conversation is an engine

Where Patient is King/Queen/Parliament

One segment of the healthcare market expecting continued explosive growth is telehealth—so reports Arundhati Parmar in MedCity News. Parmar cited IMS Research which projects 55 percent growth in telemedicine in 2013. Telemedicine covers a wide swath of care, of course: from a simple phone call to email and web-based approaches to a variety of technologies employed in diagnosis and follow-up for everything from minor ailments to chronic and acute care.

Telehealth is inherently interesting for the medical device community in the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro. Each of the big three medical device companies markets some variation on telehealth—especially focused on implanted pacemakers, defibrillators and cardiac resynchronization devices. But in some ways we are quite behind in considering the preferences and patterns of patient communication. For too many years our community has focused on marketing to physicians. But perhaps 2013 will be the year our community wakes to the fact we must talk simply and effectively with a much, much wider group of audiences. As patients continue to grasp the nuances of the power to choose, they will choose to engage with companies with whom they can develop relationships. They will demand clear and succinct information that doesn’t condescend. The days of doing whatever the physician says are quickly coming to an end.

Brand will be an even bigger deal when the patient is king.

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