Tag: healthcare

Pharma Brands Can Now Target Households With Mobile Ads

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Mobile ad firm 4INFO is teaming up with healthcare marketing analytics provider Crossix to help pharma brands more effectively deliver and measure their mobile ads. With this new partnership, healthcare marketers can now combine Crossix’s predictive data models and 4INFO’s ability to target mobile ads on a household level to identify and engage with relevant health consumers on their mobile devices.

Crossix developed the data models by using third party data such as over-the-counter drug purchases using loyalty cards, medical claims data indicating a doctor visit, and information from retail pharmacies showing prescription refills. No actual medical data that would identify an individual as having a specific disease or condition was used in the process, according to the company.

What Pharma Brands Need To Do
Due to HIPAA rules that prohibit the use of personal health information for media targeting purposes, pharma marketers have long struggled with the challenge of reaching their target audiences. However, since the data models developed by Crossix do not involve an individual’s actual health data for media targeting purposes, this partnership may have opened the doors for pharma brands to enjoy the ad targeting perks that others have been enjoying for a while. With the growth in mobile usage and advances in ad tech, pharma brands looking to improve their ad effectiveness can consider using the new ad products those two companies now offer.

 

Source: AdAge

UberHEALTH And Pager To Push Healthcare Into On-Demand Economy

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Popular ride-hailing app Uber is expanding into new territory as it tested delivering flu-shots on demand. As part of its UberHEALTH project, the company started dispatching flu-shots with its fleet of Uber drivers in 35 cities – including New York, Chicago, and Boston – for 4 hours on Thursday, when “UberHEALTH” was listed as one of the options at the bottom of the Uber app. It offered Uber users a chance to get a wellness pack for $10, and a registered nurse will come along to give flu shots to up to 10 people. The wellness pack included several trinkets, such as a water bottle and hand sanitizer. Earlier this week, Uber announced a new partnership with Practo, an app that lets users in India and some Southeastern Asian markets book medical appointments and request an Uber to travel to them.

What Brands Need To Do
This is not the first time someone has tried to revolutionize the healthcare industry with an on-demand model. Pager, for example, is a mobile-based healthcare service connecting patients with healthcare professionals on demand. Launched in New York City in May, 2014, the startup recently expanded its service to San Francisco and inked a deal with Walgreens to reach more patients through Walgreen’s website. As more and more services become available through on-demand platforms, healthcare and pharmaceutical brands should consider moving into the space to make their services and products more easily accessible and readily available, through either developing their own on-demand services or partnering with existing services.

 

Source: BuzzFeed

Event Recap: Disctrict CoWork NYC DistrictPitch Event

Posted on by Ben Hone

On October 1st, the Lab attended DistrictPitch, an event organized by District CoWork where select startups pitch their business to a panel of investors. There were a number of interesting companies on display with real marketing implications. Here are some highlights from the event.

The first to present was OKMyOutfit, an on-demand personal shopping service that charges members a monthly subscription. Users receive a consultation from a team of stylists to identify their style preferences and make more informed purchase decisions. OKMyOutfit has a partnership with the Hudson Bay Companies to offer their products and there is certainly an opportunity for other retail brands to get onboard and become providers.

The next company to present was Bluebook Academy, an education service aiming to accurately link training to occupation. As a student works their way through a curriculum, their skills and weaknesses are identified and matched to appropriate career paths. This type of guidance is often lacking in the education industry and could help guide students based on strengths and passions.

Next up to the podium was TOP Docs, a collaboration tool for teams working on a project remotely. Picture how frustrating it is to constantly have to download and save different versions of the same document because some teammates are using Google Docs and others are using Dropbox. TOP Docs allows users who are using different cloud-based storage platforms to perform real-time edits on the same file and automatically saves back to the original platform’s format. It is accessed as a freemium model on mobile and web, iOS and Android.

The following company, CareConnectors, is a health care communication platform for doctors and patients. Too often, patients leave care facilities with limited understanding of their own conditions. The platform provides patients with easy-to-understand diagnoses and prescriptions so they increase their understanding of their own personal health. The platform can also be used for peer-to-peer communications between health care providers so an individual’s treatment is uniform and streamlined.

The second-to-last business to present was eDivv, a secondary market for consumers to buy, sell, and barter beauty products. When someone has extra product that they know they will not use, they can connect to the community to trade or sell. The site includes forums, blogs, and messaging in order to connect its members. From a brand perspective, eDivv is collecting data from their community, while also offering native advertising and branded product trials.

Finally, Measurence took the stage to present their offline analytics platform for brick and mortar retailers. They are able to leverage WiFi, bluetooth, or beacons to connect to a customer’s mobile device in order to track their in-store location, dwell times, and conversion to purchase. They launched in November of 2014 and have a partnership with Square to link purchase behavior. Measurence does not build its own hardware but they are working on an Apple Watch app for the store manager to access an analytics dashboard in real time.

The DistrictPitch event showcased an array of ventures that are tackling solutions across many industries. From retail to healthcare, these entrepreneurs showcased their intelligence and ingenuity.

 

How A Health Insurance Is Using Wearable Data To Motivate Its Customers

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
CSS, one of Switzerland’s biggest health insurers, is testing a pilot program to incentivize or, depending on your perspective, penalize its customers based on fitness data. Launched in July, the program tracks the movements of 2,000 volunteers on a daily basis using digital pedometers. The goal is to better calibrate insurance rates based on individual data. Currently, the monitoring can only legally be used on supplementary insurance, but the company reportedly would like to expand it as part of the Switzerland’s mandatory basic coverage.

What Brands Should Do
Fitness trackers and the quantified self movement have grown in tandem, which in turn, generate a vast amount of health data that the healthcare industry can use to improve their service. In fact, CSS is not the first insurance company to utilize fitness data: Oscar Insurance launched a similar test program in the US last year. The company gave away Misfit fitness trackers and rewarded users with Amazon gift cards based on their personal stats. Besides insurers, more healthcare companies should figure out how, within legal bounds, to incorporate fitness data into their incentive programs or even penalization, in order to provide more personalized and calibrated services, understand their customers, and manage risks.

 

Source: Quartz

CVS Taps Into IBM’s Watson For Smart Health Monitoring

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
CVS Health has announced a new partnership with IBM to tap into its Watson computing system to help analyze and interpret health data from patient’s health records, pharmacy information and other resources. The goal is said to be leveraging Watson’s cognitive computing power to aid CVS Health nurses and pharmacists, as well as improving healthcare management and prevention for patients with chronic diseases.

What Brands Should Do
For heathcare and pharmaceutical brands, it has become increasingly crucial to keep up with the new opportunities that technologies, especially advances in mobile devices and biometric sensors, presents. Apple recently gave the go ahead to for-profit use of its ResearchKit, which can be utilized to scale data acquisition and facilitate medical trials. For brands of all types, it’d be smart to look into the cognitive capability of Watson and other machine learning services, which can provide new solutions in analyzing and understanding customer data.

 

Source: TechCrunch

Fast Forward: How You Can Use Apple’s ResearchKit For Better Clinical Data

Posted on by Lab Team

Your guide to tech-driven changes in the media landscape by IPG Media Lab. A fast read for you and a forward for your clients and team.

  • Apple gives the go ahead to for-profit use of ResearchKit
  • Increase study population sizes by multiple orders of magnitude
  • Create an iOS app that taps into iPhone and Apple Watch sensors like step counts, calorie use, and heart rates to get started

What Happened
Apple’s ResearchKit is a new open-source software framework that helps the medical community gather research data from iPhone users. Although it was initially intended for, and has been widely used in universities and other non-profit medical institutions, now two pharmaceutical companies – GlaxoSmithKline and Purdue Pharma – are starting to integrate ResearchKit in a for-profit endeavor, according to Buzzfeed.

What This Means For Pharma Brands
In order to use ResearchKit, the first step is to develop an iOS app that taps into the biometric data that will help you understand people’s lives and drug efficacy. Surveying users with questions at least daily is encouraged. The data available continuously include daily step counts, calorie use, and heart rates. Future hardware generations are likely to add to these. The requirements to tap into the data are:

  • oversight by an independent ethics review board,
  • explicit disclosure of the data being gathered, and
  • getting a participant signature of informed consent.


Market Impact
Since Apple unveiled ResearchKit back in March, medical researchers have been using the tools to create apps to aid studies on treating various common diseases such as diabetes and asthma. A Stanford University cardiovascular study, one of the first uses of the program, had more than 11,000 participants sign up in less than 24 hours, a population size that the director of the study said would normally take a year and coordination across 50 facilities around the country.

As far as opening the platform to for-profit ventures, Jeff Williams, Apple’s senior vice president of operations, told Buzzfeed, “We’re open to working with anybody that is going to make an impact on people’s health. So we’ve made ResearchKit open-source so Apple won’t even control who uses it. We will control what we put on our App Store, but we won’t control who uses it.” This opportunity doesn’t replace anything comparable. It opens a new world of possibility for the types of information and health data that can be learned with the sensors that hundreds of millions of people around the world carry with them in the waking lives. Its scale and usefulness will only expand as more and more sensors are added to Apple’s ecosystem.

For More Information
Please contact Engagement Director Samantha Holland ([email protected]) at the IPG Media Lab if you would like more detail or to schedule a visit to the Lab.

For previous editions of Fast Forward, please visit ipglab.com. Please reply with any constructive criticism or feedback. We want these to be as useful as possible for you and your clients, and your feedback will help us immensely.

Header image courtesy of Apple’s ResearchKit Page

 

Your Next Medical Trial Could Be Carried Out On iPhones

Posted on by Lab Team

St. Jude Medical announced earlier this week that its new wireless spinal cord stimulation trial system has been approved by the FDA. The system uses Bluetooth and pairs with iOS devices to provide control to the patient and doctor. The St. Paul, Minnesota-based hospital is among the first to incorporate mobile technology into medical treatments, and with Apple making a push into medical and healthcare field with HealthKit and ResearchKit, we expect mobile devices to be further integrated into medical practices.

Source: 9to5Mac

Event Recap: WeWork Labs Med-Tech Demo Day

Posted on by Angel Mendozza

The past month has been a busy one for the IPG Media Lab. Despite the behind-the-scene activities, the Lab managed to attend Tuesday’s WeWork Labs Med-Tech Demo Day. The demo day was a Shark Tank-style event led by Merck’s own Jaime Melendez along with leaders from Sharecare, Sherpaa, and Milestone Venture Partners. The event also featured six of New York’s most exciting medical-tech startups:

  • Develop Link: is a data-driven platform providing healthcare infrastructure to developing worlds.
  • Healogram: is simplifying healthcare monitoring through more efficient recovery tracking and analytics.  
  • Motesque: is tracking daily movement to better prevent and diagnose injuries. 
  • DICOM Grid: is a diagnostic imaging management and exchange.
  • Healthify: is building healthcare infrastructure for vulnerable populations.
  • Voyager Med: is connecting patients to medical providers around the US.

Each presenter only had three minutes to pitch their business, followed by a four-minute Q&A. In classic fashion the judges were relentless, firing questions to learn more about their growth strategy, business model, defensibility, current challenges, etc. When the dust settled, both Develop Link and Healogram emerged as winners by the judges’ votes.

At the end of the day, The WeWork Labs Med-Tech Demo Day was an extremely successful event. The presenters had opportunity to pitch to thought leaders within the Med-Tech community, and the audience learned about exciting advancements in the medical industry and how it’s reshaping the paradigm of traditional medical care.

Why More Hospitals Should Get Into eHealth

Posted on by Lab Team

Read the original story on: MobiHealthNews

New Jersey hospital Morristown Medical Center recently opened up an on-site eHealth store that focuses on health app and wearables. Dubbed HealtheConnect, the physical store aims to encourage patients, family members, and medical professionals learn about health apps and wearable devices. While the store is currently backed by the hospital’s foundation, the hospital claims that its longterm plan is to transition it into a standalone operation and revenue stream over next year.

Uber Experiments With On-Demand Healthcare

Posted on by Lab Team

Read original story on: Engadget

After experimenting with picnic baskets and grocery delivery, Uber is now introducing a pilot program named UberHealth that looks to leverage Uber’s logistical power into on-demand health services, starting with the flu shots. Users in Boston, Washington DC or New York City can order an on-demand flu shot to be delivered and administered by what Uber refers to as “roaming nurses.” Maybe in the near future, Uber can do more for healthcare like bringing doctors straight to the doorsteps of bedridden patients.