3 articles in 10 minutes from the Health team

By Hannah Potter , Head of Health UK?

As specialists in the health and pharma sector, keeping up to date with the latest news, regulatory updates, research and trends is a vital part of our work.??

A few things piqued our interest recently, so here are 3 articles worth taking 10 minutes to read:?

1 / Why I’m uncomfortable with healthcare marketing’s obsession with ‘patients’??

Read it online here.?

Frankie Everson , Co-Founder and Head Of Strategy at Atomic Matter shares her new personal perspective on the use of the term ‘patient’ as someone who recently experienced acute illness. ?

What caught our interest?

This piece really resonated with us as patient-centricity is integral to everything we do. But should we reconsider some of the language we use? ?

In the piece, Emily writes: “There is a huge chasm between what we think we know as healthcare marketers and what we actually know about the experiences of people living with illness. For an industry where humanity should be at the very heart of what we do, there’s a startling lack of empathy.”?

The importance of empathy in patient care and decision-making threads through the work we do. Within project work, we use our 'Empathy Map' tool to help encourage seeing the world through other people’s eyes. ?

A key idea behind this tool is helping organisations see ‘patients’ in the full complexity of their existence as people – not just as patients. ?

As Emily says “It’s time to stop the sense of detachment that so often plagues our industry and to put humanity back into healthcare.”?

If you’re attending the EPHMRA conference next month, you can hear me alongside Lucy Mitchell ACMA/BSc ??♀? from Jazz Pharmaceuticals speak about our paper on this topic: 'Applying a ‘Human’ Approach to Strategy Development - co-creating a road map for Parallel session customer engagement’.

2 / Ogilvy creates health influencer unit to fight social media misinformation?

Read it online here.?

We know that health influencers have seen a dramatic rise in recent years (in fact we wrote about it in 2022), but how many of them could be sharing potentially damaging misinformation?

As healthcare systems remain under pressure, and with GP appointments hard to come by in some countries, more people are turning to social media for research and answers.

Ogilvy’s new team sees a role for agencies to help organisations navigate this emerging world.?

What caught our interest?

The challenge for health and pharma is in using this trend to battle medical misinformation and build positive brand stories.??

“Ogilvy PR’s head of influence, Rahul Titus has called health the ‘new frontier’ in marketing, with the agency’s new unit set to include a range of influencers who are health specialists, expert patients and celebrity medics.?

These influencers will then look to help users check diagnoses or spot symptoms. They will at all times need to clearly state within their content whether they are being paid by a pharmaceutical company.”?

As pharma companies continue to get on board with influencer marketing, what impact might this have on research, insights and innovation? How vital will this approach be for reaching both patients and HCPs? We expect to see much more inter-agency collaboration in the future so clients and agencies should be ready for joined up-working with health marketing agencies.??

3 / Interview with economist and author Emily Oster?

Read it online here. ?

Whether you work in the health sector or not you may be familiar with economist (and parent) Emily Oster, who made waves over a decade ago with her first book Expecting Better in which she used data and statistical analysis to challenge the tropes, myths, old wives’ tales and often strongly held beliefs around pregnancy. The book offered a fresh perspective to those wading through countless opinions, not only online, but also amongst friends and family.?

Her new book The Unexpected: Navigating Pregnancy During and After Complications deals with uncertainty, loss and grief which are sadly a common part of the pregnancy journey and experience. ?

In the interview with New York Magazine, Emily discusses the impact of her writing and her data-led approach.??

What caught our interest?

Oster talks about the importance of recognising gaps in data and understanding as a way to spark conversations and influence decision-making. She cites the fact that 50 percent of stillbirths have unknown causes as an example:?

There is absolutely a sense in which I see the call to action of this book as, “Let’s understand this better.” Let’s talk about it more. Let’s recognize that one of the reasons we talk about it more is so people will think, “That seems important. That’s something people are talking about. We should give funding to that. That’s a problem that people would want us to solve.”?

Women’s health is a subject many at Incite are passionate about ?- read more here from our recent series on the topic – so we applaud people like Emily Oster for bringing it to the forefront with a data-driven approach contributing to the discourse.?

And there’s also a more general point: highlighting the things we don’t know, especially in sensitive areas, is often as important as sharing what we do know.??