Finding a Voice Hacking the Narrative — We all have a voice. It’s that internal monologue we have with ourselves. Have you ever considered what that voice is and how it connects to raise above the din? How do I find my voice when I am working to find my way? Can our voice be a guide or a tool to drive a narrative and content?
Tag: marketing
Becoming An Internet Savvy Patient: Podcast 014
The Internet is a rich, vital, and important vein of information on healthcare, clinical medicine, and sharing. It sometimes takes trial and error to find the right information. Let’s see if we can remedy that.
Today we discuss ways to become an internet savvy patient with Diana Frame owner and founder of Frame Research which provides rigorous summaries of medical evidence to health care decision makers. Diana shares her practical and smart academic search process with Carolyn and I. We had her promised to return and teach us how to bring what we’ve found to our HCP. So keep an eye open for Part II.
Below are links that Diana identified as key sites for patients and caregivers.
Please let us know if this was informative and what else you would like us to discuss.
Finally, take a look at the Pubmed search interface that Diana created for the iPhone/iPad called pubsavvy. It makes your Pubmed searches sing. You can download it here.
MedlinePlus (It also has a Spanish language version)
Centers for Disease Control (especially good for infectious disease updates and various US health statistics)
Cleveland Clinic (has an online chat feature)
Google and Google Scholar can be very useful, as we discussed, particularly if you use specific search terms and refine them as you go. Try the “medical term” diagnosis rather than symptoms, and the generic name of drugs rather than brand names, for more rigorous results. (Do the opposite if you are looking for more basic patient care info, or descriptions of patient experiences). Your local public library can also be a good starting point.
Disease-specific organizations are good places for more targeted info, and some .orgs can help you find a community of people with similar health issues (the social learning piece we talk about), which is usually lacking at the .gov sites. For example – NCI is pretty comprehensive, but without the social aspect that one may find at American Cancer Society who has a list of ACA online communities.
Patients Like Me is a good one, not specific to cancer.
More in-depth evidence based medicine sites – these may require some familiarity with medical jargon:
PubMed is the big one
AHRQ Evidence reports
National Guidelines Clearinghouse – website is a little clunky to search, but if you do find a relevant hit on this it is usually a fairly comprehensive summary from a reputable organization
Cochrane Library – only summaries are available for free (and they are a little dry, even for academic medicine), but again these are reviews assembled with a rigorous methodology
Clinicaltrials.gov – a good place to look for ongoing studies, for those with an understanding of their or a loved one’s specific diagnosis. Also can be helpful to find clinical experts in your area, even if trials are not appropriate.
Notes & Links: October 28, 2013
What the ad biz needs is to exorcize direct marketing
Doc Searls Weblog begins with a Michael Wolff’s article in USA Today “What ad biz needs are writers“. Searls primary message in this piece is that advertising and direct marketing were kept apart with top notch writers, art directors, creative directors, etc. wanting to go into direct marketing. And as Searls points out.
In the online world, advertising messages are not much about increasing brand awareness, or other old-fashioned advertising purposes. (Though today’s ad folk love to throw the word “brand” around.) Instead the main purpose is getting direct responses: clicks and sales, aimed by personal data, gathered and analyzed every possible way. The idea is to make the advertising as personal as possible, as far as possible, regardless of how creepy it gets. It’s all fully rationalized. (Hey, you canopt out if you don’t like it.)
Terry Heaton in Street Fighting Magazine is quoted
Operating within the soul of every marketer is the ridiculous assumption that people want or need to be bombarded by advertising, and that any invasion of their time or experience to “pass along” an attempt to influence is justified. If this were true, there would be no looming fight over DVRs, which allow viewers to skip ads. You have no inherent right to my eyeballs, and it is precisely this axiom that makes today’s instruments and gadgets so powerfully disruptive to the culture
What we have here is the fact technology is changing marketing. It is timely that the next post from Greg at Digital Tonto takes us into the future of marketing.
Greg writing on Digital Tonoto points us toward the future of marketing. And in todays techno world Greg sums it up nicely when he says “…brans will have to learn to be more like publishers and develop content skills. It also means that marketers will have to create a genuine value exchange rather than just coming up with catch ad slogans and price promotions”
Greg points out the following:
- From Rational Benefits to Passion Economy
- From Strategic Planning to Adaptive Strategy
- From Hunches to Simulations
- From Brands to Platforms
This is a great read full of ideas and links you won’t find elsewhere. And with Twitter Chats like #hcsm what Greg offers us are tools, ideas, a directions for those of us interested in healthcare to focus and build. We are marketing outcomes, care, management, cost, etc. It’s time we had the tools to think of it that way.
Sugar Linked To $1 Trillion In U.S. Healthcare Spending
How sweet it is. Dan Munro Contributor at Forbes takes a deep dive into the Credit Suisse report on sugar and finds this pearl:
So 30% – 40% of healthcare expenditures in the USA go to help address issues that are closely tied to the excess consumption of sugar.” Credit Suisse Report
This is a financial report about the sugar industry, which the US subsidizes in a big way. Americans pay three times the world price of sugar to the tune of about $3 billion a year in estimated taxes. See the full article here. In essence we pay to get sugar and we pay to fix what sugar broke.
What is of interest is how detailed this report gets into the health aspect of sugar. And below is a chart “Annual Global Soda Consumption Versus GDP per Capita” Check out where the USA sits. No where near the trend line so far above it think heaven. And you really need to see the chart titled “Average Daily Caloric Intake of Sweeteners By Country”.
Making The Office Visit a Value Exchange
Sunday night at 9pm EDT the #HCSM chat happens. It is one of the best online healthcare chats that I’ve participated in. It is fast, smart, well facilitated, and with some of the best and the brightest minds I have the pleasure of interacting with. The topics are well considered and examined in great detail. Each discussion drives me to think more and consider the changes occurring in healthcare. If you haven’t participated or lurked and you are interested in healthcare check it out, ” …as the dormouse said, ‘Feed your head’.”
I’m sure I am the most annoying participant with my continuous hocking about SM being a tactic and we need to identify strategies/goals and then overlay a tactic. Can’t help myself Donna and Alan beat me about the head for years to learn what a strategy is and how to use it. Sunday night #hcsm takes me back to sitting in the agency and having account people talk about tactics before they identify a strategy. Backing a tactic into a strategy is putting your shoes on and then your socks.
Sunday morning along with the NY Times I get my mailing from Digital Tonto (www.digitaltonto.com). One of his posts was 4 New Marketing Paradigms: here
Within that post were nuggets that clarified my thinking about those HCSM chats.
Greg the 4 new marketing paradigms:
From Making Contacts to Building Assets
From Campaigns to Platforms
From Awareness to Activation
From Transactions to Experiences
Yes, his post is about consumer media and marketing but let’s get real. We have to think in terms of marketing, communications, and strategies if we are going to meet the needs of patients in this evolving digital world.
It is the patient who is driving a need to know and learn because the www is allowing them in real time to seek solutions to problems they have, classic adult learning. To assume physicians who are struggling to keep up with an ever increasing work load and diminishing returns will jump into social media as a solution without first understanding what is happening is as likely as Mitt Romney is to have a cup of coffee.So we must look at strategies that engage both physician and patients and make that amazing unit of learning (patient & physician) work harder and produce better results. In a word use a strategy to show the physician what’s in it for them.
In the section: From Making Contacts to Building Assets Greg states ‘What’s emerging is the concept of value exchange in the form of owned media assets.’ This is not about using apps and content (tactics) to capture ‘eyeballs’ (think patient office visits). It’s about building assets and creating engagement.
The asset is the physicians knowledge and skill at delivering care. Creating engagement is helping patients replace or complement what they’ve learned at WebMD. Physicians should become MyMD to patients seeking knowledge. Make no mistake, patients trust their physician more then WebMD or they want to. Talk about a ready made gap to close, this is one that can be done.
Take away: The office visit is greater then the sum of its parts. It is a place to begin the ‘value exchange’.
I will examine how Greg’s other models relate to health communications and social media over the next few days. And I will show an example of how to begin that value exchange.