor. Our strongest recommendation is that every marketer use a listening platform to monitor social media comments. Marketers have long invested in 12 person focus groups or thousand person surveys; with social media monitoring, you can quickly and easily see the perceptions of a much wider cut of customers. In the case of Ambien you can literally listen in on over 60,000 comments per year!

Second, track macro results over time. With ongoing analysis you will be able to see:

• Is our total number of mentions going up or on the decline?
• Is our share of voice compared to our competition increasing or decreasing?
• Is our positive sentiment increasing or decreasing?
• Does a change in sentiment correlate to a new marketing strategy or tactic?

Third, review comments for actionable issues.
Not every comment or topic will require action, but using Ambien as the example, if a there is an ongoing debate over what the DTC ad announcer is actually saying, you have to wonder if many thousands of other viewers out there aren’t also unclear as to what is being said. This could easily be an issue not picked up by focus group panels, but is revealed when you can listen to 60,000 people.

Fourth, if you promote or engage on just one platform, make it Twitter. We suggest that brands can progress in social media first by listening, then by promoting (one way communication), then by truly engaging (dialogue and relationships). With limited time and budgets, this can seem like an awesome task (how do you respond to various blogs, user groups, YouTube comments, etc.). But we can see that Twitter accounts for the vast majority of user-generated comments. So if a brand is going to promote or engage, focusing on Twitter will cover most of the bases.

NOTE: For more information on the ListenLogic social media listening platform that was used in this study visit: www.ListenLogic.com.

Social Media Faceoff: Lipitor versus Crestor coming next!
Subscribe to the Kru Report at: http://www.kruresearch.com/subscribe

Here’s a new video from Kru Research showing that the age of participatory medicine has begun.

Please share, forward, and RT. Enjoy!

Sources used for this video include:

• Kao, Helen, Rebecca Conant, Theresa Soriano, Wayne McCormick. “The Past, Present, and Future of House Calls.” Clinics in geriatric medicine 25(1): 19-34.
• Yawn, B., M.A. Goodwin, S.J. Zyzanski, K.C. Strange. “Time Use during Acute and Chronic Illness Visits to a Family Physician.” Family Practice 20(4):474-7.
• Ley, P., “Memory for medical information.” British Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 18: 245-256.
• Rubin, Rita. “Doctors baffled by patients not taking prescriptions.” USA Today 29 March 2007.
• Ferguson T, Frydman G. “The first generation of e-patients.” BMJ 328 (7449): 1148–9.
• Herrick, Devon. “Web Replaces Doctors as Patients’ Top Health Information Source.” Health Care News 01 January 2009.
• Fox, Susannah, and Sydney Jones. “The Social Life of Health Information.” Pew Internet & American Life Project June 2009
• Fox, Susannah. “The Engaged E-Patient Population.” Pew Internet & American Life Project. August 2008.
• Goetz, Thomas. “Practicing Patients.” New York Times 23 March 2008.
• Keckly, Paul, and Laura L. Eselius. “2009 Deloitte Survey of Health Consumers.” Deloitte Center for Health Solutions. March 2009