Pharma companies are perhaps most well-known for cheesy TV ads where the lists of side effects is longer than the medicines’ actual descriptions. It may feel like these companies have not changed anything about their marketing strategies in decades. That said, more and more pharma companies are finding ways to connect with potential or existing patients digitally through mobile health apps. Apps can help patients learn about their disease, monitor their symptoms and explore potential interventions. For patients already on a specific treatment, apps can augment patient experience, improve patient compliance on therapy and possibly help them seek payment assistance.
Overall, these apps provide valuable data to drug developers and drastically narrow the population that they need to target their marketing towards. However, the majority of health apps independently developed by pharma companies have had mediocre success, primarily because they are poorly developed and simply do not attract enough patients to reach useful scale. No one needs yet another app just for medication reminders and, most definitely, not a separate app for each different medication.
But what about tacking on to an existing app that patients already use? Companies that have partnered with a health app or medical device that already has a strong user base have seen far better success. For instance, Novo Nordisk is working with diet management app Noom to market its weight loss drug and Pfizer has created an app in conjunction with device maker Striiv for hemophilia patients. We will likely see more similar partnerships arise in the near future and you can bet that every health app from Fitbit to WeightWatchers will eventually be selling aggregated data to healthcare companies. This is still very much an evolving space and certainly raises questions about patient data protection but, as a silver lining, the shift to digital might mean that we’ll all have fewer awful TV drug ads to endure.
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