Envisioning 2.0

Since early this year, Abbott Laboratories and the PR firm Fleishman Hilliard have been producing a contest designed to encourage young people to enter the clinical laboratory profession.  According to Abbott, the program, Labs Are Vital, was a smashing success.  It reached more than 1.8 million students interested in the sciences.

Students participating in the contests were asked to develop videos, T-shirts and advertisements encouraging people to start a career in laboratory medicine.  A key part of the programs’ success was the fact that Fleishman Hilliard was heavily engaged with the Facebook community surrounding the contest.  With a few exceptions, the contest sponsors were very responsive to community members’ needs and quickly answered questions.

Intimate interaction with community members was critically important, as Abbott changed the program’s various deadlines a few times over the past few months to give students more time to participate in the contest.  These changes confused community members.  In addition, Fleishman did a good job defusing negative commentary about the contest by quickly and honestly addressing criticism about the effort.

This contest illustrates that social networks have the power to “seed and grow” online communities around a common cause.  “Seeding” means providing the community with an online home.  Growth entails giving the community room to evolve at its own pace and constantly making adjustments as its needs change.

To learn more about the contest, click here.  To view the Facebook group, please click here (Facebook account required to view site).

Better late than never . . . The latest edition of the Health Wonk Review is up.  Click here to view it.

A bit of a buzz has been going around the pharma blogosphere about a new marketing campaign for the over the counter allergy medicine (OTC) Zyrtec.  Jack Friday at PharmaGossip has wondered whether it’s legal.  Yes, as John Mack, author of Pharma Marketing Blog, noted. The marketing campaign is perfectly legal as Zyrtec is now an OTC pill.

However, Mack wondered whether it is true, as Adrants reported, that Zyrtec flyers were seen on telephone poles in Boston.  He said: “I doubt this is a true story — more likely a Web 2.0 plant by crafty Zyrtec marketers.”

Well, shortly after I read these two blog posts, I left my windowless cubicle for a dose of fresh air and sunshine and what did I see?  Well, I caught a glimpse of a flyer taped to scaffolding near my office in New York’s East Village.  So, yes the rumors are true.  McNeil has instituted a clever guerilla marketing campaign once reserved for consumer packaged goods companies and underground musical acts.  I took a moment to scan in the flyer.  As you can see, someone was curious enough to respond to the marketing campaign by ripping off a section of the flyer with the Zyrtec 800 number.

Overall, this is a very, very clever campaign that’s sure to generate a lot of buzz for Zyrtec.

This morning news reports revealed that a dozen drug and device makers will be providing more information about their financial contributions to advocacy groups and physicians.  The companies responded to a letter from Senator Chuck Grassley.  He asked them to reveal whether they would be following in Eli Lilly and Company’s footsteps and disclosing monies they provide to outside individuals and groups.

According to the Associated Press: “A dozen of the nation’s leading drug and device makers have told Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, that they have plans or are working on plans to publicly disclose grants to outside groups. The details will be provided on each company’s Web sites.”

Pharmaceutical industry watchdogs say drug and device makers are seeking to head off legislation that would require them to disclose this information. “If they were doing this out of the goodness of their heart, they would have done so decades ago,” Dr. Peter Lurie of Public Citizen told the Associated Press.

Whatever The Motive, Drug Firms’ Move Is A Smart One

In April 2007, my firm Envision Solutions released a survey revealing that many Americans are deeply skeptical of drug firms’ motives for supporting non-profits.  According to the nationwide online poll, 43% of US adults believe that pharmaceutical companies fund groups like the American Heart Association and the National Kidney Foundation in order to get more people to buy their products or medicines.  This distrust threatens to sap the power of pharma-non-profit alliances and lead to greater regulation of the industry’s communications and grantmaking activities.

This is why I believe, that whatever the motive, drug firms are taking a step in the right direction by disclosing information about their financial ties to non-profits.  In fact, the benefits go both ways.  If companies and their partners do more to increase the transparency around their relationships, people will have less cause to believe they are being dishonest. In addition, it will make it much easier to recognize the benefits of these public-private partnerships.

Note:  I was inspired to write this post because of an article I read in the current round of the Health Wonk Review.  Check out the latest excellent edition here.

A couple of weeks ago, Jane Sarasohn-Kahn published a great analysis of some of the latest data from EBRI and the Commonwealth Fund focusing on the state of consumer-driven health plans (CDHPs).  In sum, the data’s not good.

Before I get into a discussion of Sarasohn-Kahn’s analysis, it’s best to talk briefly about the war of words currently swirling around CDHPs. Last year, , Gred Scandlen published a report, “CDHPs – ‘Working As Intended,’” where he noted that many studies are flawed and obscure the true benefits of CDHPs.  He argues that:

-    Recent surveys find CDHPs have continued to grow rapidly
-    High-deductible plans encourage people to take their care seriously, e.g., they are much more likely to go to their doctors to manage chronic conditions
-   “CDHP members are [not] likely to forego care due to cost”

Now, with that in mind, let’s look at what EBRI and the Commonwealth Fund found.  Most importantly, their study indicates that the healthy and wealthy are most likely to use CDHPs. Sarasohn-Kahn notes that this is not what CDHPs were designed to do. In fact, they have been touted as a means of getting more people into insurance plans.  In addition, although more affluent individuals are using these plans, Sarasohn-Kahn notes that “members of CDHPs and HDHPs are more likely to delay going to a doctor, visit a specialist, or undergo medical tests than members of comprehensive plans.”

I’m not going to take a position on whether CDHPs are successful just yet.  However, juxtaposing Scandlen’s analysis with EBRI’s research raises some interesting questions.  Most importantly, which numbers are we to believe?  Unfortuantely, there’s no good answer for this question.