Webinar: Digital HCP voices in lung cancer

Using HCP social media insights healthcare companies can gain an in-depth understanding of their customers to answer key business questions and keep ahead of online trends to inform strategic activities across the year.  By realising your HCPs’ concerns you can provide solutions to their unmet needs. Tracking their digital engagement around events or campaigns allows for learning to support marketing planning and strategies for the future.

In healthcare, social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Sermo, and TikTok are valuable resources allowing doctors, students, and healthcare professionals (HCPs) to connect with both their peers and the general public on a global scale. More and more HCPs are using social media platforms to have open, honest discussions with their peers regarding their experiences with patient cases and various therapies, as well as to voice their needs and opinions.

With the use of social media in healthcare comes a number of risks — the main limitation of health information found on social media being the lack of quality and reliability. Specifically, for HCPs, they have the same legal and ethical obligations to their patients on social media as they would anywhere else, including maintaining confidentiality and anonymity, no matter the intended audience. Furthermore, social media can blur the lines between personal and professional, and it is important for HCPs to maintain that professional boundary not only with their patients but the general public too.

#MedTwitter is great tool to keep up to date with latest developments in the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries, to pose questions to fellow HCPs regarding patient cases, to raise an influential voice in the fight against medical misinformation being shared with the public, and to start conversations on various opinions and views of the newest product launches.

Social media gives you a good overview of a wider audience than maybe a focused group of say 25 HCPs. It also shows you their unprompted conversations which is something that you do not get from traditional market research. Though the average age of active HCPs on social media may be in the younger bracket since these guys are “digital natives”, we are seeing pharma help their KOLs get online by partnering them with DOLs, and more of the older HCPs are begin to see the benefits of connecting to their peers online.