What about doing healthcare online?

Within a changing marketplace, successful biomedical companies increasingly are broadening their marketing approaches through online patient education initiatives and internet outreach.

Patients are afterall, becoming much more educated about their healthcare choices in general. Hence, the goal to communicate more directly with today’s self-educating and better-informed healthcare consumers.

This won’t be a trend that will be overlooked in Singapore. Biomedical manufacturing is one of the main drivers behind manufacturing in the republic, boosted by the country’s established electronics and precision engineering industry, and services sectors such as logistics, contract manufacturing and sterilisation services.

Output of Singapore’s biomedical manufacturing cluster surged 111.6% in December 2011 on a year-on-year basis.

Self-educating healthcare consumers want to be sure that they are receiving the absolute best care, which includes the choice of the most effective medications or medical devices. They are increasingly likely to Google a medical device, visit the Web site of its manufacturer, and then ask their physician some questions about it.

They’ll want to know: “Is this product an option for me and, if not, why not? I read about it on a medical blog and it seems to have very good results for patients like me.”

Likewise, people will use the Web to educate themselves about a procedure they may be facing. As a result, companies need exposure for their products and related procedures on those Internet destinations that a curious potential patient might visit. It’s quite different from trying to sell shaving cream or toothpaste by promoting a name brand.

To the degree that they can establish those relationships early, as patients are diagnosed with the condition or new technologies evolve, there is strong potential to create loyal, lifetime customers for biomedical companies. Education-oriented marketing can be an important element in this process.

From the signs that my colleagues at CTPartners and I are seeing, we believe that eventually every area of healthcare will have a component of education – of reaching out to and touching consumers.

The biomedical companies that we are working with for example, are genuinely more interested in raising awareness and in urging consumers to learn than they are in hyping brands. They understand the central importance of this, in a healthcare marketplace that is becoming increasingly sophisticated and better-informed.

Such companies increasingly need to add executives with consumer-marketing backgrounds to their senior management teams to develop push-pull strategies. The “push strategy” relates to communicating directly to physicians. The “pull” strategy involves developing a plan that will pull in consumers who will ask their physicians about a particular product they’ve discovered through their own research.

However, there’s definitely a shortage of substantial talent in Singapore and the rest of Asia who bring the ideal mix of experiences to the table. And it’s tough to go outside the biomedical industry.

If you do that, you generally lose the type of individual who understands what it means to bring products to market under the auspices of FDA approvals and regulations. Companies that will be most successful in finding the right talent are those who partner with a search firm that recognises this important trend and knows how best to respond.  

Gregory J. Lovas is a Partner at CTPartners in Singapore who leads the firm’s Life Sciences Practice in Asia Pacific.

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CTPartners is a leading performance-driven executive search firm serving clients across the globe. Committed to a philosophy of partnering with its clients, CTPartners offers a proven record in C-Suite, senior executive, and board searches, as well as expertise serving private equity and venture capital firms.

With origins dating back to 1980, CTPartners serves clients with a global organization of more than 400 professionals and employees, offering expertise in board advisory services and executive recruiting services in the financial services, life sciences, industrial, professional services, retail and consumer, and technology, media and telecom industries. Headquartered in New York, CTPartners has 23 offices in 15 countries.