Pharma’s EHR Opportunity – We Need to Be Involved

I recently came across a great article talking about marketers need to decode the EHR for Pharma. It’s been really interesting to see the evolution on pharma’s relationship with EHR software. No doubt they’ve all always seen a tremendous opportunity, but they’ve all treaded lightly because of the possible undue influence on a provider.

The article did make an interesting comparison between how pharma approaches EHR and how they approached social media in the past:

Their pervasiveness has raised eyebrows throughout pharma. What’s happening with EHR “reminds me of the early days of being in the digital center of excellence [DCOE],” Flaiz recalled. “Social was exploding. It belonged to corporate comms, brands, PR — there wasn’t anyone who didn’t think they owned it.”

The same thing is happening now with EHR, but with a different cast of characters: trade, pricing, medical affairs, R&D, marketing, and the DCOE — all want a piece, she said.

I also love that the article frankly states that agencies will focus on placing banners and messaging and that marketers will need to focus on a much deeper approach to marketing pharma in an EHR. In fact they outline the other EHR Opportunities for pharma that pharma marketing professionals should consider: clinical decision support, integration with the hub and patient-assistance programs, patient engagement and education, and scraping it for other information of value.

I’m sure that many readers of this don’t like this discussion at all. No doubt many feel like pharma shouldn’t have any relationship with an EHR vendor. That’s naive since pharma already has relationships with many EHR vendors. It’s a mistake for us to put a blind eye to this topic.

Yes, we need to proactive in talking about how EHR vendors should work with pharma and how they should not work with pharma. If we’re not involved in the conversation, we’ll miss out on the opportunity to shape the discussion.

Plus, not all pharma interaction with EHRs is bad. It can be a really good thing as long as what’s being done is transparent. Plus, the reality is that pharma is going to have an influence on doctors. Why not have that work done in an EHR where you can know what influence pharma is having on the doctor? Pharma and EHR vendors will work together. The question is how much we’re going to know about their involvement.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

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