Healthcare PR: BioImagene's Build to USCAP
Say what you will about the effectiveness of conferences in the marketing mix--there are still a lot of shows that companies feel they have to attend in order to see and be seen. In the case of Schwartz client BioImagene, that conference is the annual meeting of the U.S. & Canadian Academy of Pathology (USCAP).
BioImagene is one of the companies that dominate USCAP and their PR team is working overtime to support the show presence. So it was nice for everyone to see a blog entry, "BioImagene PR Doing It The Apple Way," from New York-based pathology resident Karl Robstad, M.D.
Dr. Robstad offers, "In an industry that, at least in my opinion, lacks some of the excitement in spreading the word about their newest and best products/services, BioImagene is a real stand-out taking a page out of Apple’s handbook, by creating mystique and hype around product releases, and then following the hype up with grand spectacle unveilings."
He continues, "You can look at stuff like this and call them 'PR stunts' or whatever, but I think there is a certain amount of merit behind a good PR campaign."
We'd agree, Dr. Robstad, and thank you for noticing. It's all about generating the sort of visibility that makes the BioImagene sales team happy and that underscores how a company that was founded a few years ago is altering a century-old industry.
The BioImagene booth was hopping at USCAP last year. Here's to an even more successful 2010 event later this month.
This photo from euthman is covered by a Creative Commons license.
Tags: BioImagene, healthcare PR, medical PR
By Laura Kempke on March 12, 2010 1:03 PM
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HIMSS 2010 - A Few More (Observations) from the Road
Following are additional impressions from HIMSS 2010, Atlanta contributed by Schwartz Communications colleagues Dave Close, Nigel Smith, Dana Conti, Mercedes Fereck…
• Bloggers vs. reporters: There is hardly a difference in the healthcare IT market. Prominent bloggers like HISTalk attract big readerships - large enough to host their own party and awards ceremony on the same night as Healthcare Informatics’ Innovators Awards Event. At a client’s press briefing, bloggers sat next to top tier outlets like Modern Healthcare, providing their own perspective and reporting on the news. Take Anthony Guerra for instance. He is the former editor of Healthcare Informatics, who is now leveraging his CIO contacts to write stories on his new site healthsystemCIO.com
• Booth Gimmicks Abound: From the aforementioned DeLorean, to a specially constructed basketball court featuring former Harlem Globetrotters to Tiki-themed lairs and Vespa giveaways, HIMSS once again featured some pretty memorable booths. I can certainly appreciate the scenery, but it seems somewhat "Mad Men" retro and a bit silly to see companies still hire beautiful young women to draw traffic into the booths. Every spokes-model in the southeast must have been at the GWC. How do you stand for seven hours on six-inch heels?
• Wither the CIO? There weren’t as many hospital CIO types roaming the show floor as in years’ past. Many we spoke with said the CIO was an “endangered species” at HIMSS and most who did attend were there as a guest of a vendor. So, HIMSS this year was mostly vendors talking to vendors, with the most likely business outcome being strategic partnerships down the road, or planting seeds for a future merger or acquisition.
• Testing The Waters: This year at HIMSS, Schwartz met with a number of general technology vendors who were there to “test the waters” of the healthcare vertical market and/or to gather information on healthcare IT certification.
Let us know your thoughts of the show….
Tags: Healthcare PR, HIMSS 2010
By Doug Russell on March 8, 2010 10:42 AM
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HIMSS 2010 - Play It Pretty For Atlanta
Once again this year, Schwartz was the lone PR firm with a booth at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference, which was attended by 9 of our clients and wrapped up yesterday. They were there along with some 30,000 other healthcare IT professionals, all eager to hear the latest on "Meaningful Use," Electronic Health Records, HITECH, ARRA and how to secure federal stimulus dollars. Hundreds of vendors exhibited in two huge exhibition halls, ensuring my pedometer registered up to 8,000 show floor steps per day. Good thing, considering the spectacularly unhealthy fare offered at the food stalls throughout the Georgia World Congress Center.
Following are a few observations about the show, including contributions from Schwartz VPs Dana Conti and Dave Close, who attended HIMSS along with 5 other colleagues:
• It seems that every six months, the number of media outlets shooting video on the conference floor doubles. Publications like DotMed and Healthcare IT News tape interviews during the day and edit stories at night. And you thought you had a long day at the booth?
• The land grab for HIE contracts is on. Everyone from major players like GE to niche HIE vendors are highlighting their ability to support the next healthcare technology infrastructure...and reporters wanted to hear from anyone with an HIE pitch.
• So many EHRs. It seems like everyone is developing or offering an EHR with the story that it’s a logical extension of what they do – whatever it is they do. We met a fascinating guy from South America who developed an EHR for racehorses. He was at HIMSS to find opportunities to sell if for human patients. Why not? He’ll have to change the parameters for the size of a urine sample, though.
• Some version of the phrase “meaningful use” was in the signage or literature in almost every booth. Last year everyone was waiting for the definition. This year there is a definition and it’s moved very quickly into the marketing spiels of hundreds of companies.
• Perhaps the most appropriate visual metaphor to healthcare IT today was in the booth that had a “Back to the Future” DeLorean. One of the engineers had built the thing and it’s an amazing facsimile of the real movie car. He said it has 200,000 miles on it and he drives it to the shows. An old, obsolete car covered with all sorts of futuristic technology bolted all over it to make it do new things. At HIMSS you saw so much fantastic technology – EMRs, PACs, PHRs, HIEs, analytics…all sorts of new tech to make the old, clunky healthcare system faster and better. But I can’t help thinking that until there is some type of structural reform, it’s still 21st century tech bolted onto a creaky, obsolete system.
Stay tuned for more HIMSS observations.....
Tags: ARRA, Healthcare IT News, HIE, HIMSS, HIMSS+PR, HITECH, meaningful use
By Doug Russell on March 5, 2010 2:41 PM
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Biotech, Pharmaceutical Companies Listen to Social Media
Yesterday the Boston Business Journal ran an overview, "Biotechs proceed with social-media caution," of the state of affairs in drug companies' use of Web 2.0 platforms like Facebook, Twitter and blogs.
As you'd expect, this is an issue tracked carefully by every PR firm in Boston, San Francisco and other areas where the drug and medical device industries are concentrated.
As we all know, companies that market therapies and medical devices in the U.S. have to be prudent in their use of social media. Lacking FDA guidance, they generally believe that they need to steer clear of anything that might be deemed promotional. (John Moore of Chilmark Research boils it down for readers in the Boston Business Journal article: "How do you have clear disclaimers in 140 characters?") And what if patients make claims that aren't supported by FDA labeling? Or report side effects that the drug or device company can't verify?
Yet, as the article points out, people are talking anyway--patients and their families will continue to search online for information about conditions and treatments--and biotech and medical device companies increasingly feel that they have to at least listen to those conversations.
I've heard some ask, "Why would I listen when I can't respond?" That mindset strikes me as too tactically focused and short-sighted. A response to that post or that tweet may be out of the question, but any effective external communications program has to be based on a reasonably comprehensive understanding of how your product is perceived.
Beyond that, as the article and other discussions of pharmaceutical marketing have pointed out, companies can still make some use of social media as a channel to reach target audiences. They might be hamstrung at this moment in time in not being free to engage in every two-way conversation, but pharmaceutical and medical device companies should be able to get creative in their use of social media to disseminate some types of information, such as facts about a particular medical condition and tips on its management that have nothing to do with a drug or device.
Jim Weinrebe from Schwartz attended the November 2009 FDA hearings on social media and opined, at the time, that "active listening and monitoring" of social media by drug and device companies would gradually become seen as "safe" and would not go hand in hand with a requirement to "police."
Pharma and device companies are listening to what's being said online and some are beginning to go a bit beyond. None of these firms are giving consumer brands a run for their money in use of social media, but it's clear that they should at least begin to listen. Perceiving social media use as "all or nothing" isn't in line with industry leaders' current thinking.
Tags: biotech PR, biotechnology PR, Boston PR agencies, pharmaceutical PR, San Francisco PR agencies, social media
By Laura Kempke on February 23, 2010 4:10 PM
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Innovation and Growth in Swedish Medtech
By Kristina Ebenius on February 18, 2010 2:26 PM
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Healthcare PR: Hospitals Leading the Way in Social Media
My old hometown newspaper, the Rochester (Minn.) Post-Bulletin, covers happenings at Mayo Clinic with regularity. (Absolutely everyone called it "the Clinic" when I was growing up, but since I'm in communications I'll try to respect the fact that they've dropped the "the" and mean it about the "Mayo" part.)
An article in the paper this week, "Mayo Clinic Looks Toward the Future," describes how things went last year for the hospital, "a $7 billion nonprofit company that employs more than 32,000 people in Rochester." Sounds like things were a bit rough, but that Mayo, which also has a huge presence in Arizona and Florida, finished the year in good shape.
Looking ahead, to grow, "Mayo plans to use everything from social media and 'telemedicine' to remote clinic locations [potentially outside of the U.S.] to accomplish that goal."
Mayo is already, as just about everyone in healthcare PR knows, phenomenally active and I believe creative in its use of social media. (For a start, check out the Sharing Mayo Clinic blog.) I'll be very interested to see what Mayo's got up its sleeve in 2010 when it comes to using social media to reach patients and consumers, both in the U.S. and abroad.
Much has been made among healthcare marketers of how hamstrung pharmaceutical and medical device companies are, or perceive themselves to be, in their use of social media in the absence of FDA guidance. Hospitals, however, have jumped right in.
To keep current on this topic, check out the Found In Cache blog. It's full of charts and useful resources (e.g., "Over 1,000 Hospital Social Media Sites") on use of social media by hospitals.
You may want to also read HealthLeadersMedia's late January article "Few Hospitals Use Social Media Effectively, Says Study." It says that only 12.5% of respondents to a survey--hospital marketers--had succeeded in attracting new patients using social media.
With social media use on the rise--consider that the fastest growing demographic on Facebook is women over the age of 55--maybe hospitals will see greater returns on their use of social media in 2010.
Photo credit: Visit this page for information on this photo of the Mayo building. This photo is covered by an open source license.
Tags: healthcare PR, healthcare public relations, medical PR, medical public relations, social media
By Laura Kempke on February 12, 2010 6:42 PM
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Social media for B-to-B health care companies: Is there value?
There is tremendous buzz about using social media to promote all things consumer including health care treatments and diagnostics. But what if your company markets to hospital administrators and clinicians instead of patients? Does that mean there is no value for your company to engage in social media?
When thinking about how the medical community is using social media, the perception tends to be that social media sites like Facebook and YouTube are only used to target patients, however also present are influential medical organizations and health care companies targeting clinicians and hospital administrators. The Society of Interventional Radiology (SIR) has a Facebook fan page that communicates updates on SIR's upcoming meetings, announces webinars and provides video clips of clinicians sharing their experiences using interventional radiology to treat patients. YouTube is also full of these types of videos designed for physicians to observe cutting-edge practices in surgery, diagnostics and other treatments.
With regards to targeting health care administrators, social media sites designed for professional networking--such as LinkedIn and Twitter--can be strategic venues for developing a presence for your brand. While LinkedIn is best known for providing individuals with a trusted network of business professionals to help them identify job opportunities, there is another component to LinkedIn that is conducive for helping to brand companies as key opinion leaders in their industries. With more than 55 million members including executives at every Fortune 500 company, LinkedIn provides a channel to get in front of key decision-makers in the health care business world.
Even better, it's very easy to begin building a corporate presence on LinkedIn. In minutes you can create a company profile that is essentially the same as the boilerplate section of a corporate website. Also simple to do is forming a LinkedIn group, a more interactive forum than a company profile that is designed to be a place for sharing industry and/or corporate news and allows members to begin discussions with one another. It is a great place to upload links to media coverage about your company as well as interesting articles about the industry.
One of the important choices when setting up a group is to either make it open to anyone who wants to join vs. invite-only. There are pros and cons to both options. If the group is going to be comprised of company executives who want to use it as a forum to share information between one another, then it would be best to set up the group as invite-only to prevent sharing information inadvertently with competitors who may unknowingly join a public group. If however, the number one goal of setting up the group is to elevate the company's brand to any and all business professionals, the public option will make it easier for more folks to join and would be the best choice. Also, it should be noted that if an inappropriate comment is posted, the group manager has the ability to delete the comment and/or subsequent comments in the discussion as well as remove "difficult" members from the group.
That said, it is important to remember that social media sites are not well suited to keeping information private. Anything you post to a LinkedIn group could be seen by clients, prospective clients and competitors. Social media sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn frequently change their privacy policies and settings. When changes are made they are not always transparently communicated to members.
If the idea of driving discussion seems too aggressive, there is still value in familiarizing yourself with outlets such as LinkedIn and Twitter. Like all communications campaigns, the key lies in finding outlets that reach your desired audience. Even if you're not ready to engage proactively, just listening to what business professionals in your industry are talking about can help inform how you go about reaching them. To this end, sites like Sermo are conducive to learning how physicians think about a particular topic. There are sponsorship opportunities available for companies to post questions and have access to the clinicians' answers, something that could be worthwhile if you are researching the best way to position a new product or relaunch an old one.
So the answer then is, yes, absolutely there is value for B-to-B health care companies to engage in social media, and we didn't even delve into opportunities on Twitter. Come back soon for a post dedicated to best practices on Twitter for health care companies with both B-to-B and B-to-C selling models.
Tags: B2B healthcare, healthcare PR, healthcare public relations, LinkedIn, medical PR, medical public relations, social media
By Sherry Feldberg on January 29, 2010 2:11 PM
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