Patient Centricity. You have probably heard that phrase a million times this year alone. After all, it is one of the biggest buzzwords of 2013. But there is a reason for that. Pharma needs to find a way to better reach and engage with patients—and this goes beyond ads that get them to ask their doctors about a specific brand. This is about better understanding patients and learning how pharma can better serve them. This is about improving patient adherence and outcomes.

The good news is that the industry gets that. We asked our readers for innovative patient-centric initiatives and strategies and our inboxes were flooded with responses. Of course, pharma is probably well aware that medical non-adherence costs the industry billions of dollars a year. (An estimated loss of $564 billion globally according to Capgemini Consulting.) But the industry also cares about giving patients a voice, providing them with tools that can help them stay on medication and creating an environment where they can connect with others like themselves.

In the following special section, we take a break from telling you why patient centricity is important and instead give you a glimpse into exactly what is being done in this area. We chose the most innovative, original and exciting patient-centric strategies and initiatives that we received from across the industry. These companies truly understand what it means to put the patient first.

Affinnova

Patient Predictive Analytics

Charu Chaturvedi, SVP, Affinnova Life Sciences
charu@affinnova.com

At Affinnova, we are helping marketers create more patient-centric  messaging using innovative interactive technology, evolutionary science and predictive analytics—approaches that are already widely embraced by other industries. With our technology, marketers are no longer limited to testing one or two message options at a time on patients. Instead, they can test many ideas, exploring a number of different benefits, claims, insights and imagery. These ideas are shown holistically in combination with each other—the way patients experience them in the real world.

Through an interactive online interface, patients view different message bundles side by side and choose their preferred combination. Behind the scenes an evolutionary algorithm learns from patient choices and continues to evolve the bundles in real-time to reflect their selections. Through this accelerated “survival of the fittest model,” patient-centric input is used to identify the optimal, winning messaging bundles that will stand the test of time. In head-to-head comparisons, Affinnova’s patient-centric bundles are 60% more preferred than ones from traditional methods proving that better engagement and higher satisfaction begins with the patient.

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Ayogo Health

Gamifying Patient Adherence

Michael Fergusson, CEO
info@ayogo.com

Ayogo applies the behavioral psychology of games and play to the management of chronic health conditions and patient adherence.

For instance, Monster Manor, a mobile game for families living with childhood diabetes, is integrated with a tracking app which lets children effortlessly enter all of their diabetes information and allows parents to monitor and stay informed anytime, anywhere. Every time children enter their BG information they are rewarded with a piñata, which they can crack open to find items such as “Beanz” that will help them collect more monsters or “Gold” that will buy their  monster new pets. In addition to rewarding kids, parents are provided with insights, strategies and a tool to support their child’s management efforts.

Games like Monster Manor activate our reward circuitry—we want, desire and receive a dopamine buzz from our play. Gamifying health allows us to hack into our natural feedback loops by engineering ways for us to get more dopamine hits for demonstrating good behavior. By applying game mechanics to the management of chronic health conditions, we can help people to adopt healthier behaviors that will improve their lives.

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CAHG

DROPS101 Mobile Support Tool

Robin Shapiro, EVP, Chief Creative Officer
robin.shapiro@cahg.com

CAHG worked with Alcon on a patient-centric and outcomes-focused approach to helping on-the-go parents of children with acute eye and ear infections. This collaboration resulted in the DROPS101 Web Tool, an engaging multi-product mobile platform that simplifies and supports “Dr. Mom.”

At the heart of this new tool is a video education module that walks parents through dosing instructions step-by-step. In one touch via their mobile phone, users can access on-the-spot educational information, electronic coupons, dosing instructions and fun mobile games to occupy and reward children during or after administration. DROPS101 Web Tool can be shared from physicians to parents and then from parents to friends and family via email, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Google+.

In the first four weeks after launching DROPS101 Web Tool, the site received 12,000 visits. Average visit duration is over two minutes long, demonstrating strong engagement with the tool. Ongoing real-time analytics will continue to provide a stream of actionable metrics and regional intelligence.

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ContextMedia

Point-of-Care Programming

Shradha Agarwal
Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer
shradha.agarwal@contextmediainc.com

ContextMedia, a provider of digital healthcare networks at the point-of-care delivering condition-specific programming, was born with an ambitious goal: inspire lifestyle changes by bringing media tailored to each individual at a time when he or she is most open to health information and at a place where he or she can take immediate action.

ContextMedia was the first company in the industry to work with each member practice to use algorithms and sophisticated technology to tailor the programming to better serve each practitioner’s preferences and to resonate with each patient’s unique needs based on demographic. The next challenge for ContextMedia was staying with the patient to continue inspiring them in-between their physician appointments. To make information readily available, ContextMedia pioneered mobile programs delivering daily inspiration to educate on making healthier choices. ContextMedia continues to innovate by working closely with EMRs to target media to each individual with a service-first attitude rather than build a one-size-fits-all patient product.

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Epocrates

Medical App

Heather Gervais, Senior Vice President, Commercial
hgervais@epocrates.com

The Epocrates medical application is used by more than one million HCPs to help improve the quality and safety of care for hundreds of millions of patients nationwide. In the past year alone, the medical app has helped clinicians avoid more than 27 million adverse drug events through its medical reference app. It has also worked with all of the top 20 pharmaceutical manufacturers to deliver actionable patient-centric information to HCPs. Through a recent targeted physician script lift program with Adheris, Epocrates also significantly increased patient adherence with prescription refills, resulting in an additional 19,000 prescriptions for the drug and a 0.4% increase in persistence for patients on therapy versus control.
Additionally, Epocrates for the iPad app, introduced in late 2012, is the optimal patient education tool. The platform’s size is ideal for sharing information found in Epocrates, such as why a drug may interact with another, or to show a patient the pink round pill that they will be taking. Physicians can also swiftly email or print patient education handouts from Epocrates that detail drug usage and risks.

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Excellerate

3 Keys to Patient-focused Impact

Jill Donahue, Founder
jill.donahue@excellerate.ca

Helping pharma improve patient outcomes is Excellerate’s mission. One way we achieve this is through our program “Persuasion Rx: The 3 Keys to Patient-focused Impact for Pharma People.” Through a combination of live events and remote learning tools, Persuasion Rx delivers the knowledge, attitudes and skills required to lift our industry, your company and you up to a higher level of human and financial contribution.

“Persuasion Rx changed my life! I stopped ‘telling’ and started ‘influencing’. When I did it that way—and this really is the philosophy taught in the three keys—it took less time to get where I wanted to go and I went places I couldn’t have gone before!” says Susan Simon, Director Sales Force Development, Bayer Inc.

After an overwhelmingly successful pilot in Canada, we are now seeking a pharma partner to test the U.S. version and measure its impact on engagement, sales and patient outcomes. For a free description of the three keys or the full Bayer case study, contact Jill.donahue@excellerate.ca.

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Genzyme

Facing Fabry Together Film Project

Jennifer Wound
Senior Product Manager, Fabry Global Marketing
Jennifer.wound@genzyme.com

At Genzyme we are always looking for unique ways to engage with the patient community to raise awareness for rare diseases. This year we launched Facing Fabry Together, a disease awareness film highlighting the common experiences shared by four families from around the world living with Fabry disease, a rare genetic disorder.

To support the video and reach a broad audience, we developed a multi-channel approach to distribution. We built a Facing Fabry Together microsite, which includes access to the full 45-minute film, information on the featured families, the making of the film, and instructions on ordering a DVD. Also included are links to Fabry Community (Genzyme’s U.S. website for information on Fabry disease), Genzyme Rare Community (our patient advocacy website) and Fabry International Network, an independent global network of Fabry patient organizations. We also developed a YouTube channel for the film featuring a trailer and teasers to drive traffic back to the microsite. Thus far the response from the patient and caregiver communities has been astounding, and this new resource will continue to be used in many Genzyme advocacy efforts in the years ahead.

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Ginger.io

Behavioral Analytics for Health

Karan Singh, Co-founder
karan@ginger.io

At Ginger.io, we believe that understanding a patient’s behavior is as important as knowing their symptoms. By looking at a patient’s overall well-being—his mental health, feelings of control and support—we are able to recognize the patterns of behavior that indicate a potential health problem.

We achieve this not by using inaccurate, burdensome surveys or expensive devices, but instead by relying on the ubiquitous smartphone. An individual installs our app on his/her iPhone or Android. While the individual answers occasional questions about his mood, the app’s primary purpose is to collect phone sensor data. Our systems use that data to understand an individual’s daily patterns and trigger an alert to a member of the individual’s support network when something might be going wrong. Follow-up actions can increase an individual’s connection to a broader network, or address some of the mental health issues that contribute to decreased adherence.

We are confident that given our early results at the MIT Media lab, and strong industry support, our technology will be broadly adopted and we will be able to use big data to lead to better health.

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Greater Than One

BioDigital Human

Hung Ma, VP, Account Development
hung.ma@greaterthanone.com

At Greater Than One, we believe digital communications are most effective when they powerfully connect with the human being on the other end. Today, the gap between patients’ desire for knowledge and their false perceptions of their conditions and regimens is a major cause of non-adherence, so we’re always on the lookout for new strategies to close that gap. One example is our BioDigital Human, a robust, scalable digital platform that does for anatomy what Google Earth does for mapping.

The BioDigital Human’s potential role in adherence was immediately obvious: patients who can see the impact of their condition on a highly detailed, virtual human body are far more likely to understand its severity, in turn making them more likely to adhere to their treatment regimen. Through BioDigital Human’s interactive web environment, patients can interface with information from third-party content providers such as Wikipedia and the National Institutes of Health, gathering the vocabulary and information they need to become fully engaged, active partners in developing their regimen. And as active partners, they don’t see themselves as complying with somebody else’s demands, meaning they have greater motivation to adhere.

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Habitworks and Icosystem

Patient Coaching Engine

Andy Cosgrove
Vice President, IcoHealth Strategy & Corporate Development
acosgrove@icosystem.com

Habitworks delivers chronic care management solutions that engage patients and improve outcomes and adherence. Icosystem combines expertise in human behavior and decision-making with simulation and optimization techniques inspired by complexity science and biology to build predictive analytics solutions. The two companies teamed up to integrate simulation techniques with a patient-centric coaching engine designed to create successful, long-term habit change for individuals living with chronic conditions. We start with Icosystem’s agent-based modeling software that simulates the day-to-day activities of individual patients.
This approach exposes emergent behavior and new interventions that may not have been considered when using traditional statistical approaches. Once the Icosystem model generates its recommendations, the Habitworks coaching engine personalizes a set of tools that promote self-efficacy and enable the individual to support their chronic condition on their terms. The coaching engine supports a wide range of feedback, messaging and support tools including self-reporting, networked medication dispensers as well as a majority of the self-tracking tools on the market—but our real innovation is we know how to build the kinds of tools that help people change.

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Healtheo360

Social Caring Network

David S. Duplay, Chairman
dave@healtheo360.com

Healtheo360 is a “caring network” where patients living with chronic conditions, such as diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer’s and many others, come to find support, encouragement and information. Healtheo360 will evolve global healthcare as it puts the voice of the patient and caregiver at the center of the learning and decision-making process through social media. Our community includes patients, their caregivers, family members and friends who share their stories so others may find inspiration, motivation and support.

Patient’s will benefit with services including Virtual Social Therapy, peer counseling, support groups, educational publications and access to a library of video content from patients and caregivers. Comments are allowed and encouraged to promote lively discussions. Made by members “Just Like You,” our library of videos are longitudinal health journals that cover symptoms, diagnosis, treatment, remission and various health conversations. Our technology team is constantly optimizing and enhancing the site to improve user experience. Healtheo360 has also recently launched a patient study designed to measure the advantages of Virtual Social Therapy to type 1 and 2 diabetics via Healtheo360’s interactive video platform.

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Human Care Systems

Interactive Patient Support Program

Thomas Oglesby, Vice President, Global Client Solutions
toglesby@humancaresystems.com

Human Care Systems (HCS) combines proven behavioral science with multi-channel patient experience design to engage patients via phone, web, print, mobile and email. Our integrated solutions change behaviors, which impact health outcomes. HCS programs place patients at the center of an engaging support experience that addresses each person’s unique barriers and events through the diagnosis, initiation and adherence phases.

Adherence and other self-management behaviors are multifactorial issues. Overlapping and reinforcing barriers can be logistical, financial, social, physical, mental, emotional, attitudinal and cultural. They can also be related to side effects, clinician relationships, health literacy, profile, regimen and lack of obvious benefit. Often one barrier (e.g., financial or logistical) is exacerbated by other barriers (e.g., health literacy, emotional issues or side effects).

The HCS approach to patient engagement is to help each patient learn (using the science of effective pedagogy), gain insight (through cognitive behavioral techniques), take action (through behavioral modification tools) and get feedback (engaging HCPs, family and friends). Each patient experiences a guided, interactive support program that analytically addresses that patient’s events and barriers. As a result, our programs drive improved initiation, adherence and retention.

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Indegene Inc.

Indegene Patient Value Services

Dyan Bryson, VP, Patient Enablement Services
Dyan.Bryson@indegene.com

As we partnered with our life sciences clients we recognized the need for enhanced patient engagement. In fact, we used our foundation capabilities to create an execution-focused service to help our clients drive several kinds of patient enablement. To us, this includes driving favorable health behaviors change, improved medication adherence and easier access. Our Indegene Patient Value Services integrate Medical Expertise, Specialized Contact Infrastructure, Healthcare & Communications Expertise and Deployment Ready Technology Platforms. For instance, one of our platforms is Optimax, which facilitates better health outcomes through personalized reminders, educational resources and multi-channel support. The platform engages up to nine different internal and external stakeholders to facilitate compliance and health outcomes management.

We have also developed such initiatives in several regions around the globe including China, the Middle East, India and throughout Europe and North America. These initiatives help enable patients with the consideration of local culture and regulatory environments. As the life sciences industry expands its focus on patients, we are there understanding and supporting the evolution of their businesses.

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LeveragePoint Media/Rx EDGE Pharmacy Networks

Pharmacy As A Communication Channel

Jim O’Dea, President and CEO
jim.odea@leveragepointmedia.com

Our company was one of the first to recognize the tremendous capacity of pharmacies as communication channels to reach current and prospective patients. Literally millions of consumers go through the doors of retail pharmacies every day. We help pharmaceutical marketers reach this audience at a critical “connection point” when they are seeking healthcare answers in the aisles of the pharmacy. In terms of engaging patients, we practice the “four A’s”:  Generating Awareness about the condition and treatments available; Acquiring patients by motivating a dialogue with a healthcare provider; creating Affinity with the brand; and providing a platform for medication Adherence.
Using quantitative measurement techniques, we have demonstrated the effectiveness of our programs in terms of acquiring new patients and by helping current patients persist with their medication therapy. Reaching the right audience of potential patients and doing so efficiently has never been more important. Recognizing this, we continue to innovate in the pharmacy channel through targeting and segmentation within the store and by the aisle, using such criteria as store traffic, geographic factors, purchasing data and demographics.

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MEMOTEXT

Patient-Tailored Direct Messaging

Miki Peer, Medical Science Liaison
mpeer@memotext.com

MEMOTEXT mobile solutions for medication and treatment adherence combines best available evidence and client-specific needs to provide content tailored to the individual patient. Solutions are based on patients’ preferred mode of communications including interactive voice recordings, text messaging and/or email or web correspondence. Interactive media communications consist of both “push messages” (reminders, educational and motivational content) and “pull messages” (questions on adherence barriers, health attitudes and behaviors). Pull messages occurring at the program outset and throughout program participation, guide adaptation of communications to changing patient needs and behaviors. In this way MEMOTEXT keeps patients engaged (evidenced by high program retention rates of 81% to 98%), improves treatment adherence and quality of life and provides key patient information.

A study in patients with diabetes showed sustained improvements in several measures of adherence and adherence-related factors for patients receiving the MEMOTEXT intervention. Objective medication adherence (MPR) improved by 20% to 50% (depending on patients’ baseline level of adherence), and self-reported adherence also improved. Additionally, an average of 79% of patients reported improved quality of life and knowledge of diabetes management, medications and dietary recommendations.

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Millennium

Reaching Cancer Patients

Kathy Gram, Director Patient Advocacy
Kathy.Gram@mpi.com

As Millennium scientists enter the front door of the company’s headquarters each morning to continue their work in developing cancer medicines—and maybe someday curing this disease—they are joined by an invisible, but very vocal partner. As committed as we are to creating novel cancer medicines, we are equally dedicated to partnering with cancer patients and those organizations that are at the forefront of patient advocacy.

Patient Advocacy’s goal is to position Millennium as a trusted and valued partner of choice for key advocates in the cancer community. Patient Advocacy reached 17,000 myeloma and lymphoma patients and caregivers by funding live education programs delivered as the result of our national partnerships with IMF, MMRF, LLS and LRF. We partnered with field and advocacy groups for MyMultipleMyeloma Ambassadors to directly touch over 3,000 myeloma patients and caregivers. We did the same for Local Patient Outreach Programs (LPOPs) to directly reach about 800 patients and caregivers who carried the message through word of mouth to an additional 3,000 people. As a result, 84% of LPOP participants planned to ask their doctor about treatment options and 76% of participants opted into MyMultipleMyeloma.com.

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OPUS Health, a division of Cegedim Relationship Managemen

Engage All Stakeholders for Better Outcomes

Marc Migliorini
Senior Director, Product Marketing and Innovation
Marc.Migliorini@opushealth.com

OPUS Health is committed to building proprietary solutions and making investments in technology in response to new legislature, regulation and access challenges within the co-pay industry. For example, we launched our DebitRx solution aimed at helping patients who experienced difficulties in using traditional co-pay cards at pharmacies. It’s completely integrated within our in-house claims engine and driven by program rules and our stringent validation process. Also, with patients taking a more active role in managing their health, we launched Digital Health Communities in partnership with numerous health-related websites. We’re able to engage and enroll information-seeking patients and caregivers and deliver behavior-based communication that helps them to manage their health.

We believe that HCPs should play an integral role in improving patient satisfaction and engagement.  We launched Clinician2Clinician to complement the growth of NPs and PAs as first-line treatment. NPs and PAs typically spend more time with patients both answering questions and encouraging a participatory role in health. In addition, our field force detailing tool, iOPUS insights, empowers sales reps to help prescribers understand patient adherence rates. It reinforces overall program effectiveness, helps demonstrate outcomes and closes the feedback loop.

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PatientPoint

Care Coordination Platform

Noel Khirsukhani, Senior Vice President Sales and Marketing
noel.khirsukhani@patientpoint.com

PatientPoint Care Coordination Platform is the first mobile-enabled care coordination and patient engagement platform to be prevalidated by the NCQA for 2011 PCMH criteria. It was recognized for innovation in patient engagement by the Microsoft Health Users Group. The platform integrates with practice management software and EMRs, streamlines the clinical process at the point of care, automates outreach to noncompliant patients on behalf of the physician and reconciles gaps in care. In addition, the provider organizations gain clinical and administrative efficiencies, resulting in increased revenues and reduced care management costs.

The PatientPoint product suite also includes patient education programs for exam rooms and waiting rooms. Physician practices using these programs have shown a 10% to 16% increase in patient adherence to preventive screenings.

PatientPoint takes a patient-centric approach to product innovation. The company’s full suite of patient engagement products facilitates the patient-physician relationship, drives adherence and empowers patients to take a more active role in their healthcare.

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PatientsLikeMe

A Learning Health System

Lori Scanlon, Marketing and Communications Director
lscanlon@patientslikeme.com

A free patient network, PatientsLikeMe is where people find the answers to questions like “Is what I’m experiencing normal?” and “Is there is anyone out there like me?” while also connecting with others who know firsthand what they are going through. Today, nearly 200,000 members have reported their real-world experiences on more than 1,500 diseases. Through health profiles, members monitor their health, document the severity of their symptoms, identify triggers, note how they are responding to new treatments and track side effects. They learn from the aggregated data of others with the same experiences and see, often for the first time, just how they are really doing. They also get and give support from others that will help them live better day to day.

A “learning health system,” PatientsLikeMe invites everyone to share their disease experiences in a way that can continuously improve care and dramatically accelerate our understanding of human health. A not-just-for-profit founded on a philosophy of “openness,” PatientsLikeMe aggregates the data, analyzes it and shares the results with healthcare and life science companies to accelerate research and develop more effective treatments.

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Sanofi/Intouch Solutions

Auvi-Q Companion App

Lori Lukus, Director, Communications
Lori.Lukus@sanofi.com

In 2012, Sanofi US announced FDA approval for Auvi-Q (epinephrine injection, USP), a breakthrough in epinephrine auto-injector design, for patients at risk for severe life-threatening allergic reactions. Sanofi licensed North American commercialization rights for Auvi-Q from Intelliject, a company founded by Evan and Eric Edwards, twin brothers who both grew up with life-threatening allergies. Auvi-Q is compact and features audio and visual cues that guide patients and caregivers step-by-step through the injection process.
Sanofi partnered with Intouch Solutions to create the Auvi-Q Companion App for iPhone and Android. Each Auvi-Q prescription comes with two epinephrine auto-injectors and a trainer. The Companion App provides additional training and a focus on emergency preparation. For example, the app can be used by patients and caregivers to practice or show others how to use Auvi-Q right from their phone, complete with voice commands and visual cues that simulate the device itself. Other features, such as shareable allergy profiles and text notifications that can be sent to emergency contacts at the touch of a button, make the app a part of a patient’s anaphylactic preparedness plan.

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Shire Pharmaceuticals

Patients’ Journeys—As They Experience It

Pamela Stewart, Director, Consumer Global Marketing Research
pstewart@shire.com

The team at Shire is committed to understanding the personal journeys that patients face when living with challenging conditions. Staying close to patients’ experiences means listening to their stories told online. It means developing an online community of ADHD sufferers that become integral to how Shire supports patients in its campaigns.
This online community is just one of a number of patient-centric market research initiatives currently underway at Shire, thanks to the work of Tjun Wong, Senior Director of Global Market Research, and Pamela Stewart, Director of Consumer Market Research, in close partnership with the brand teams and other colleagues.

“We’re using a wide range of innovative tools that go far beyond traditional focus groups and questionnaires to discover and reflect the patient journey,” says Wong. “We’re interested in ethnography, learning through observation and meeting the patients within their own environments. We’re interested in what happens in chat rooms and behind closed doors.”  Sometimes it calls for something called Blography, or giving patients a video camera and inviting them to record their actual lives.

We’re not observing at a distance. We’re getting as close to the patient journey as any pharmaceutical company can.

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stickK

The Commitment Contract

Sam Espinosa, Director of Marketing
sespinosa@stickk.com

stickK translates the latest behavioral economics research into a truly distinctive solution for incentive-based behavior change programs. Deep social media integration, flexible goal structure, diverse incentive offerings and industry-leading expertise in behavioral economics set stickK apart from other offerings. By coupling powerful extrinsic forces with each individual’s intrinsic motivations to succeed, stickK is a uniquely compelling, results-driven experience that’s also fun.

Led by co-founders Ian Ayres and Dean Karlan (economists and professors at Yale), and their network of prominent colleagues, our academic basis ensures our methodology stays at the forefront of applied behavioral economics, continually improving the efficacy of our service.
Using our core product, the Commitment Contract, users create a binding agreement to accomplish a personal goal such as lose weight, hit the gym or take meds. Individuals invite a “Referee” to verify progress, and can add friends and family as “Supporters” to offer encouragement along the way. Thanks to this accountability, combined with a comprehensive point system to incentivize each step of the experience, users are up to three times more likely to achieve their goals.

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Topin & Associates

Clipboard Conversation Patient Study

Al Topin, President
atopin@topin.com

Topin and Associates’ recent Clipboard Conversation research study is just one example of how we are putting a focus on patients. The study revealed that today’s patients are “clipboard patients” who come to doctor visits armed with reams of information from the Internet and other sources. These patients are changing the patient-physician conversation, and that’s impacting how physicians prescribe brands and manage patients. Some insights from the study include:

  • Patients’ trust in physicians is no longer a given; they are not compelled to follow a physician’s advice about treatments.
  • Patients want physicians to spend more time with them and feel negatively when they are not able to get more time.
  • Physicians feel unequipped to provide the level of information, time and attention patients need today.
  • Physicians are looking to pharma to help them fill this patient education gap.
  • So how are we using this insight? We’re working with our clients to build programs that position their brands as helpful to physicians, not only in terms of treating conditions, but in helping physicians educate and manage their patients.

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Treato

Generating the Patient Voice

Viki Gronau
Marketing and Business Development Manager
vikig@treato.com

Treato combines Big Data technology with patented Natural Language Processing algorithms to tap into patient wisdom on a massive scale and in real-time, for the ultimate benefit of better outcomes, greater satisfaction and improved adherence. Treato automatically collects a vast amount of patient-written health experiences from online blogs and forums and extracts relevant insights, connecting the dots to create the big picture of what people say about their medications and conditions. This newly generated real-time index of the social health web makes the patient voice accessible to everyone in the healthcare ecosystem.
Treato’s two solutions—an openly available patient website and a brand intelligence service for pharmaceutical professionals—provide real-time insights into patients’ opinions and attitudes. For example, it is possible to analyze patients’ responses to treatments with regard to their concerns, side effects they have experienced, how their physician relates, and so forth. Pharmaceutical marketers are using the insights into patients’ opinions, attitudes and experiences to enhance patient engagement and improve planning. Patient educators can use Treato to learn about obstacles to adherence and prepare programs to help overcome them.

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Univision Communications, Inc.

Reaching the U.S. Hispanic Community

Jorge Daboub
Senior Vice President of Business Development
jdaboub@univision.net

Univision is a trusted brand with some of the most popular multi-platform programming and a 50-year legacy of serving Hispanic America. Univision has leveraged this connection with the U.S. Hispanic community to bring culturally relevant health content via “Salud Es Vida” (Health is Life), a comprehensive initiative designed to raise awareness, increase knowledge and encourage positive health decision-making. The program uses Univision’s media assets—television, radio, digital, social media and grass-roots events like health fairs—to educate Latinos on health issues and promote healthy living habits, access to care and disease specific information including the importance of early detection and aggressive management of the chronic illnesses and risk factors.

Furthermore, in partnership with Envision RxOptions and HolaDoctor, Univision launched the Univision Farmacia Card to empower Hispanics, who at times are disproportionately affected by lack of education and awareness pertaining to health issues. Free to everyone and accepted in over 42,000 participating pharmacies nationwide, the Univision Farmacia Card program has reached more than one million members in its first year—saving members an average of 40% across brand and generic drugs combined.
With emphasis on bringing health issues to the forefront through “Salud Es Vida” and its other initiatives, Univision continues to create awareness around relevant health topics to Hispanics.

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Vogel Farina/Novartis Oncology

My NET Manager Patient App

Bob Vogel, Co-President
bvogel@vogelfarina.com

Neuroendocrine tumors (NETs) are a unique cancer that can cause debilitating symptoms and compromise quality of life for years. Optimal care calls for multidisciplinary collaboration and, importantly, patient input.

Novartis Oncology recognized an unmet need for education and support and in 2008 launched The NET Alliance, a global initiative specifically for patients with NETs, their caregivers and healthcare professionals. A key offering is My NET Manager patient app, the first mobile app designed especially for people with NETs. It is also one of the first mobile apps to be successfully executed by Novartis Oncology, paving the way for other digital patient-focused solutions for the company.

My NET Manager enables patients to record changes in symptoms and track the different tests and doctors they typically need to see. The ability to easily input and access information is convenient and encourages engagement. The app has been downloaded from iTunes more than 7,700 times as of March 2013, and feedback attests to how the app helps ease the organizational burden and facilitate meaningful communication between doctor and patient.

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