Chapter 20
The Rise and Rise of Digital Pharma
It has never been easier to find health information online. Be that via patient-oriented websites, NHS Online sources, user-generated forum content or a range of health, disease awareness and fitness applications available for mobile devices.
Healthcare professionals are increasingly using platforms such as doctors.net to communicate with each other and receive intelligence and share information about disease awareness and medicines in a more social and collaborative manner.
2012 saw the first mobile health app registered and regulated as a medical device in the UK, providing a strong indication that digital health tools are growing up. So what can healthcare organizations do to incorporate social platforms and digital tools into their campaign armoury and truly begin to benefit patient health outcomes?
The global healthcare landscape
Worldwide, governments aim to deliver effective, safe and affordable healthcare to their people with increasingly effective outcomes. And the budgets this sector attracts are not small change either from a political spend perspective or a PR perspective. In 2011169 the World Health Organization (WHO) expected a global annual spend on healthcare to reach US$6 trillion and over the last 50 years, healthcare spend has outpaced GDP growth by about 2% a year. There are, says McKinsey, few signs that this trend will slow.
New approaches such as digital and mobile health, remote medicine delivery, ...
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