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GfK Healthcare | February 2010 | |
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Touch Screens and the Health Care Marketing Researcher  What seems like a thousand years ago now, I was asked by a company that runs educational seminars for the pharmaceutical and other industries to chair a seminar on the emerging Internet. The seminar was scheduled in Nashville, Tenn., for the week before Christmas, and I couldn’t imagine anybody showing up. Nonetheless, because of my general interest in getting up to speed on anything new and promising, I accepted the invitation. My first task was to buy as many books as I could find on the topic. I had never been on the World Wide Web at that point, and thought that if I was going to chair this session, even if only a handful of people showed up, I should be the most conversant person in the room on the topic. In consuming these volumes, I became fascinated with digital media, and have remained so ever since. Imagine my surprise when I and two days’ worth of knowledgeable speakers showed up in Nashville to face an audience of about 300 crazed pharmaceutical marketers. They had come to an unusual venue at an inconvenient time for one reason. As expressed so eloquently by one of the attendees, “Merck has a Web site and my boss told me I have to get a Web site. Quick, help me!” The dot-com era ensued, with the creative types working assiduously to create “way cool” sites that were “sticky,” i.e., that would attract people and hold them there. Because of the novelty of the medium, growing percentages of the population with time on their hands would “surf” the Web in search of such sites for entertainment value. Not surprisingly, this pastime got old fairly quickly, and people started to go to the Internet in search of specific information, and increasingly to shop. Search engines developed, which unfortunately now spew out hundreds of thousands of references on virtually any topic, including health care, if you don’t know specifically what you are looking for. As a sidebar, those of us who have been in the business for a while recall the frenzy of miscellaneous digital activities in which pharmaceutical companies invested. One of my client companies at the time, for example, invested $250,000 to $500,000 in 23 different startup ventures, for fear that one of them would take off and the investor would wind up being left out. Medical News Network, which downloaded a medical news program to physicians’ offices overnight via a clunky network of rooftop satellite dishes and video recorders, siphoned millions of dollars from pharmaceutical companies before crashing. Electronic prescribing, using equipment that was not ready for prime time provided by organizations that were not experienced enough or well enough funded to support the system, was also rolled out to key doctors. Online detailing, both automated and provided through teleconferencing with live wraps, also came and went as doctors realized that the video rep was simply using the same materials as their in-person rep, minus the samples, pizzas and other goodies that the live rep could provide. All of this left a rather bad taste in the mouth of the health care industry, which became understandably gun-shy of making further investments in the digital space. Much of this could have been avoided had decision makers followed the wisdom and common sense of MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte, a founder of Wired Magazine and author of “Being Digital.” This seminal book, published in 1995 but still highly relevant, anticipated the energy that could be wasted if digital technology were not applied correctly. Most specifically to the point of this piece, Negroponte said that desktop/laptop computers were not the optimal places to employ digital technology. He anticipated a time when computerized technology, typically designed to do everything digital and often the wrong size for its application and in the wrong location, would be designed to serve one specific purpose and be easy to use. He could foresee, for example, a time when computerized technology embedded in your refrigerator would remind you when to throw out expired milk. In the same spirit, my new car is equipped with a camera/computer combination that detects lane lines on the road and shakes my steering wheel, somewhat embarrassingly, if I start to wander from lane to lane. So what does all this have to do with health care marketing research? Lots! Digital devices/applications are beginning to appear that will help empower the revolution in health care, and we as marketing researchers will be called upon to help to develop them, test them and eventually derive data from their use. Appropriately applied, such devices can enable us to enter into genuinely interactive two-way conversations with our stakeholders, and we will be called upon to help design these conversations and to listen and learn from them. I am currently experimenting with an HP TouchSmart computer, originally designed by my colleagues at Invivia, a design firm cofounded by a professor of design at Harvard University. Although a wireless keyboard and mouse are thrown into the box for good measure, the major interactions between the unit and its user is through a 23-inch touch screen. Available with wall brackets to install in your home, this device has applications that allow family members to communicate with each other, coordinate schedules, etc. I’m exploring its application in the offices of caregivers and the homes of patients. As this is being written, the iPad is being unveiled by Apple. As it becomes available, I’ll start to look at that platform too. I love my Kindle and use it regularly to download books and periodicals from Amazon. It’s a good example of a purpose-built application working well. I wouldn’t leave home without my iPhone, not because I talk on it all that much, but because I depend so totally on applications like Google voice-driven searches to instantly uncover any piece of information I might ever need. While I’m examining these different platforms, I’m also reading “Glimmer: How Design Can Transform Your Life and Maybe Even the World,” by Warren Berger. This book offers valuable insight into what “design” in this context actually means, how it can make aspects of life more effective and efficient, and when viewed through the eyes of an experienced health care marketing research, how it can revolutionize the practice of delivering coordinated health care and wellness programs. To stay ahead of where information technology in health care is going, read the book, start to explore your own use of and need for various applications, interfaces and platforms, and begin to envision ways in which design, when appropriately applied to health care and wellness, can indeed transform your world.  Richard B. Vanderveer, Ph.D. CEO, GfK Healthcare   |