Take a look at a recent post I made to Cambridge BioMarketing’s company blog on the benefits of going digital with medical publications.
So why go digital? Here are a few clear benefits:
Faster to Publish and Distribute – The traditional printing process is much more time consuming than electronic publishing. eBooks may also offer quicker lead time to publication and distribution due to much improved ease-of-edit. eBooks can be emailed or transmitted wireless.
Vastly Increased Interactivity – eBooks can be embedded with multimedia, linked to references, and developed with a truly interactive user experience. Readers will be able to interact with content not possible with flat print pieces.
Cost Benefit – Easier to publish and distribute. No more printing costs.
Digital Book Readers are Evolving – With nearly 75% of healthcare professionals using some sort of smarthphone or PDA, it’s clear that the user base is ready and willing to embrace eBooks as the format of choice. And digital book readers are only getting more advanced (and going down in cost).
The site, 1000CranesOfHope.com, is a cancer awareness tool that allows users to post wishes online. The site takes the Japanese tradition of senbazuru (which promises that a person who folds 1000 origami cranes will be granted a wish) and applies to the site — users can design, post, and share wishes. We’ve generated nearly 1500 wishes to date.
Congrats to the team at Cambridge Biomarketing and the talented group at Millennium that we partnered with.
More focus on preventative care: Healthcare companies are going to need to understand their customers much better. Profiling and CRM programs will become more important; understanding how customers “tick” will be more critical than ever.
Patient Retention: Along those lines, customer retention will also become increasingly important. Drug manufacturers will need to take an even more pressing role in treatment management–more options and choices for patients will increase need for intensive customer and relationship management.
Cleanly presented and arranged like a narrative, these visualizations outline some of the key facts of an episode and demonstrate a nice example of how infographics can be used to tell a story.
Microsoft Pivot is an experimental new platform from Microsoft Labs that allows users to interact and visualize massive amounts of data.
Pivot garnered quite a bit of attention at the 2010 MIX conference, and attendees were apparently wowed by the elegant and engaging interaction model.
I can see numerous applications for this technology in my field of healthcare technology. Pivot could be used to track symptoms across thousands of patients, identifying trends, common side-effects, and adverse events. The application could also have use for processing and analyzing electronic medical records.
