How the Web is Changing Healthcare Marketing

As we get close to the end of 2009, I think it's important to recognize a particular healthcare marketing milestone. In August of this year Online Media Daily reported the results of a poll that revealed nearly half of consumers go to search engines to research their own medical conditions. This confirms other numbers I've heard recently.

So what does this mean for healthcare marketers? The article makes the point about the need for marketers to add Search to their toolbox, but that's a given. What may be more important is we as healthcare marketing professionals have a challenge ahead of us. We need to move forward cautiously. If we are talking about driving awareness from the patient side, we must also pay close attention to how our intentional or accidental patient marketing effects our marketing to physicians. I think there is a delicate balance that should be maintained between driving inquiries from the client side and making sure physicians have the clinical details and patient outcome information they rely on to make decisions. If we don't we risk alienating them from the brands we manage.

There is also likely to be new regulations that we will need to understand and navigate. Rules for healthecare marketing in Search and social media are being written right now and they will need to address some really big questions like: How can anyone regulate healthcare conversations online? Given that conversations are happening and will happen, what can be a healthcare marketing groups role in that conversation? What are the successful models out there now? ...and... how will all of this change the way we talk about devices and treatments?

This should be a fun and interesting new year and I'm excited about exploring this frontier.