MarketFlash

Physician Use of Mobile Medical Textbooks: What it Means for Pharmaceutical Marketers

Physicians and other health care providers (HCPs) are putting their bulky textbooks back on the shelf and opting for digital versions on their smartphones and PDAs. How pervasive is this trend? According to Manhattan Research, nearly 50% of physicians are now accessing electronic versions of medical textbooks on their mobile devices.¹

The digital trend is not surprising given the way in which physicians seek and access medical reference information is undergoing fundamental and dramatic change. Driving this change is the portability of information, efficient search capabilities and the fact that most digital textbooks are updated on a regular basis, whereas printed versions can be out-of-date by publication time.  As a result, physicians are now accessing electronic medical textbooks on their mobile devices dozens of times a week, often at the point of care.²

How will this impact pharmaceutical marketers who have long provided HCPs with vouchers for printed medical textbooks? It means new opportunities to deliver branding and clinical messages to HCPs—and integrate it into their daily workflow.  For example:

• Branding can be delivered to physicians through a “Splash” transition screen every time the physician accesses the mobile textbook (Image 1)
• Pharmaceutical marketers can sponsor “Key Words” which, when searched within the mobile textbook, deliver clinically relevant sponsored messages to physicians (Image 2)

Pharmaceutical marketers may also use mobile textbook sponsorship to target HCPs by specialty. For instance, the new American Joint Cancer Coalition Staging Manual, 7th edition (AJCC) is due out later this year, taking effect on January 1, 2010. The target audience for this mobile textbook sponsorship is Oncologists and Hematologists who have some of the highest usage rates of mobile devices.³

Skyscape, a subsidiary of Physicians Interactive, has partnered with more than 40 of the most trusted medical publishers in the world to provide HCPs with more than 500 mobile medical resources and is offering one-year mobile textbook sponsorships for more than a dozen of the most popular medical textbooks including the following:

• Joint Cancer Coalition Staging Manual, 7th edition (AJCC) (Hematologists and Oncologists)
• The 5-Minute Clinical Consult (Primary Care, cardiology)
• The Washington Manual of Medical Therapeutics (Primary Care)
• Harrison‘s Manual of Medicine (Primary Care)
• The Harriet Lane Handbook (Pediatrics)
• The Johns Hopkins POC-IT ABX Guide (Infectious Disease)

For more information about mobile textbook sponsorship or to learn how to build relationships with HCPs through other mobile solutions, please contact Physicians Interactive at 800-794-6757 or info@physiciansinteractive.com.

¹Taking the Pulse, 2009, Manhattan Research

²Skyscape Physicians Survey, 2008

³How Oncologists Use the Internet and Other Technologies, Manhattan Research, 2009