How EMRs will – and won’t – change the brand conversation

By Gabriel Cangiano, Director, HCP & Payer Strategies, Intouch Solutions
[email protected]

 

If electronic medical records didn’t already exist, they’d probably crop up in the fevered dreams of overworked brand managers. After a long day of struggling to communicate with more and more reticent physicians, those brand managers would hit the pillow and imagine a channel that would appear in physicians’ workflows every day, in virtually every practice — a channel tailor-made for smart digital content and tools, that bypasses all the communication roadblocks that have built up over the past few years. And then they’d wake up again, back in the humdrum reality of sales reps and iPads, with that fantasy dream of a channel on the edge of their memory, not quite within reach.

But EMRs are real. And like the victims of many fantasies come true, we as marketers don’t quite seem to know what to do with them. We’ve talked about them and written about them and maybe even gone to the odd EMR conference, but almost nothing in the way of effective pharma communications has made it into a real, live EMR workflow. Some of that is due to our industry’s usual, in-bred caution when it comes to new technologies; some of it arises from the unique challenges of EMR as a communications channel. But neither of those is a sufficient justification for us to be sitting out on the biggest revolution in medical recordkeeping since the invention of file folder tabs. EMRs can be a boon for marketers if we are able to change our approach to physician communications to suit them.

To answer all those questions we know you are asking …

 

Is EMR really a marketing channel?

No. Not even a little. Do you know the last place doctors want to see marketing messages? Their EMR interface. To a physician, the EMR is a private care space limited to only that which will help the patient. Tossing some ad in there, even a well-crafted ad, is just short of projecting a commercial onto the chest of a cardiac patient right before the surgeon begins cutting. So unless your brand strategy is to irritate doctors as much as possible, you need to begin with the premise that EMR is not a marketing channel.

 

So if it’s not a marketing channel, why are we here?

Because EMR is an unprecedented opportunity to show how helpful your brand can be to the care process. EMRs offer marketers the opportunity to develop and deploy all those beyond-the-pill tools we’ve been talking so much about — educational content, patient support apps and the like. While a physician might be expected to revolt if she sees a banner ad after inputting info about her patient’s multiple sclerosis diagnosis, she might just change her tune if instead she is presented with an MS lifestyle advisory app that can be “prescribed” straight to the patient or with links to an online support community that the patient can explore.

 

That’s all very well, but how can we even begin to make connections with EMR providers? The industry is so fragmented right now.

True, but not for long. According to one study published last year, the top ten EMR vendors already control 90 percent of hospital market share and 65 percent of ambulatory. So the Epics and Allscripts of the world are growing in reach. Partnering with just a handful of providers could put a brand’s content in front of a large percentage of the physician population, and that percentage will grow every year.

 

And why would the Epics and Allscripts of the world even want to talk with us?

As a matter of fact, now is the perfect time for them to want to talk to us. Due to the implementation pressure created by the Affordable Care Act (ACA), EMR providers were forced to substantially compress their development processes in order to meet demand. Now, five years down the line, they are finally catching their collective breath and thinking about ways to fill in the many cracks in their offerings that they so hurriedly created. Just as pharma marketers have been thinking about what they can offer beyond the pill, EMR providers are starting to think about what they can offer beyond the basic, technology-supported workflow tools. They are hungry for value-adding content, which happens to be the very thing we can provide. EMRs may turn out to be the pathway through which the beyond-the-pill concept can evolve into truly integrated wraparound services.

 

Okay, let’s say the Epics and the Allscripts are actually interested in this sort of partnership. What are some outside-the-box, non-“selling” tools we can offer them?

How about a reimbursement flow navigation tool? Reimbursement remains spectacularly confusing for pretty much everyone, including physicians, and this is especially true for the specialty products that are taking over the branded marketplace. Don’t you think physicians might want to be able to answer their patients’ reimbursement questions or offer them a resource that can help them instead? And who knows more about reimbursement than we do? A reimbursement navigation tool, inserted at just the right spot in an EMR’s workflow, could provide a powerful and memorable benefit to both doctor and patient.

Or what about support programs? In that moment of diagnosis, when a patient is at their most fearful and vulnerable, what could be more appropriate than information about a patient support program? Spreading the word about pharma’s support programs is one of the industry’s great challenges; pushing them out through EMRs might be the perfect marriage of time, place and resource.

And here’s a really wild idea — clinical trials. Pharma companies have been griping for years about the difficulty of recruiting patients for trials. Many physicians are simply too busy to keep up on all the trials in their field. But an EMR could easily be made “smart” enough to attempt to match individual patient characteristics to a grand database of trial needs. So at that same moment of diagnosis, physicians might be able to offer patients a treatment opportunity they might otherwise never have found.

Lurking behind all this is the fact that everything we might potentially contribute to an EMR could have a measurable impact on patient outcomes — and the word “measurable” is as much a selling point as the tools themselves. As the healthcare marketplace moves toward pay-for-performance, EMRs are going to want to have outcomes data to show to clients and payers, and the sorts of tools we could provide would fill that need nicely.

The bottom line here is that we need to start using all that knowledge we’ve collected about the wants and needs of our audiences and translating it into ways that add value to their EMR workflow. If we can do that, the pitches to the EMR providers will write themselves.

 

Now we’re starting to get excited.

Don’t get too excited just yet. Bringing pharma and EMRs together is going to be a long haul. In most other communications mediums that we use to reach physicians, the only question the folks on the other side of the table ask is, “How much can you pay us?” In this case, for the first time, we are going to have to justify the content we are providing in terms of the value it will add to the EMR offering, since anything that shows up in there will reflect on the EMR provider as much or more than it’ll reflect on us. Or, put another way, a highly motivated and knowledgeable third-party gatekeeper is going to be judging our claims of usefulness before we get in front of a single doctor. This is not going to be, “Everyone has an iPad now — we need an iPad app by next week!” It’s going to take time, relationship-building, and plenty of trial and error. But given the growing reach of EMRs, the potential reward will easily justify such an investment.

 

So how do we begin?

Just as you would with any new medium: start small. Build a relationship with an EMR provider and offer to provide supportive content to a narrow scope of specialists treating a narrow scope of diseases in a limited geographic area. Test and learn; get feedback and adjust; rinse and repeat. Everyone is going to have to adjust their thinking here — the EMRs as much as the marketers — so the smaller, the better. Besides, this will give the EMRs a proof of concept and build the trust required to launch it on a broader scale.

Becoming a part of the EMR puzzle is our opportunity to help build the next care paradigm for physicians and patients. So let’s begin.

 

Gabriel Cangiano is director, HCP and payer strategies, at Intouch Solutions.