Thursday, April 22, 2010

Strength in numbers -Making Crowdsourcing part of your digital strategy can yield a treasure trove of actionable up-to-the minute corporate data

This is a post that was written for www.communiquelive.com/features

Strength in numbers -Making Crowdsourcing part of your digital strategy can yield a treasure trove of actionable up-to-the minute corporate data.

Evenus, thought to be Socrates’s poetry instructor, is often quoted as having said: “The crowd gives the leader new strength.” This has never been truer today. Non-profit organizations, companies and governments that heed his advice and try to harness the power of the crowds will emerge as the next generation’s leaders.

It is important to begin with a basic understanding of what ‘crowdsourcing’ really is. We will then focus on some of the current trends and look more specifically at how the healthcare sector could benefit tremendously from this approach.

Jeff Howe, the person credited with coining the term and author of the book Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business, talks about four types of crowdsourcing: collective intelligence, crowdcreation, voting and crowdfunding.

• Collective intelligence essentially means that if two brains are smarter than one, then 1,000 brains should be infinitely smarter still

• Crowdcreation is submitting creative ideas to crowds and selecting the best idea or presentation

• Voting, as in political voting, is the same process used to make decisions on every­thing from improvement ideas to ‘best recommendations’ on diets

• Crowdfunding is the crowd deciding to fund a purchase or collectively financing a social cause.

Opting in

In the digital era, with the advent of new technologies like Google’s Sidewiki (beta launched September 2009), companies are now subject to crowdsourced content and opinions whether they are even aware of this or even participate in the process or not.

By making the decision to participate in the crowdsourcing process and putting in place mechanisms and personnel to manage this and reward the crowds, companies are exposed to a wealth of information. This treasure trove of actionable, up-to-the minute corporate data could be the holy grail of businesses that recognize the need and currently pay for market research projects, clinical trials, product develop­ment ideation or process re-engineering.

From the perspective of having up-to-date information on customers, markets and research data, it is no longer necessary to rely on last year’s studies or clinical trials.

These new ‘key opinion leaders’, brand champions or tribal chiefs are ready, willing and able to participate in these processes right along with you. And they probably already are, whether you choose to listen and participate or not. By taking the time to get involved with your crowds and tribes, you’ll benefit from a reiterative process.

Emma Johnson, the award-winning business journalist, quotes Howe in a recent article about crowdsourcing on the business website Entrepreneur.com: “Increasingly, customers expect to have a say in the products they consume – especially Gen Yers, who’ve grown up in an age of Amazon.com reviews and YouTube.

Anyone under the age of 25 doesn’t need to read my book – they live it.” Howe also says: “And anyone dealing with that demographic as vendors needs to under­stand that world.”

Multiple benefits

So how can the health sector benefit from this powerful process?

Every day, healthcare websites are popping up and offering various crowdsourcing options for patients and caregivers, doctors and pharmaceutical companies, federal, state and local governments. It’s becoming such a movement that even payers and non-profits are getting involved. The importance of crowdsourcing is becoming abundantly clear. It can benefit all that are involved on all sides of the paradigm.

Many innovative uses are turning the power of one into a power for all. Sites such as Flutrackr or Google’s FluTrends use crowdsourced data to, in one case, track flu outbreaks and the other, to estimate flu trends. Both models have fantastic uses in a number of healthcare situations. For retail focus, doctors could stock up for likely demand; for pharma companies, plant production could be increased, and for federal, state or local governments, the need to anticipate school closures or to stock up on necessary equipment such as facemasks is easy to predict.

Patients can now access websites that allow them to connect on a disease category or on a caregiver basis such as 23andMe.com. This is a personal testing site for which you can perform a comprehensive at-home DNA test by swabbing your mouth and sending it in for results on if you are likely to experi­ence more than 100 conditions including heart attack and cancer. 23andMe.com is in a position to crowdsource genome research and is doing so on an aggregated basis for Parkinson’s and pre-eclampsia.

Want to comment on healthcare reform? There are websites that ask the crowd to help address healthcare reform issues. Makingmedicinesmarter.org is a new website from Medco that invites comments from visitors about reducing healthcare costs and expanding coverage.

One crowdsourcing tool that intrigues me is the Pharmer’s Market. The New York Times recently cited this online prediction market in the article Seeking a Shorter Path to New Drugs. Pharmer’s Market uses crowdsourcing to predict the success of a drug. The tool was developed by the combined efforts of a small team from the Sloan School of Management at MIT and Harvard Business School. This online market invites drug industry experts, such as biomedical researchers, to anony­mously bet, using virtual dollars, on the possibility that specific breast cancer drugs, undergoing clinical trials, will meet failure or success.

Ragu Bharadwaj, one of the creators of Pharmer’s Market when he was an MIT graduate student, explained the value of the betting: researchers can evaluate whether the collective intelligence derived from the experts may serve as a handy predictive tool for drug companies.

Crowdsourcing and the FDA

Having seen how some major pharma companies and insurers are actively involved and engaging in this new space, let’s take a look at some possibilities for the federal government.

The FDA has been making a lot of noise recently about many things. Among the most recent newsworthy events involving the FDA, which monitors both food and drug safety issues, was a peanut butter recall. Director of FDA web communications, Sanjay Koyani, and his team did a remarkable job with the dissemination of information to consumers and professionals around the peanut butter recall and the affected products.

Koyani‘s team have become prolific users of Twitter and other social media tools to communicate directly with professionals and the general public. This has produced remarkable results both in terms of the speed of disseminating information and educating the public on an issue. Equally notable was the effort on the part of many citizens to aid in the dissemination of this information and to ‘pick up the torch’ on behalf of the FDA in informing and educating citizens. Thus, social media and crowdsourced pres­entations demonstrating again how it can achieve its goals.

Koyani and the FDA deserve to be commended for wholeheartedly embracing the power of digital communications to accomplish their outreach and educational goals in a much more timely fashion that ultimately results in professionals and citizens who are more quickly informed and better educated. Koyani was quick to point out that the direction of Aneesh Chopra, the first US Federal chief technology officer, has been instrumental in encouraging govern­ment agencies to do so.

Is it time for the FDA to do more and go the extra mile for the benefit of professionals, citizens and corporations that fall under its purview? With the advent of digital tech­nology and crowdsourcing, it is now possible for the FDA to play a proactive role in the recognition of drug and food issues.

It is entirely possible that we would have an FDA that is better informed and able to deal with these issues as they are gestating and before they reach the local or even national level.

Building on its fine experience in distri-buting important information, the FDA could begin to actively engage in the dialogue and collection of relevant data on a much larger scale. Reviewing crowdsourcing tools such as Flutrackr and Google’s health, it is hard not to imagine a world where our federal agencies could become proactive in managing and averting public dangers.

For years we have heard about ‘chatter’, mostly from our intelligence and military organizations. Chatter could very well be used to make us more intelligent about matters of public health regarding both drug and food safety, helping to both anticipate and collect data on potential public dangers.

Having seen the clear benefits of crowd­sourcing in healthcare, I hope you too believe in its benefits and become its champion.

www.communiquelive.com/features



Sustainable Digital Strategy for the Pharmaceutical Industry

The Medium Term Impact of Digital and Social Media on the Pharmaceutical Industry

Having attended two conferences recently, one about e-pharma and the other about e-clinical trials, I heard many great presentations that inspired the direction and some of the content included in this article. The first presentation of note was from Chris Andersen, Editor in Chief of Wired Magazine and bestselling author of two fantastic books: The Long Tail: The Future of Business is Selling Less of More, and Free: The Future of a Radical Price. The second presentation was by Thomas Senderovitz MD, FCP and Senior Vice President of Global Clinical Development at Grunenthal GmbH.

Both presenters addressed the structural issues facing the pharmaceutical industry today and in the next five years. Chris presented mass market examples, including one from the music industry. The music industry has historically been based on the blockbuster big hit model, which mirrors the blockbuster drug model of the pharmaceutical industry. In the last few years, the music industry’s model has been forced to change. That change- a structural shift to the long tail-- was driven, in part, by low barriers to entry, low costs of delivery and moving towards a model that is much more tailored to its target audiences. The industry’s new model has more molecules targeted at smaller populations. In the old model, we listened to music in the car or at home on CD players. With the invention of the iPod and other mp3 players, we can now listen to music wherever we are and search out and download the music that we want to hear.

Structurally, Pharma will be faced with a similar dilemma. Those that make an effort to adapt will be successful long term player. One strategy will be to move towards a model targeted at niche audiences. The clinical trial community predicts we will see the emergence of personalized medicine in five to ten years time.

Tom’s presentation looked at other strategies including ways in which Pharma could be more efficient in its pipeline development by using computer modeling and the wisdom of crowds. He also discussed how the changing landscape, and particularly social media, is affecting Pharma’s pipeline. Making use of available social media tools holds obvious benefits for Pharma. Sites like curetogether.com and patientslikeme.com, where patients are revealing the most intimate details of their personal health, can be used to find cures and crowd source valuable data. Big Pharma is already involved-on a test basis- in these endeavors. This is a trend that will only continue as the real potential for companies’ pipelines and R+D become clear. As Chris argued, the large patient populations online more than make up for the lack of clinical settings.

Knowing about these structural market pressures and recognizing the US (and NZ) specific DTC model, what can Pharma do in the digital and social media spaces? Having attended the FDA’s Part 15 hearings on the use of social media last year, I noticed three common themes: (1) that there is an overabundance of medical information on the Internet and in social media channels, (2) that both patients and doctors were using the Web to find and discuss this medical information, and (3) that there is a need for trusted sources in the space to provide content that is current and accurate. Pharma is uniquely positioned to work with patient groups to provide that content. No one else knows molecules or therapeutic categories better. Pharma has an abundance of non-confidential information that would be invaluable to the very audiences and markets they serve. Making this content available, either directly on a non-branded basis like Novartis’ CML Earth (A patient meeting place for those suffering from Chronic Myeloid Leukemia) outreaches or by working with a patient association to provide the content, is a huge opportunity for Pharma to demonstrate thought leadership. As an added bonus, it allows Pharma to directly serve the communities they depend on for market share. There is already information out there about products and patients are already discussing the drugs that are on the market. It is important this online discussion be an educated conversation with the most accurate information available. .

The second thing Pharma can and should be doing now is listening. In every other marketplace, industries are plugged into the online conversation. At a minimum, companies are aware of public opinion, sentiment and the relative share of conversation by their brands versus their competitors. Why has Pharma been so slow to follow suit? The MLR among us will point to a lack of clear regulations and the likelihood of increased AE reporting. For those who are uncomfortable with change, that might be enough to say no to digital projects. The FDA has never provided clear, specific guidance for online interaction and, as a result, Pharma has been left to determine its own policies within the very broad guidelines that the FDA does provide. From a regulatory perspective, it is status quo. The only exception to this confusion is Google’s new pharma advertising model, which resulted from an FDA warning sent to pharmaceutical companies here in the US. The industry responded to that warning, adapted to the new policy direction within six months, and is back to promoting DTC.

Given that pharmaceutical companies at their cores are R+D pipeline and sales/marketing companies, how long can the industry forgo the benefits of the digital space? A valuable opportunity in marketing and research is available now to those companies who are able to adopt these new tools. . Patients want transparent relationships with drug companies. Working in a partnership with patients will reveal the medical information needed to assist a company’s bench clinicians and researchers in their work. The cost effectiveness of portable monitors means that it is only a matter of time before the digital space is an even bigger reality for the pharmaceutical industry. There are already numerous examples of people sharing their data via social media channels such as Twitter and Facebook.

The digital space is an important social trend for the pharmaceutical industry to join. Here in the US, patient data offers valuable input for our American DTC drugs and drug companies pay a handsome price for market research to acquire that data. Why not get it online? In Europe, this same market research provides valuable insight into how to best communicate with prescribing doctors via the channels they are using.

After being in the digital listening phase for a minimum of three months, a pharmaceutical company would then be ready to employ tactical strategies for using social media to send messages to patients and doctors in the US or in Europe. After three months, a company would better understand what channels are needed to effectively and efficiently communicate to target audiences. I think this is the winning strategy for Pharma. What do you think?