Here’s what the organisers are saying about the event:

Organised by Economist Conferences’, Healthcare in Europe, returning for its second year, will confront the major health challenges facing the continent. You’ll be able to engage in genuine dialogue and discover practical solutions with a high-level group of influential healthcare stakeholders.

Confirmed speakers include:

• Recep Akdağ, Minister for Health, Turkey
• Sir Andrew Dillion, Chief Executive Officer, National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence
• Despina Spanou, Principal Advisor, Directorate General for Health and Consumers, European Commissio’
• Else Smith, Director General, National Board of Health, Denmar
• Peter Kappert, CEO and Chairman, Sonnenhof Swiss Health
• Professor Richard Sullivan, King’s Health Partners Integrated Cancer Centre

For the full speaker line-up visit www.economistconferences.com/europehealth

Here’s what the organisers are saying about the event:

“As the governments around the world continue to increase their scrutiny of major corporations, the pharmaceutical industry is coming under heavy pressure from politicians and regulators who are calling for increased transparency from the industry. Although the Sunshine Act reporting requirements have been pushed back into 2012, all companies are preparing or have already begun disclosing their relationships with healthcare professionals, a bold and often controversial step for this highly competitive industry. On a global scale, European governments are now also calling for similar legislation, with countries such as France and the Netherlands most vocally calling for action. As a result, pharmaceutical companies throughout the world are looking to put their compliance programs in place and push forward with transparency initiatives that will meet and exceed regulatory requirements.

Through a comprehensive blend of regulatory, industry and legal perspectives, this program will deliver on the promise of helping pharmaceutical companies increase their transparency while maintaining highly productive and professional relationships with government authorities and healthcare professionals.

For full details and registration information, visit: q1productions.com/GlobalCompliance“

Here’s what the organisers are saying about the event:

“As the Medical Device Industry has continued to evolve, so has its role and importance of public relations and corporate communications. Various high-profile cases within the industry have required the skills of seasoned PR executives who understand how to best handle any situation and deliver important information without negatively impacting shareholder value for their company. From communicating during product crisis to furthering positive corporate reputation through initiatives aimed at higher levels of corporate social responsibility, the public relations and corporate communications executives have a wide range of ever increasing responsibilities.

Throughout the Medical Device Public Relations and Corporate Communications Conference program, participants will have a variety of opportunities for learning and knowledge share, through case-study and workshop driven presentations, high level keynote sessions, as well as breakout and panel discussions. This program will help to better gauge current communications strategies and bring clarity to PR executives that wish to further their corporate brand through effective and appropriate communication.

For full details and registration information, visit: q1productions.com/MedDevicePR“

Here’s what the organisers are saying about the event:

Join over 1000 people in Barcelona! Seamlessly integrate multi-channel strategies at the 7^th annual eMarketing & Mobile Europe 2012 (March 27-28)

Still the best in Europe:

Boost your network with over 1000 attendees: co-located with SFE Europe 2012 to make the largest commercial excellence pharma event in the world!

Guarantee best-practice: Award-winning case-studies from Merck, Shire-Movetis, Lilly, Pfizer, Novartis, Boehringer-Ingelheim & more in mobile and digital marketing

Meet your customers: Physician and stakeholder panels for a 360 discussion on proven tactics for mobile and digital engagement

Unlock the full potential of mobile: ‘mobile masterclass’ that builds on key the outcomes from our pioneering Mobile strategy conference

See the full brochure and delegate list here: http://bit.ly/AjNnXq

Learn from the best:

Martin Dubuc, Global Head of Multichannel Marketing CoE, Merck

Antonio Ibarra, European Solutions Centre Digital Marketing Lead, Pfizer

Bettina Borga, New Head of Healthcare, Google

John Pugh, Global Head of Online Communications, Boehringer Ingelheim

Fabio Piva, VP Marketing, Bayer

Fergus Boyd, Head of eBusiness, Virgin Atlantic

It was a year in which we have seen the integration of mobile health tools, or ‘mHealth’, as the riches of emerging channels were exploited in Pfizer’s iPhone app; just one of the nominations to have put location-based services to good use. Meanwhile, Roche Diagnostics deepened their relationship with diabetes bloggers to achieve greater levels of engagement than ever before.

In fact, two thirds of our winners this year are commercial healthcare companies who are exploiting digital, social media and mobile channels. Here is proof that the leaders in the pharmaceutical and healthcare industry can no longer be considered to lag behind the rest of the world in their adoption of emerging channels.

But it’s not all about the commercial healthcare industry. As with previous years, we have seen the success of partnerships between commercial and non-commercial organizations. And incredibly, in the year that Google Health was shut down, we’ve seen inspiring engagement taking place in public health services; two of our winners are health services of very different natures, from Swaziland to the UK, both incorporating new channels to transform local healthcare delivery.

Every winner has a unique story to tell, and after interviewing them we’ve told each of their stories in a set of special reports below. I hope you find these inspiring – I have certainly been incredibly inspired as I and the team at Creation Healthcare have researched and analysed the finalists. You might spot some common themes among the experiences of our winners and the lessons they have learned. We’ll explore these themes in future editions of our e-journal, Healthcare Engagement Strategy, and at our special Summit event on 26 June in London.

After months of research and analysis, we have selected six winners who have each pioneered in healthcare engagement over the past year, breaking down barriers and overcoming hurdles to achieve their vision. I am extremely grateful to everybody who sent nominations; to the global team at Creation Healthcare who shared ideas as we reviewed nominations together; and to all finalists who took the time to share their stories with us. Our Healthcare Engagement Strategy 2012 winners are:

AstraZeneca’s #rxsave Twitter chat: Open Dialogue Award
Boehringer Ingelheim Facebook Page: Facing Customers Award
NHS local digital service: Digital Health Services Award
Pfizer ‘Public Restrooms’ iPhone app: Time & Place Award
Roche Diagnostics, Diabetes Care with the Big Blue Test and the diabetes online community: Patient Engagement Award
Swaziland National Malaria Control Programme: Life Changer Award

Winner: AstraZeneca #rxsave Twitter chat

“We thought that using Twitter would help us reach a broader audience of community advocates than through our traditional channels”, says Jen McGovern, AstraZeneca’s Director of Patient Assistance Programs, about a one-hour-long live conversation that AstraZeneca hosted last year in the highly public social media environment of Twitter.

Over the past few years, Twitter, the global social media phenomenon where people exchange public messages, or ‘tweets’, restricted to 140 characters each, has been the subject of much debate as a possible platform for stakeholder engagement by regulated organizations. In the case of pharmaceutical companies, while many have a presence on Twitter, few have proactively invited live conversation in the way that AstraZeneca did in their ‘#rxsave’ Twitter chat about patient prescription programs.

A Twitter ‘chat’ is simply a collection of tweets, grouped by a common set of characters preceded by a ‘#’ hash to form a ‘hashtag’ such as ‘#rxsave’. By grouping these messages together, individual Twitter users can listen to and participate in a ‘conversation’ with each other. When AstraZeneca hosted the #rxsave chat in February 2011, they effectively invited anybody who was interested to join in, and provided some context: the chat was about AstraZeneca’s prescriptions savings programs in the US.

Reaching patients

McGovern says that the Twitter chat was an experiment to find out how useful Twitter might be in reaching patients across the US who are eligible for AstraZeneca’s Program. “We wanted to explore Twitter as another channel to engage with community advocates working with patients who are eligible for our programs”, she says. “From offering patient assistance for more than 30 years, we know that for every patient enrolled in our program, there are many more who are eligible but going without their AZ medicines because they haven’t applied. Eligible patients live in communities in every state, making it a challenge to reach them efficiently and effectively.”

AstraZeneca also saw the chat as an opportunity to hear from patients. “We wanted feedback on how to operate our prescription assistance programs more effectively and efficiently to serve patients”, says McGovern, adding that the company hoped Twitter would help them “…to get more people talking about prescription assistance programs, and to listen to what people had to say about ways that we could reach more eligible patients.”

The chat generated hundreds of tweets from a range of stakeholders with diverse viewpoints. Patients, patient advocacy groups, healthcare professionals, and industry observers joined in the conversation and many more listened in quietly or read the transcript afterwards. Most participants welcomed AstraZeneca’s attempt to engage in an open environment, and as in any public forum, a wide range of views were expressed. The one detractor among over 200 people who used the hashtag failed to put a damper on the constructive conversation.

“The response was overwhelmingly positive and participants provided great recommendations and ideas. There was healthy dialogue between @AstraZenecaUS [AstraZeneca’s US Twitter presence] and patient advocate groups, and information sharing among all participants”, says McGovern.

Breaking new ground in a regulated environment

The challenge of real time open conversation for pharmaceutical companies, and one reason why few have attempted it, is summed up in a tweet from AstraZeneca shortly after the start of the chat: “Re Qs about subject matter, we are unable to discuss meds or disease in 140 characters in realtime given current regulations”. In a sensitive regulatory environment, where pharmaceutical companies are limited in what they can discuss directly with patients, the concept of deliberately engaging in two-way Twitter conversation, asking questions to stimulate a public response, broke new ground.

“In the absence of FDA guidance at the time, we chose a topic where we could have a robust and worthwhile conversation with participants that didn’t get into specific medications or disease states”, says McGovern, who ‘moderated’ the Twitter conversation and led AstraZeneca’s part in it. “As a pharmaceutical company, when we talk about our medications, we also have to talk about their risks and benefits, which is difficult to do in 140 characters.”

The concept of moderating a social media conversation is somewhat limited with Twitter, since the only voice in the conversation that anybody may control is their own. Unlike other social media channels, it is not possible to delete or block any other participant from the conversation, and this is one of the factors that makes Twitter such a risky environment for the unprepared. There is also the challenge of identifying which messages to respond to and doing so in a timely, relevant and regulatory compliant way. “We did experience a high volume of tweets that flowed pretty continuously during the course of the hour.  From an operational standpoint, we found what worked well was to have someone focus on translating the content we wanted to share into the 140-character limit. That freed up one person to read through the tweets and be as responsive to as many as possible without also having to type up the responses”, says McGovern.

McGovern says that the chat was successful in confirming to AstraZeneca its direction regarding working with patient advocates, but that she also hopes the sharing of ideas between participants benefited the people who joined in. “We would like to think those who participated in the chat appreciated seeing the opinions and ideas of others who have an interest in this topic.  The AZ team benefitted from receiving this input.  While many of the ideas and comments put forth were ones that we had considered in the past, or were ones that were outside the scope of our program capabilities or resources, the discussion confirmed some of our thinking about challenges and opportunities for working with advocates as an important channel of information to patients.”

Social media policy

McGovern says that Twitter simply provided a new channel to engage stakeholders who AstraZeneca was already speaking with. “We’ve been engaging with advocates for many years talking about strategies for reaching eligible patients.  Using Twitter was really just a way to expand this ongoing conversation”.

When I asked her what recommendations she would give to others in regulated healthcare organizations who want to engage stakeholders in a real-time social media environment like Twitter, she said that it starts with having a well-communicated social media policy:

1. Have a formal social media policy that aligns your company’s policies and values with the guidance from regulatory agencies such as the FDA.
2. Be clear with all internal and external stakeholders about your social media policy and the ground rules for the social media event.  Let people know what to expect and how to engage.
3. Make sure you are doing this for the right reasons – this needs to be part of a thoughtful communications strategy supporting a specific organizational objective. 

For going where others in your environment had not been before in the pursuit of dialogue with patients, we award AstraZeneca the Healthcare Engagement Strategy 2012 Open Dialogue Award.

“We have enabled our wall for commenting because we want to hear from you!” reads Boehringer Ingelheim’s Facebook page, inviting its 15,000 fans to post public comments on its wall. “Help us to keep this wall interesting by actively contributing…”, it goes on. And according to John Pugh, Head of Online Communications at Boehringer Ingelheim, the page is an attempt to proactively engage people online. “We’re deliberately trying to engage with people… We’re asking questions”, he says.

Boehringer Ingelheim has embraced Facebook as a channel that allows controlled two-way engagement, to facilitate public conversations with individuals. This is new ground in an industry that is highly regulated and where the boundary of acceptable communication differs from country to country. Yet here is a single interface to Boehringer Ingelheim that embraces stakeholders from all over the world, in their own language.

Responding to customers

In a recent post to the company’s Facebook wall, a patient based in Denmark asks about pack sizes for Boehringer Ingelheim’s COPD drug Berodual: “i am using berdual, with the six gun, wondering why those intelligent people with you, make a sixgun, and pacages with only 5 pac ammo ” reads the comment. The dialogue that follows in open comments between Boehringer Ingelheim and the patient includes an explanation from the Denmark office, an apology from the company and an apparently satisfied customer. “Hi thanks, good explanation… have a nice day…” he concludes.

Resourcing the strategy

What kind of resources does it take to run a Facebook page like Boehringer Ingelheim’s? According to Pugh, it takes a team of two, backed up by technology, an agency to handle “crisis situations”, and the company’s 42,000 colleagues. “We use our network; we’ve got 42,000 employees around the world”, he says. “If we get something in Spanish I’ll go and speak with my Spanish colleague, and he’ll whizz it back, but in the future he’ll be able to do it directly so we can start having those local conversations as well”.

The company’s Facebook strategy is supported by a number of tools including social media marketing suite Buddy Media. “We really want this to be a communication channel; our own two-way channel, and not just in English. We’ve just plugged in Buddy Media and are rolling that out across multiple languages – Spanish, German, Italian… So we can start having local conversations in those languages”, says Pugh.

A content partnership with PSFK is helping to broaden the range of health-related content published on the page, ensuring that it does not become merely a corporate communications broadcast channel but includes wider topics about healthcare, patients, and social media.

“We look at Facebook as the centre of our social activities… we have our news and our corporate information, which is great and we encourage feedback, but what I really want to do is widen the funnel more”, Pugh tells me. “Then we can start segmenting who our followers are and start having newsletters with segmented messages.”

This targeting of stakeholders has already been trialled by Boehringer Ingelheim over other social media channels. “On Twitter we’ve been segmenting our followers so we can provide segmented messages… and we want to start doing that on Facebook too. So if we want to do an oncology conference, we can look at who was there last year, what were the topics, and how can we target them. We want to do that with Facebook as well.”

Pugh says that when it came to gaining internal support for the Facebook strategy, the company’s existing experience with other social media channels paved the way. “We’d already overcome the whole discussion about relevance of social media and ROI, because we’d already done so much work on Twitter and YouTube”. Yet despite this, and board-level encouragement to “try new things”, it took a long time to convince the business that Facebook could be used in this way. “I’d been trying to do Facebook for about a year before it came out… The biggest barrier was convincing the business that it wasn’t just a platform where people post personal messages, where friends connect; that it is now a communication channel where you have businesses on there”.

“When we did our 125 year anniversary for Boehringer, that was the hook that I could hang it on”, says Pugh. “We launched a great photo competition around our Corporate Social Responsibility programme called ‘Making More Health’ so we asked our Facebook community, ‘what does Making More Health mean to you?’ and can you express it through a photo. We had around 850 photos coming in, amazing quality, and we chose 50 that we liked and asked people to vote for what their favourite was, and that became the photo of the campaign. We got this amazing photo from the Philippines… there was lots of news around it and then [the Facebook page] just took off”.

Just the beginning

Despite the active engagement taking place on the page, Pugh considers the journey to date to be just the start and seems more interested in what lies ahead. He is almost scornful of what he considers the page’s low number of fans to date. “There’s only 15,000 people on it which I think is pathetic. When we start getting hundreds [of thousands] then it starts to get a bit more compelling and that’s when we’ll segment it, and get the real benefit.”

He says that the current environment is a place to learn how to engage well, before it grows bigger. “We’re still building it at the moment but what we wanted to do was to make sure we build it in the right way. We answer questions, and we try to use it as a customer response tool”.

Pugh hopes that in time, the Facebook page will play a role in changing Boehringer Ingelheim into a more widely patient-focused organization. “If you’re going to be committed to your customers then you need to make it easy for them to get in contact with you. We’re still a long way away from that at Boehringer, but we’re working on it. The more success stories we have, and the less nightmares we get, it can only be compelling…”, he says.

Learning lessons

The path of pharmaceutical social media pioneers is not well-trodden yet, and there are lessons still to be learned. Pugh is open about some of the lessons he has learned from mistakes. “We had a couple of campaigns that didn’t work. Early on I sent out 120 tweets in an hour, that didn’t go down very well”, he says.

Arguably the most significant lesson learned by the Boehringer Ingelheim team was in social media crisis planning. “Certain people had an issue with us and tried to disrupt our wall. They took the argument into places we hadn’t even considered.   At first we were caught by surprise and didn’t know how to deal with it. We didn’t have our process mapped with every conceivable event”, says Pugh. “We have now, thanks to that guy. We tried to address the issue directly but it was complex and in the end we let his posts sit on the wall and asked people not to respond. We decided not to delete it. We sat down with legal and had a rational conversation about it. One person is not going to drag down our Facebook page.”

In fact, Pugh tells me, the case highlighted a point about information that was missing from the public domain and Boehringer Ingelheim took steps to address the balance through other online resources, away from the Facebook page.

Vision, governance, agility and mistakes

When I ask Pugh what advice he would give others who are embarking on a direct social media engagement strategy, he outlines four areas:

1. Vision: “You need to have an inspiring vision”, he says. “Get top-down support; get internal alignment. You need people to get enthusiastic.”
2. Governance: Pugh says that digital governance is essential. “Make sure you have your T’s crossed and I’s dotted when it comes to terms and conditions and internal guidance, governance structures and approvals.”
3. Agility: “You need to be able to make quick decisions and move”, he says. “Keep it small; keep it quick. Don’t try to do things by committee.”
4. Mistakes: In this environment, fear of mistakes might stifle innovation but Pugh says that making mistakes allowed the team to learn fast. “Don’t be afraid to make mistakes. We jumped in feet first, made our mistakes, and learned quickly. What we gained from that was a well-rounded knowledge base.”

Boehringer Ingelheim, for supporting customers in public on Facebook across international, regulated environments, we award you the Healthcare Engagement Strategy 2012 Facing Customers Award.

The NHS local digital service was created and is operated by Maverick Television. According to the company’s Digital Media Director, Jonnie Turpie, the service was inspired by another Maverick production and previous Healthcare Engagement Strategy Awards winner, Embarrasing Bodies, which broke new ground by combining entertainment, rich media and public health in an integrated television and digital experience.

“We’re delivering Embarrasing Bodies to massive public engagement, using [existing UK NHS resources] NHS Choices and NHS Direct as a backstop for quality assured information. Embarrasing Bodies has shown to the NHS that people want to engage with their health online, which allowed us to have a constructive conversation with them about how we could deliver that”, says Turpie.

The NHS local website includes a breadth of rich content about health and healthcare in the West Midlands region of the UK.

Rich content and services

The digital service includes a breadth of rich content about health and healthcare in the region, as well as resources for NHS staff. ‘Near Me’ is a tool allowing citizens to locate their nearest health service by category and is available via the website and a location-based iPhone app.

Turpie explains that each new feature is an opportunity to demonstrate the usefulness of digital engagement to stakeholders. “‘Near Me’ is a simple service but it allows any user to find their nearest hospital, surgery, pharmacy, walk-in centre, online or on their phone. That’s been a bit of a breakthrough for the health service and we’ve encouraged that”, he says.

“And then at Christmas, we published data that’s available internally in the NHS, i.e. pharmacy opening times. The NHS as a whole knows when pharmacies are going to be open. All we’ve done this Christmas is to say ‘here you are’. We did quite a lot of good SEO [search engine optimisation] work to enable us to come top of the search ratings, so if people are in need of a pharmacy quickly on Christmas Day or Boxing Day, they can get it through NHS local. That’s the sort of very useful service that we’re bringing to bear.”

The ‘Near Me’ iPhone app is a location-based service to locate local healthcare providers

A progressive journey of engagement

Carl Plant, Online Community Manager for NHS local, says that most of the progress to date has been around getting people comfortable with new engagement channels. “Over the past year we’ve laid down the foundation of using digital and getting the NHS in the West Midlands to be confident that digital is the way forward”, he says, adding that services continue to be enhanced to serve citizens and NHS staff.

“We’re about to launch an e-learning platform dedicated to developing the workforce, and at the same time we’re going to be launching a service that will enable patients to make more informed choices around where they go for treatment, the clinicians they choose and the types of treatment they choose. We’re enabling patients to understand performance and also to leave their own opinions around their experience of healthcare in the West Midlands”, says Plant.

The move towards greater levels of engagement has been a progressive journey for NHS staff too. “What we’ve found over the past 18 months is that NHS staff are using digital outside of the workplace because that’s part of their daily lives, however integrating that within their working practice has always been a challenge”, says Plant. “So a lot of the work that we have done is to get some of the key people in the SHA [Strategic Health Authority] to actually start using some of these tools and technologies, and then they become advocates of digital.”

Technology and governance

Increasing the level of digital healthcare engagement has been challenging, according to Turpie, because of barriers in the form of both technology and concerns over risk. “It’s not been easy over the past ten years for people to access services, because of a lot of technological issues, but also a lot of risk issues, and quite rightly – health is extremely important to those delivering it and those receiving the services, so you’ve got to get that governance right”, he says, adding that the time invested to put in place robust digital governance policies has simplified the process of engagement for staff.

“We spent quite a lot of time working through a lot of issues, and one of those is around information governance, to make sure that we can be absolutely clear about the information and the engagement that we’re encouraging, but also to make it simpler and that’s one of the things that the staff are finding useful.”

Turpie says that one of the technological challenges was the existing healthcare system infrastructure, which was not designed for rich media like video content. “Things like video on health services has not been easy because health services systems have been set up to deliver X-ray images across the web and using their bandwidth for those sort of essential services, not information about engagement… it’s taken a lot of hard technological work behind the scenes but we’re now getting there.”

He adds that providing the digital service and engaging citizens has required that some existing technology ‘firewalls’ be opened up. “The NHS [IT] has been brought up with risk prevention, for obvious reasons, but actually we’re in a digital world that has got to encourage engagement that will lead to better health and better lifestyle, and better benefits if we get it right and make it easy. But we’re working through that process, and NHS local is the first external service that’s trying to do that.”

Responding to users

The website encourages feedback from users of the service, and Turpie says that responding to this is essential. “We committed right at the beginning to review the services on a 6-monthly basis, with the patients and staff, i.e. the users, in order to get feedback into the system and to enhance it, because digital moves on much quicker than many public sector services, but we’ve got to make this service responsive to our users. And we must keep it simple and easy.”

For breaking new ground in digital health service delivery we are pleased to award NHS local the Healthcare Engagement Strategy 2012 ‘Digital Health Services’ Award.

Winner: Pfizer Israel ‘Public Restrooms’ app

“There are no Public Toilets in Israel”, says Tali Rosin, Public Affairs & Policy Manager with Pfizer Israel, speaking with me about Pfizer’s ‘Public Restrooms’ iPhone app. “which is a fact that amplifies the challenge to overactive bladder patients and women in general. So we launched a GPS app that locates the nearest toilet – restaurants included!”

The app, in Hebrew language for the local market in Israel and available in the Apple App Store, was downloaded over 15,000 times in its first two weeks after launch and reached Apple’s coveted “Top 25” most-downloaded list. It is a tool that uses location-based services to identify the nearest public restroom and share feedback from other users who have rated the facility.

Rosin explains that in Israel, like most of the world outside the US, the pharmaceutical industry is forbidden from marketing prescription products directly to consumers but that disease awareness campaigns provide a mechanism for engaging people without breaking regulatory rules. This, she says, leads to some creative disease awareness campaigns.

“The application was part of a campaign that had mostly TV commercials. But the TV commercials themselves dealt with the situation and not the solution”, Rosin tells me, explaining that the television commercials simply raised awareness of overactive bladder but did nothing else to practically help. But the problem for people with overactive bladder is that they often avoid leaving their homes for long for fear of not finding a bathroom when they need it, she tells me.

“So we thought, we’ll help them so they’ll know where the nearest toilet is, because they do suffer. And whilst doing that, maybe they’ll come to the conclusion that they might suffer from an overactive bladder and then maybe they’ll go to the doctor and ask for help”, explains Rosin, who says that it is not only overactive bladder patients who benefit from the app but anybody who needs a public toilet. “Not only those who suffer from overactive bladder benefit, but also mothers with little children, or anyone in Israel. So this is really practical for Israeli people.”

Rosin says that the app addresses Pfizer’s goal to promote health information while encouraging people to take action and seek help from a medical professional. “Pfizer’s motto is ‘Working together for a healthier world’ and we are really into educating, and promoting health. So if we raise awareness of this problem, which is a huge problem and many people suffer with it, then they will know what they suffer from. And if they go and seek help, it’s great for us”, she says.

The app includes a facility to automatically dial a Pfizer patient helpline from your iPhone. Rosin says that of over 1,000 calls made to the helpline, many wanted to know where to get help. “We received so many calls from people who said they had this problem and asked for help about which doctor they should go to, and were seeking information”.

With the combination of location-based services, social engagement and ratings, and integrated telephone dialing, Pfizer’s app breaks new ground for pharmaceutical engagement with patients. Yet Rosin says there were no major hurdles to cross in implementing it. “I had to obey Pfizer’s standards and regulatory compliance issues, but once you know your material, there are no obstacles. It was not made too difficult”, she says, crediting Pfizer’s multidisciplinary team with the successful deployment. “It’s always about teamwork. It’s the product manager, and the e-marketing manager, and business technology, and regulatory, and medical, and legal, and the country manager that has to approve anything. It has to be, and it is, teamwork.”

To others in regulated healthcare looking to innovate in patient engagememt, Rosin encourages optimism: “Know that you can make it happen… smartphones, and social media, open up such wide horizons that you can really start all over again. Suddenly you have more tools that you were not aware existed before.”

Pfizer Israel, for a simple app that exploits the rich functionality of smartphones and delivers practical help to consumers where and when they need it, we award you the Healthcare Engagement Strategy 2012 Time & Place Award.