Core Nation Rants

US healthcare and pharmaceutical online advertising spending on direct-to-consumer (DTC) and over-the-counter remedies will reach $1 billion by the end of 2010. This represents an increase of 10.6% over last year according to eMarketer’s latest report, “DTC Pharmaceutical Marketing Online: A Slow Shift to Digital.” By 2014, the study predicts, online ad spending should reach $1.52 billion. A closer look reveals some very interesting trends. Healthcare and pharmaceutical ads found on search engine sites ...

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Author: Mandy Graziani

Would you want to know that you were genetically predisposed to developing a disease or condition for which we today have no cure, nor any real therapeutic course of management? This is a question more and more of us will need to answer. Science and medicine are moving so quickly today that we are now at the crossroads where diagnostics can begin to out-pace therapy. My colleague and fellow CoreNationRant-er Ken Kramer asked me recently ...

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Author: Ken Ribotsky

Eli Lilly announced on August 18 that it was ending its large clinical trials of the drug semagacestat in patients with mild-to-moderate Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Semagacestat is a drug that inhibits the activity of the enzyme gamma secretase. Gamma secretase catalyzes the processing of beta amyloid, a protein that slowly accumulates in the brains of patients with AD. The beta amyloid hypothesis of AD has been a guiding force in the search ...

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Author: Ken Kramer, PhD

Medicare and other payers are developing programs to reward physicians and institutions for clinical benchmarks for patient outcomes, marking a paradigm shift from visit-based, individual patient service to collective population management. These programs are known as “pay for performance,” or “P4P,” and their clinical benchmarks vary slightly among different payer programs, but overall they are all fairly similar. With more payers embracing this approach, physicians are looking into ways to help them manage and excel ...

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Author: Devon Malecki, MD

Advertising Age reported late last month a new study that indicates brands are irrelevant on Twitter. The problem may lie with how most marketers are using Twitter, that is, as a “broadcast medium” rather than a forum for conversation: “…only 1% of consumer tweets that mention a brand are part of an active conversation with that brand, meaning marketers are, for the most part, conducting one-way conversations — the opposite of the way consumers often use ...

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Author: Jennifer Philburn

We’re seeing a tremendous uptick in physicians who use PDAs and smartphones. According to recent data from Manhattan Research, 64% of U.S. physicians use a smartphone, and 70% rely heavily on data accessed from their mobile device to make clinical decisions. More than 6,000 apps are now available in the Apple iTunes store alone, and SDI reports that 95% of physicians who own smartphones are saying, “I’ve got a medical app for that.” ...

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Author: Mandy Graziani

I would like to engage you in a little theater of the mind. Let us imagine that an anonymous donor has bequeathed $10 billion for research into 1 of 3 therapeutic areas. Moreover, this donor orders that the entire grant goes to the disease state that receives the most votes from a nationwide Internet poll. The 3 candidate illnesses are: Obesity Addiction Lung cancer Without ever conducting this poll, I am reasonably certain that the results would be overwhelmingly ...

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Author: Ken Kramer, PhD

Ironically, good communication is not always the strongest suit of those working in the communications industry. Communication is where all trust and relationships begin both in your personal as well as in your professional life. So how is it that “experts” in communication can sometimes be poor communicators? I believe the biggest reason is the inability to listen, which is paramount in our customer relations and service-oriented business. It sounds simple and logical enough, but ...

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Author: Devon Malecki, MD

I am currently reading the book Switch by the Heath brothers. I think it is a brilliant account of what drives us all to make decisions big and small. I am so thankful to the boys for providing an easy and clear explanation for what I have been ranting about with clients for years: everyone makes decisions based on emotions that are somehow steered by logic. Another important point the Heath brothers make ...

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Author: Ken Ribotsky

How often do we underestimate the power of social norms? Let’s face it, just like many animals, humans learn by imitating the behaviors they observe, and they continue this learning process through adulthood. Modeling, if you will, is widely accepted, even by us corporate types. Modeling is one of the pillars of sales training. By watching and imitating others, we learn to act in ways that make us effective at activities such as sales, surgery, ...

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Author: Ken Ribotsky