Healthcare Professionals, Click Here
October 2009, p44
By Meredith Abreu Ressi, Vice President of Research

In an era of customer service portals, unbranded sites and corporate destinations, a new debate has emerged over the role of the product.com for physicians. How relevant is the product.com in communicating with healthcare professionals (HCPs)? Should the content be managed by the agency in charge of the site, or through a centralized group that provides content for HCPs across the company’s site portfolio? Should customer service features be available on the product site, or reserved for the service portal?

Companies big and small are wrestling with these questions, with a broad range of opinions on what constitutes best practices for providing content and services on the product.com site for healthcare professionals today. It is a critical debate for companies to have -- a recent study by Manhattan Research showed that 80% of physicians have visited a product.com website in the past 12 months. So how can companies best meet the needs of those physicians who arrive at the product.com site?

The first step for many companies is to step back and take an inventory of all of the physician-focused digital assets the company has across the product portfolio. The goal of this exercise is to understand the true depth of content and services that the company has for the physician audience in order to identify where efforts are being duplicated, and where there is existing content to be leveraged.

From there, companies can piece together a picture of how all of these sites work together – bearing in mind that the physician is not always thinking of the new unbranded URL or service portal destination – but instead, just knows that he or she needs information on a certain product – fast.

So how can you best deliver information and services, in a way that is most efficient for the physician (and logistically feasible for your company)? A look across some of the top product site destinations among physicians shows that there is not one answer to this question. Here is a look at how some of the top product websites visited by physicians across a variety specialties approach content management for their sites.
 
Vyvanse.com
When clicking on the “Healthcare Professionals” section of the Vyvanse website, which was the top site visited by pediatricians in recent Manhattan Research study, visitors are brought to an info site on Medscape.com that contains a full range of studies and information about the product, all within the Medscape domain.

Levaquin360.com
The Levaquin site was the top site visited by emergency medicine physicians in 2009. When clicking on the “Healthcare Professionals” section of the Levaquin.com site, visitors are brought to Levaquin360, which includes a full range of service resources including a link to have a live discussion with a representative, videos, and patient education resources. This approach essentially creates a service portal within the product.com environment, without redirecting physicians to a separate URL for the full range of services and features.

Januvia.com
Merck’s approach to providing physician content on product websites is to maintain the look and feel of the consumer-facing site, while providing a uniform login across the portfolio of Merck sites, should physicians want to access service features such as the Merck OnCall service.

The HCP section of the Januvia site, which maintained its top ranking for visitation by primary care physicians this year, maintains the look and feel of consumer-facing portion of the site, while providing links to the Merck OnCall service.

Viagra.com
Across the Pfizer portfolio of product websites, clicking on the “Healthcare Professionals” section of the website brings physicians to the product page within the PfizerPro site. This method allows the physician-facing content to be consistent across the company portfolio, but does not maintain the look and feel of the original product site.

Advair.com
GSK’s Advair.com is designed for a consumer audience, and does not offer a separate section of the site for healthcare professionals – yet it still ranked as the top site visited by allergists and immunologists this year.  The site does allow physicians access to customer service features, however – when clicking on “Contact Us”, the GSK Response Center form allows visitors to select whether they are a consumer or healthcare professional.

While each of these sites takes a different approach to content management, the consistent theme across the top product sites visited by physicians is that they provide easy access to a range of content – and, more importantly – services – that allow the physician to get her questions answered quickly and efficiently. The best practices for providing these services depends on the product, the company, and what is logistically feasible for creating an optimal user experience to meet physician demands. But as long as sites are developed with the physician’s needs in mind – rather than being limited by the constraints of what the company  has “always done” -- there are many paths to developing a successful product site for physicians.

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