Medical education: Do you know your audience?
pharmafile | June 16, 2008 | Feature | Medical Communications, Sales and Marketing |Â Â communications, medical educationÂ
Medical education has always been an important part of the mix within pharmaceutical marketing. The planning and development of high quality and credible med ed programmes that provide healthcare professionals with information that is useful, educational and able to positively impact health outcomes for patients is our ultimate goal. The pharmaceutical industry makes a huge contribution to postgraduate medical education, with figures of up to 50% of continuing medical education (CME) in the UK being quoted in some quarters as being provided by the industry.
But with the ever changing NHS the traditional audiences we once needed to communicate with have become more fragmented and diverse. Different stakeholder groups have emerged who we need to engage with in our communications programmes, all of whom are important in a variety of different ways, whether they are fund-holding decision makers, are involved in service commissioning, are specialists within the secondary care setting, are prescribers in primary care or are in patient advocacy groups and providing support and information to patients. So how do we segment these audiences and prioritise who we need to be including within our communications programmes?
Stakeholder mapping
Firstly, we need to carry out a thorough review of the therapy area and products that we are working with. This 'stakeholder mapping' process involves a number of steps that need to be undertaken including:
* Identification of the key players involved with the budgeting and commissioning process
* Identifying those influencing the patient pathway, from both an acute and chronic perspective: i.e. the journey that patients take within the healthcare system and the healthcare professionals that will be involved with them from diagnosis of the condition, through to treatment and ongoing maintenance if the condition is chronic.
* The final step is to then identify the different advocacy groups involved from both a professional and patient perspective in the management of the relevant conditions
Having identified all these stakeholders, the key to the success of our programme is to prioritise and clearly understand not just their involvement and impact on the patient pathway, but also to appropriately tailor and ensure timely delivery of our key messages to address their educational needs.
Then, once we have identified the core groups we need to talk to in terms of the programme development, it is beneficial to identify the level of importance and influence of customers within these groups. We need to look at who the key players are in terms of their sphere of influence, specialist knowledge and experience and credibility. It is essential that we begin to work with them at this early planning stage to develop and tailor specific message and elements to address their needs and to ensure we are producing credible med ed programmes. We also need to work with these key opinion leaders (KOLs) to identify the key target customers within each of the categories identified in our stakeholder mapping, in line with a number of areas, including: sales data, salesforce feedback and liaison with company personnel. Through close working relationships with these target customers, we can identify topical issues that need to be addressed within the therapy area and specifically tailor our programme to meet the needs of the various stakeholders involved.
Work with these KOLs often takes the form of advisory boards, focus groups, expert panels or even one-to-one meetings, all of which are an essential part of the planning process for our med ed and PR campaigns. They help to ensure that we obtain valuable feedback and input into the programmes we are planning and provide insight into how our programmes might be received by the healthcare professionals we will be targeting.
So what about the targeting and segmentation of these wider audiences?
With a busier and more competitive market place and the evolution of more specialised brands, the need for peer to peer communication and the sharing of best practice and experience has become even more critical than it ever has been. The advent of more specialist products being developed by pharma companies requires a much more strategic and focused approach to the med ed and communications programmes that are created. A much more targeted approach is required in planning strategies which results in a programme of activities that are tactically very different to what we have been used to seeing in the past.
For example, in some therapy areas we have less than 200 key customers in a particular target audience segment, therefore, the messages we develop need to be very focused and practical if they are to be of any value. They need to address very specific funding, usage or clinical and safety issues or perhaps be focused around the development or inclusion of a product within an already well defined treatment pathway.
Adapting communications programmes to new NHS stakeholders
Dynamics within the market are also changing and the days of pyramid selling and the traditional 'top down' approach are being superseded by a more regional and team focused approach to the management of various conditions, which incorporate the stakeholders from all three perspectives: the commissioning, budgetary and patient centric areas. The instruction of regionalised budgets across primary and secondary care, Strategic Health Authority (SHA) prescribing decisions and regionalised patient groups all help to support a more regionally focused approach to education. As individual trusts and Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) often have their own specific issues to address (from a clinical, cost effectiveness, budgetary or patient management perspective), more regionalised medical education and training initiatives can support these requirements, and communicate and address these specific issues across local implementation teams, often spanning primary and secondary care.
So when we look to communicating with the audience, what sort of educational initiatives seem to be most effective?
Having identified our target audiences and their information needs, we need to finally identify which communication methods they would respond to most effectively to hear this information. Often medical education is thought to primarily focus on meetings and symposia led programmes. However, although these are an important part of the mix, there are a wide variety of initiatives that need to be considered.
When we start our KOL mapping and advocacy development programmes, or as part of our steering group and advisory boards, we need to ask our customers which medium they prefer to receive their medical communication in. Depending on the audience, the answers range from traditional meetings and symposia and traditional publications and written communication, through to multimedia and digital formats, including webcasts, distance learning web based training, and interactive digital media, which support practical learning within the customers' own pace and timeframes.
Technology offers a hugely flexible media to both initiate and support communication with key customers. Particularly with modern advances we can listen to footage from key advocates, discuss the views of our peers, discuss and review the implications of new and existing data and interact in the management of patient case studies. But as with most things, this is an important but not all encompassing part of the mix. We need to be aware of its limitations and if we have no physical interaction with our key audiences, the result is that we have minimal control over when the customers choose to engage.
The variety of medium all have a role to play in any medical education campaign and any opportunity to use either live or 'recorded' advocates to support your learning messages should be considered as part of the mix.
As we can see, careful planning and targeting of our med ed campaigns is essential. We need ensure processes are in place when we begin to develop our programmes to ensure they are targeted and tailored to address the needs for the right customer groups and offer appropriate level of interaction with both peers and cross functional colleagues.
BOX: Considerations for programme development
* Customer availability and time restrictions
* Geographical distribution of your target audience
* Current level of understanding and the need for a varied and tailored messaging
* Support and sphere of influence of various brand advocates (tertiary care specialist, secondary care, GPwSI, GP, nurses, pharmacists, commissioners etc)
* Importance of coordinated teamwork in the management of your condition
* Variety of learning needs based on the variance in their current and required level of knowledge
* Size of your target audience(s)
* Level of interaction required in your learning programme
* Budget restrictions
Sandy Royden is chief executive – UK of Huntsworth Health and chairman of the PM Society. Helen Lawn is a director of Helen Lawn Associates and a PR officer for the PM Society. For more information visit: www.pmsociety.org.uk
Related Content
Men’s health – a new report from the Department of Health and Social Care
The UK Department of Health and Social Care has published a new report entitled Men’s …
Educating pharma
Originally published in the October issue of Pharmafocus, Sean Murray takes a look at how pharma …
Wave Healthcare Communications – Four predictions for med ed in 2016
These are some of the trends Wave foresees in the forthcoming year: Integration We predict …
