Welcome to the digital marketing roundup, which this week includes an online patient study, Quintiles’ partnership with Allscripts, Merck Serono’s digital expansion and GE Healthcare’s remote patient monitoring study in India.
There’s also a link to the next in our Tip Of The Week series, which is produced in association with CDM and can be found in the Digital Handbook.
Tip of the week: Planet of the apps
Patients who go online to research their illnesses do so because they want to be better informed and more prepared to play an active role in their care – not because they mistrust their doctors, according to a new study. Researchers at the University of California, Davis surveyed more than 500 people who were members of online support groups and had scheduled appointments with a doctor. But although mistrust did not predict reliance on the internet prior to patients’ medical visits, several other factors did. For example, people were more likely to seek information online when their health situation was distressful or when they felt they had some level of personal control over their illness. Online information-seeking was also higher among patients who believed that their medical condition was likely to persist.
Quintiles has partnered with electronic health record company Allscripts to develop new clinical and post-approval research software. The contract research organisation (CRO) to use the software to show new drug’s real-world value and improve areas such as patient recruitment and late-phase modeling. In this way Quintiles said the partnership’s goal is to significantly reduce some of the bottlenecks that traditionally impede clinical research.
Merck Serono has increased its digital outputs over the last few months, launching Twitter accounts for both its German operations and its EMD Serono US division in May. Meanwhile, EMD Serono has also joined the handful of pharmaceutical companies that have mobile sites.
GE Healthcare has signed a partnership deal with Indian hospital chain Fortis Healthcare to run an electronic remote monitoring programme. Starting with 34 intensive care unit beds in two small hospitals in Raipur and Dehradun, the programme will be expanded to 500 beds in different hospitals across the country by 2014. “In a couple of years, we believe that this will be the accepted standard of care for patients in India and help to save more lives,” Fortis Healthcare CEO Aditya Vij said.
This week the Digital Intelligence blog also covered Boehringer’s Communiqué Award for its 1 Mission 1 Million campaign, Lilly’s social media strategy and Boehringer’s digital health pilot in diabetes.
