Dynamic convergence. That phrase captures the intersection of patient, physician and payer interests that characterize today’s healthcare environment. Free market techniques like cost containment and pay-for-performance programs – combined with greater demands for information and care access – are injecting new vigor into an evolving healthcare infrastructure.

Online health portals like Web MD and disease-focused social networking sites close the information gap between patient and physician. Once compartmentalized and guarded, clinical and insurance program information now get pushed out to medical providers for benchmarking purposes. The net effect is a shot in the arm for consumer-centric healthcare.

Direct-to-consumer
Physicians remain voracious consumers of medical information, which explains the nearly one billion dollars in professional journal ad spending by pharmaceutical companies and medical equipment suppliers as reported by Nielsen PERQ/HCI Journal Ad Review. That number, however, is dwarfed by the nearly five billion dollars of prescription drug advertising spent targeting consumers each year – just in the U.S.

Borrowing a classic push-pull marketing protocol, new drug launches now appeal both to the prescriber base and patient population concurrently. This has changed the practice of medicine, as proactive patients query doctors about specific ethical pharmaceuticals they have read or heard about.

Balancing act
Accurate, complete and timely information is the lifeblood of the healthcare environment. According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, some 113 million concerned Americans logged on to the Internet in 2006, scoping out health information. Those concerns are shared on a global scale. Eight in ten people worldwide have already made, or plan to make, lifestyle changes to stave off serious disease according to a Nielsen Global Consumer Survey.

Meanwhile, despite the obvious advantages to patient and prescriber, and recent strides forward, the Electronic Health Record (EHR) movement has its foes because of privacy, security and cost concerns. Those whose rare or terminal conditions resist current treatments scour the clinical trial portals and lobby the FDA to bring new drugs online faster, balancing the needs for life-saving solutions with patient safety considerations.

Information please
As medicine embraces integrated and holistic patient wellness solutions, the demand for integrated, actionable data grows. Close on the heels of convergent healthcare participant interests will be the convergence of data sources yielding a deeper, more comprehensive understanding of patients, their medical habits, treatment regimes and health patterns – and, of course, the interaction of all of that with physician and payer behavior.

NielsenHealth was formed to help clients digest and synthesize these varied data sets and provide health care product manufacturers and retailers with the tools to spot trends, optimize the media mix, enhance advertising effectiveness, allocate resources and forecast product sales.

Nielsen recently took the pulse of patient trends by querying its Homescan Panel about ailment and health conditions during the last year to monitor attitudes and purchasing habits across various ailment segments and sub-segments, thus arming marketers with the ability to positively impact the health care value chain.

Findings from the U.S. study revealed that in 42% of all households, at least one person suffered from allergies, 33% of households included a high blood pressure sufferer, 28% had someone in the home with cholesterol problems, 27% reported that acid reflux plagued at least one household member and 26% indicated that some form of joint/neck/back pain weighed down someone at home. One example of how Nielsen can positively impact the health care value chain is by segmenting and characterizing the population segments that suffer from various conditions, and identifying relationships between health and wellness attitudes, media exposure and purchasing habits.

Seeking relief
Where do these consumers get their health information? Nielsen analyzes media consumption by disease state or condition to more accurately target media and messaging. In addition, given the prominence of the Internet in the health dialogue, Nielsen Online takes the pulse of specific sufferer group Internet-related buzz while tracking their unique media consumption.

Armed with data points and pointers from fellow sufferers, many consumers venture into self-medication. In a July 2007 47-country global self-medication study, Nielsen determined that 42% of those who suffered from an ailment treated the problem with a remedy already on hand. Another 32% scheduled an appointment with a doctor or dentist. Fully 29% purchased a non-prescription treatment, while 20% filled a prescription from a doctor to get relief. The more adventurous tried a home remedy (15%), while 14% simply toughed it out and used nothing.

Among the consumer segment that purchased a non-prescription medicine from a pharmacy, the single most important factor influencing the purchase decision was familiarity with the product or brand based on a prior purchase (63%). The second most frequently cited reason was the recommendation of a pharmacist or health care professional (48%). One in five consumers mentioned the influence of advertising or a friend’s recommendation. Financial considerations prompted 14% to buy “the cheapest I could find”.

Chronic concerns
When approached from the wellness perspective, chronic illnesses such as diabetes and hypertension require both a lifestyle change and ongoing commitment to control. In fact the CDC reports that diabetes alone is the sixth leading cause of death in the U.S., estimating that 7% of the U.S. population have diabetes, with an estimated 1.5 million new cases diagnosed each year. Using the diabetes example, proactive managed care plans identify patients and seek to enroll them in a program that provides the toolkit for managing their disease, from supplies to client medical education to nutritional counseling.

For many, it’s a marketing opportunity. The diet and medication needs for those with diabetes translate into unique purchasing patterns. Analyzing Nielsen Homescan panel data in the U.S. by disease state showed that people with diabetes purchased 271% more insulin syringes than the average consumer, 217% more blood test kits, 172% more dietetic chocolate candy, 110% more diet gelatin, 88% more diet pudding mix, 86% more gauze rolls, 66% more germicidal antiseptics and 61% more sugar substitutes used in food preparation than the average consumer. This information opens up a wealth of marketing and cross-promotional opportunities for both manufacturers and retailers who can now better understand their consumers, the ailments they suffer from, what they purchase, where they shop and why.

To specifically address the large and growing needs of the diabetes healthcare community – a condition that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) characterizes as epidemic proportions – Nielsen launched Diabetes*Buzz to enable those involved in health state management to better understand patient experiences and attitudes in order to ultimately enhance patient care. This capability augments Homescan’s current ability to understand how the diabetes sufferer thinks about and manages their condition from a holistic point of view. In this case, Nielsen is helping the healthcare industry truly understand how these people are making decisions that impact their health – as a consumer. Ultimately, this “consumer centric” understanding will help the diabetes industry accommodate the different needs of this diverse population.

Connecting the dots
Greater and greater responsibility is being pushed on the shoulders of the healthcare consumer. From home office to doctor’s office, Nielsen has the diagnostics to monitor this consumer-directed health revolution and plug clients into the information stream. In a future issue, we’ll explore the relatively new phenomenon of in-store health clinics and demonstrate how to connect the dots from consumer to retailer to manufacturer.