This document provides tips for becoming a partner with patient bloggers Kerri Sparling and Manny Hernandez. It emphasizes establishing trust between patients and those in the healthcare industry by viewing patients as people first, recognizing trust goes both ways, and addressing adverse event data openly rather than avoiding it. The document includes links to blogs and social media accounts for Kerri and Manny.
7. Don’t run away from it. By exfordy: http://www.flickr.com/photos/exfordy/123900378
8. Kerri: sixuntilme.com (on Twitter: @sixuntilme) Manny: tudiabetes.com, estudiabetes.com (on Twitter: @askmanny)
Notas do Editor
At a health conference in the Fall, I heard the term “consumer” used every single time (no exceptions) in connection to patients. As a patient, I felt very odd…
At a health conference in the Fall, I heard the term “consumer” used every single time (no exceptions) in connection to patients. As a patient, I felt very odd…
When you are in a meeting, in front of a computer, in a presentation… it helps to remember why you are doing what you are doing. Who is on the other side. We are people. Focusing on the people first will positively impact the bottom line. Focusing on the bottom line may not necessarily result in serving people the best possible way.
Patients need to trust who they get support and information from and who they give it to.
Trust gets earned and this takes time.. This is an organic change. Think of the difference between how Google organic results work (over time, creating valuable content that people trust and choose to link to) vs. pay-per-click ads sitting on the edges of a Google results page. You can buy your way into Google Ads but it is not as easy (or quick) to rise to the top of the organic results. An important step to build trust is to start humanizing pharma more. Pharma can humanize itself more in many ways: starting with putting a name and a face to the building, the company name and the stock; thinking of the patient as people (as just mentioned). We may not be getting hit by a hurricane every day but the cost of health care and the barriers to access to care make it harder and harder for people with chronic conditions to get the care they need. Pharma should find creative ways to emulate efforts like P&G’s “Loads of Home” initiative to help Katrina victims with their laundry after the hurricane: http://www.tide.com/en-US/loads-of-hope/index.jspx – so many people need help today. Can you make patient assistance programs easier to find? Easier to enter? Broader? Things like these could go a long way to help build up trust from people towards pharma. A place to start may be to mine your organization for stories of people working in pharma because they were driven from within by a personal connection to a particular condition.
Adverse events (AE) seem to be the elephant in the room most pharmaceutical companies are running away from when it comes down to working with online communities and patient blogs. Not engaging patients may save pharma the “trouble” of dealing with AE but it also results in missing opportunities for dialog.