| GfK Healthcare | January 2010 |
If You Thought 2009 Had Its Challenges, 2010 Will Add Some New Ones – and Plenty of Opportunity as Well  Every year, PricewaterhouseCoopers produces an excellent report outlining the top health industry issues for the next 12 months. To be cute about it, the firm always numbers the issues based on the year’s last two digits, so in 2009 it listed the top nine industry issues. This year’s is the top 10. Such cute devices aside, these reports are excellent, free and readily downloadable in PDF format. Every health care marketing researcher should be an active consumer of this information source. Moreover, in 2010 you can expect that I will continue to use these reports as fodder on which to base articles and presentations commenting on the implications and applications to health care marketing research of these valuable insights. To start the year off right, I would like to highlight some of PricewaterhouseCoopers’ top 10 issues, and discuss what each might mean for those of us working in the marketing research function in health care companies and the agencies that serve them. First, I believe it worth noting that the subtitle for the 2010 issues publication is “Squeezing the Juice Out of Healthcare.” As this phrase would suggest, a reading of the document indicates that PricewaterhouseCoopers’ perspective – with which I wholeheartedly agree – is that 2010 is not, for health care marketers and marketing researchers, a year that will be filled with lush, low- hanging fruit. Rather, we can anticipate a year in which flexibility, striking the correct partnerships and the continued philosophy of looking to do more with less will be required to even a greater extent than in 2009. As of this writing, we remain in limbo in terms of what the federal government’s final health care reform bill will look like, and what impact it will have. But regardless of these important factors, we can count on government to become increasingly active in matters related to health care, and we will need to keep up to speed on its regulations, contractual considerations, etc. Especially relevant to health care marketers and marketing researchers are the “Sunshine Laws” that require disclosure of all payments made to health care practitioners by commercial organizations such as manufacturers. The Obama administration, it is important to note, has increased next year’s budget for fraud detection by 50 percent, and the federal government is becoming increasingly assiduous about “clawing back” overpayments, with the risk of jail time for executives in health care companies that break the rules becoming increasingly real. Those of us in health care marketing and marketing research will need to improve training and controls within our organizations to avoid overstepping regulatory lines. A simple “Whoops, sorry” will no longer suffice. From a fiscal perspective, it is essential to note that as health care costs continued to rise in 2009, the economic travails of the recession actually caused a drop in gross domestic product. The result of combining these two phenomena is the greatest increase in health care costs as a percentage of GDP that has ever been experienced in the United States – an important driving force in government, regardless of the outcome of health care reform. At the other end of the spectrum, PricewaterhouseCoopers emphasizes that as consumers become more active in determining the course of their own health care, we must understand consumers better, especially in terms of their use of new electronic media. Another observation of the PricewaterhouseCoopers’ issues publication is that in these increasingly challenging times, it will be increasingly difficult for most organizations to go it alone. Rather, a major component of success in 2010 will be the picking of optimal partners, which can bring all the right core competencies to the table without incurring the overhead of any one organization developing them internally. And that can create a situation advantageous to all parties in terms of effectiveness and efficiency. We can also look for increased activity on the part of managed care organizations and an increase in the need to gain a research-based understanding of their policies and practices. More specifically, a frequently overlooked aspect of rising unemployment is decreasing insurance enrollment and the pressure this places on insurance companies to maintain profits. Increasingly, we can look for them to attempt to limit compensation to health care providers and commercial manufacturers. Research opportunities lie in providing information pertaining to such trends. On a very different and more optimistic topic, PricewaterhouseCoopers sees a significant increase in the integration of telecommunications and other information technology efforts into the fabric of health care in 2010. The management, analysis and accessing of information will become increasingly important, as we have discussed elsewhere (e.g., in this month’s Orange Pages) in improving the effectiveness and efficiency of health care. Huge research opportunities reside in helping to determine what technological interventions will best meet the needs of the stakeholders involved. One of the partnerships referenced above that will doubtless have a profound effect is the increasing number of alliances between health care manufacturers and their consumer counterparts. PricewaterhouseCoopers sees 2010 as a year of increased focus on “awareness” and “wellness,” and myriad marketing research activities will doubtless result as the health care focus changes from a disease model to a prevention model. Much of this research will center on sustainable participation, since it is one thing to set up wellness programs and quite another to get people to participate in them regularly and on a protracted basis. Relatedly, 2010 will see continued movement of the delivery of health care away from traditional venues. Nurse practioner-staffed clinics in pharmacies, telemedicine, telephone and e-mail consultations and other initiatives are likely to make the image of the general practitioner’s waiting room crammed with patients reading two year-old magazines a thing of the past. In summary, let me come back full circle and strongly encourage you to access PricewaterhouseCoopers’ document to understand the forces that will be at work in 2010 in much greater detail than I have outlined above. The report won’t tell you how to do a better focus group or product positioning study, but will do something far more important: It will identify the major health care trends that will unfold this year, and with careful interpretation will help us decide what marketing research needs to be prioritized  Richard B. Vanderveer, Ph.D. CEO, GfK Healthcare   |