What is innovation in healthcare?

Innovation is considered the buzzword of the century. All companies today need innovation to be successful. But there is no universal definition of what innovation is in healthcare and marketing communications. Think for a moment: How do you define innovation in healthcare for yourself and your company, and what does it look like in other countries?
At our annual Worldwide Partners, Inc. meeting, the largest global network of owner-managed agencies, a number of agency leaders, strategists and lateral thinkers from Africa, Russia, China, the U.S., Latin America, Northern, Southern, Western and Eastern Europe, took on the question of innovation. Here is a small selection of the answers:

Digitalization: opportunity or competitive disadvantage?

"Innovation in healthcare marketing is Digital Transformation and means disruption of business models."
Transformation and disruption are not considered new by us and the Americans; digital missionaries have been preaching it for a long time. But digitalization is constantly bringing new things to healthcare marketing. Therefore, the creation of new agile organizational forms that strengthen cross-departmental digital competence and readiness for innovation in the company appears to be quite important. New to many are the topics of chatbots, voice assistants, VR, AR, and even drones, and how customer experiences can be optimally designed in the digital space.
The path to digitization is inevitable, even if Germany and the healthcare industry are not marching at the forefront everywhere. Without acceleration, this could become a serious competitive disadvantage.

Data: skepticism or promise of salvation?

"Innovation in healthcare communications is Big Data, artificial intelligence, algorithms, analytics and marketing automation." Big Data in healthcare: in our country, comprehensive data collection is opposed by caution and a lack of trust among the population.
Smart Data: A complete analysis is not (yet) possible even in the consumer marketing sector, where consumers disclose much more data, because there, too, much remains intangible and others are faked.
Data and numbers: Interest-driven measurements and misinterpretations of correlations and causality give further fuel to doubts about their infallibility. Errors and confusions, number frenzy, data fever and data mania are therefore the diagnoses of the (Western European) skeptics.

And yet it is true that the protagonists of artificial intelligence quickly learn to eliminate such quality deficiencies; with self-learning machines, the learning speed is multiplied additionally. Thus, AI combined with extensive medical databases and telecommunications promises advances in diagnostic capabilities. Our African colleagues were particularly enthusiastic about this. Many other useful applications are being worked on with AI, as the following examples also demonstrate. Progress in these fields is unstoppable, so dismissing data-driven solutions would be fatal. However, a healthy degree of skepticism could lead to a responsible approach to technology and data.

Patient support: utopia or reality?

"Healthcare innovation is the development of communications applications that help patients in their daily struggle for better health or recovery from disease."
Our American friends are not at all discounting the likelihood that in the foreseeable future there will be a "Watson-empowered wearable" that is omniscient about its wearer's bodily functions, empathically detects emotional needs, and is able to motivate him/her to adopt a healthy lifestyle or comply with therapy with the right combination of coercion, training, and incentives.

Customer centricity: digital contacts or analog empathy?

"Innovation in healthcare is putting people and their needs at the center of everything."

Customer experience, personalization are keywords here that found great agreement among all participants from different corners of the world. It is not simply a matter of generating more clicks on a website or mailing, but of making contact with people, conveying relevant content to them in an emotional way, and thus also giving doctors more time to respond to patients with empathy.

A fascinating example of innovation in emotional personalization came from our partner agency Juice in USA. Instead of rigid, linear websites, they are working on fluid, dynamic platforms.
An educational site for breast cancer patients might change the emotional tone of its content and its imagery - depending on whether it believes the user is a patient with stage 1 or stage 4 disease. These are very different patients, in very different emotional states, with very different interests, needs, and concerns.

Boundary shift or risk

"Innovation in healthcare communications means presenting medical information in a fun yet credible and exciting way, whether it's the rules of taking a medication or even presenting surgical procedures. The fun could be in the choice of channel, or it could be in the nature of the story."
Could fun (fun and entertainment) push the boundaries of conversation in healthcare? Could fun help a physician understand the clear benefits of a drug? In our opinion: absolutely. Is there a risk in mandating fun and entertainment for pharma? Yes, because it would hardly be an innovation if that risk didn't exist.

Imitation: easier or with hurdles?

"Innovation in healthcare is what has long been taken for granted in almost all other industries, what doctors and patients are already accustomed to in their private lives, and what competitors will spoil them with in two years."
How often do we hear that healthcare communications lags behind all other industries? From this, one might draw the reverse conclusion that innovation in healthcare is easy. We simply do what others in other industries or countries have been doing successfully for 5 years. Innovation = imitation? Easy?
Maybe we in Germany will get help from our younger federal ministers and they will break down the legal barriers to innovative communication with patients and consumers so that they become empowered individuals and we don't become the global laggard.

More generally, our partner entrepreneurs agree that innovation in healthcare requires relentless effort, whether it's bringing fun to healthcare or staying ahead of the competition through innovation. That's where an annual push or an occasional team brainstorming session isn't enough. To successfully push through innovation, it must be made an ongoing, deliberate, company-wide priority. And technical expertise must be paired with social skills, humanity and creativity.