Last week in Berlin I was fortunate enough to sit on a panel at the Second Annual ExL Digital Pharma Conference in Berlin with Matt Jameson Evans, the gist of which was geared to putting the medical products industry into position to "listen" to patients. Matt is a doctor in the United Kingdom and serves as Executive Director of healthUnlocked – a social network for patients, doctors and nurses. He stressed the need for pharma to reach out to physicians in order to help ensure that these stakeholders in the medical dialog are not operating within silos, but rather are taking note of one another's needs and capacities.
In this video, he expresses his point of view that technological advancement is going to drive these stakeholders more closely together – a trend that is going to benefit all three.
He also states that while the industry is waiting for better clarification of the regulation of social media, now would be time well spent developing the key relationships with physicians that will bring about a stronger capacity for working together on behalf of patients in the future.
The site – healthUnlocked provides resources and tools to people who have chronic illnesses and to help navigate the explosion of online health information. The tools are designed for specific disease in conjunction with patient groups and pulls and aggregates data from other health sites which can then be accessed by users. While it is currently run by invitation only, you can request an invite.
