Every patient has a pathway to treatment. That path starts at the health and wellness phase of the journey and leads all the way through to treatment, patient adherence and managing an illness. Most pharmaceutical companies have a firm grasp on the patient pathway as it relates to their drugs.
Along that path, the individual has very different needs that can guide the content creation of a pharmaceutical company engaging in social media. Understanding those information gaps along the patient pathway is critical to healthcare social media success. A person is more apt to trust the company that’s been there from the start rather than the company that showed up only in the patient’s time of need. Social media relationships should be built to last and not transactional in nature.
But you understand this already. The more pressing question is: what is it that people want along the patient pathway? To begin to form an answer to that question, it’s helpful to understand the changing information consumption habits of today’s patient:
- 23% of individuals with a chronic disease go online for the purpose of finding others with similar health concerns
- 17% of cell phone users have used their phone to look up health and medical information
- 78% of home broadband users look online for health information
- 60% of people classify themselves as visual learners
- 67% of specialist physicians own smart phones and 75% of those doctors use their smart phone to view medical apps like Epocrates
All of this leads to an important point: social media strategy requires a robust content syndication network. Most content creation efforts focus on text-based efforts. But all data around consumption habits points to the need for a mix of text-based content along with video, audio, Slidehare and interactive games. And we are not just creating content for the oft-repeated “three screens”—we need to think about four screens (TV, computer, smartphone and tablet).
The patient pathway should map to the patient engagement span. There is no single approach to achieve this goal. By starting off with a listening program to understand the patient population and their needs along the patient pathway, you can begin to offer the right types of content at the right time. Content creation in social media channels needs to evolve from text-based and at a single point-in-time (usually treatment or diagnosis) to multi-format, multi-device and at every point along the patient pathway.
Economists have long used a combination of lagging and leading indicators to come up with an accurate picture of the economy. As the name implies, a lagging indicator provides a quantitative measure over a period of time. It is a great tool for looking back at a period of time and measuring an outcome. A leading indicator is more of short-term measure of success that offers some predictive insight into future outcomes.
Raise your right hand and repeat after me:
Congrats! You’ve decided to embark on a pharmaceutical social media odyssey. It will be a rewarding endeavor. You’ve done everything right up until this point: focused on the
I’ve long subscribed to the notion that the most important role for pharmaceutical companies in social media was as an information depot. With access to an abundance of data, research and emerging trends, healthcare companies are in a unique position to broadly distribute medical information.

