Digital Transformation in Healthcare & Shifting Role of the Digital Agency
The Less Powerful Transformation — Marketing & Sales
For a Digital Advertising Agency, Digital Transformation is an old entry at the top of the business agenda. Since the end of last millennium, our clients have increasingly been compelled by the proliferation of digital channels to rely less on Mass Media in Consumer Marketing and face-to-face Key Account Management “et al” within B2B marketing and venture into Multi Channel Marketing.
For the subset of Healthcare companies which will continue to thrive on a Medicine Only, Input Based Remuneration Business Model, the primary role of the Digital Agency remains within transforming the Sales & Marketing processes through Digital. And to the extent that the doctor is perceived as the main stakeholder in prescription choices, the bulk of Multi-Channel-Marketing initiatives are focused at physicians. Accordingly, many Healthcare Advertising agencies’ competencies evolve around marketing to doctors.
A Potent Transformation — Patient focus thru Share of Life
But this is not the type of Digital Transformation which has reached the top of the Healthcare CEO’s agenda. As apparent to all and covered intensely in industry media, Digital has unleashed another decidedly more potent force of transformation; direct access to Patients by the pharma company. It fundamentally breaks down the monopolistic ownership by the HCP of the patient relationship. It is a new form of the disintermediation seen in other industries, as the “middle man” is partially or completely cut out of the Value Chain. Whereas the HCP will remain essential, the direct access to the patient by the pharma company opens up the opportunity to establish real and mutually rewarding, life-long relationship with patients. This is in stark contrast to the second degree, transactional relationship of being the vendor delivering the drug prescribed by the “all powerful” HCP.
We are at a Moment of Truth up for deploying a Share of Life mindset at center of the business model. This is a mindset which lies at the core at some of our time’s most successful digital companies such as Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook. They have successfully gradually entangled themselves horizontally at almost every hour in a 24 hour day of their customers. They constantly define new services not driven by the current capabilities within the company nor based on how they may serve an often peripheral unmet need of the consumer/patient, but inspired by a Vision to establish those mutually rewarding relationship capturing an increasingly greater Share of Life and based on an intimate understanding of the transformative, potential of technology.
It is Vertic’s belief that mirroring the Share of Life mindset displayed by this Frightful Five is critical for the survival of healthcare companies as we know them.
The capabilities required by the digital agency to support healthcare companies in their journey towards Share of Life are skewed towards consumer marketing away and Business Strategy away from those required to do HCP-focused Multi Channel HCP marketing.
Data is what empowers the development of the Share of Life oriented patient relationship. Without patient data we cannot entangle in a meaningful and personalized manner. Even further, the digital transformation of the industry is enabled by the connectivity offered by digital as stakeholders in the healthcare ecosystem now can share data across the treatment Value Chain. Integrating data from Pharma, Payers, Patients and Providers allows for the definition of holistic treatment paradigms and which can be continuously optimized and paid for based on Value. Finally, these treatments can be personalized based on the unique characteristics of the individual patient using new classes of data such as mobile device data and genomics. The ability to access, structure and analyse (Big) Data, grasp the opportunities of diverse mobile hardware plus strategically understand the impact on the healthcare business model are key competencies for the Digital Agency of today and tomorrow. Needless to say, this is a far cry for the current core competence set of the typical healthcare agency.
And I could go on in terms of the Digital Agency’s potential role in R&D, Market Access, etc. But I will halt here, as I hope the above examples are amble to exemplify the forces which drive the shifting (some would say “transforming”:-) role of the digital agency in Healthcare.
