If a patient or physician encounters pharma-created content that doesn’t pop with relevance or utility, it doesn’t matter how multitudinous the channels are that carry it. There is no patience online for bad content.

Pharma has the resources to create, or hire someone to create, great content. But the problem is that great content lies in the eye of the content beholder. Complicating matters further, that single set of eyes may find certain content relevant or useful in one channel on one day, but may have different needs or expectations in another channel, next week. Digital marketers hope the answer to the problem of effective mass personalization – a term that reads like an oxymoron – is big data and better analytical tools for parsing it. If enough data is compiled about a given patient, for example, it follows that sophisticated, real-time analytics will be able to predictably advise brand managers on precisely what information a patient needs at any stage of her journey, in whichever channel she prefers.

Needless to say, that level of sophistication hasn’t yet occurred in the healthcare industry. Speakers at the ePharma Summit in New York this week appear hopeful that it will happen soon, but many acknowledged the organizational changes that need to happen first.

Continuous questing for new data streams can be a quixotic endeavor, leading to “analysis paralysis,” said Nancy Phelan, VP, customer strategy and operations at Bristol-Myers Squibb. Internally, pharma needs to “think differently about the talent and skill set” needed on the commercial side, and organizations must liberate digital marketing from fixed events like budget cycles and calendar-based points of action (POAs). Companies should institute “real-time processes and decision-making” for digital marketing execution, said Phelan.

On a mobile health panel, Sharon DeBacco, senior director, customer communications and operations at Ironwood Pharmaceuticals (and formerly an AstraZeneca consumer marketing leader and brand director on Nexium and Crestor), said “mobile is a marketer’s dream,” but it’s stuck on the fringes of healthcare, in wellness and fitness apps on the one hand, and in sensors and devices for critical care on the other. Missing is the middle ground patient and his chronic condition. From a content management standpoint, mobile can be “challenging and confusing,” acknowledged Scott Wolf, EVP, sales, at Everyday Health. DeBacco said the challenge for mobile is how to combine the many transactional activities phones and tablets are typically used for, to develop first a greater understanding and then a unified program for consumers.

With regard to the future of professional promotion, “pharma needs to find its way back into doctors’ lives,” said Jordan Safirstein, an interventional cardiologist. “Taking a doctor out to eat and giving them journal articles is antiquated…it doesn’t work.” Sales reps are less effective today because “physicians have no say anymore in what drugs are on the formulary,” said Kecia Gaither, vice chairman, department of Ob/Gyn, director of maternal fetal medicine, at Brooklyn’s Brookdale University Hospital and Medical Center. “That decision comes from the chief financial officer,” and to a lesser extent, the head of pharmacy, she said.

Asked about what pharma can provide to physicians, Safirstein said embedding reference texts within EMRs is one opportunity. “The most common thing I see [in the hospital] is a resident walking down the hall, staring at a screen. Pharma must take advantage of this.” What about copay cards? “I’ve never heard a patient say, ‘Thank God you gave me that coupon card,’” said Safirstein, adding that the biggest innovation to the healthcare system in recent years was the launch of generic versions of Lipitor and Plavix.

Despite ongoing challenges in digital promotion on the consumer and professional side, 72% of the healthcare companies surveyed for a recent Best Practices report said they planned to increase their digital marketing budgets by more than 10% in the next two years. Even with additional resources, will pharma be able to craft relevant and useful messages for individual patients and physicians, and deliver them successfully? The best way to find out what questions a specific customer wants answered, right now, is to ask. The best way to meet that need is to provide an answer, fast. Whether big data, new technology and analytics can help pharma provide that kind of mass personalization – at an acceptable scale and in the context of strict regulatory controls – remains to be seen.

Given the amount of activity in the hepatitis C drug development space – as evidenced in PharmExec’s 2013 Pipeline report – patients are scouring the internet for information on the disease, available treatments, and soon to be available treatments. A new Industry Standard Research report examines the digital cracks consumers encounter when looking for information and treatments, and how to potentially fill them.

Andrew Schafer, president, ISR

Unlike other therapeutic areas, like diabetes, for example, there aren’t currently a lot of brands for HCV on the market – yet – and most patients searching online for therapies tend to land on branded sites for products made by either Vertex or Genentech, according to Andrew Shafer, president of Industry Standards Research (ISR) and author of a new report on the HCV category.

However, different search terms returned different brands in the category. For example, consumers looking to find more information about the disease tended to land on branded content for Vertex’s Incivek. Consumers in the pre-diagnosis stage, who used search terms like “Do I have Hep C?” were more likely to land on branded content supporting Genentech/Roche’s Pegasys. In both cases, however, brand.com websites were further down the list of search results. Specific search requests for information about medicines and side effects tended to return similar results, but more general search inquires about the disease, it’s a mixed bag for consumers.

“What’s happening is that there’s not a go-to source for information on hep C,” says Schafer. “Online searchers are getting piecemeal information, so they’re going to another site as their search continues.” Schafer says there are two ways to counteract the problem of fickle web searchers and poor organic results for brands: paid search, or the creation of a destination site for hepatitis C information. “Pharma is getting better at providing independent information to patients,” notes Schafer.

Another consideration for digital marketers in the HCV space is where to focus resources in the social realm. According to the ISR report, consumers are willing to discuss and ask for information about HCV on Facebook at a higher rate – four to one – than they are on Twitter. Shafer speculates that Twitter is used less frequently in this case because discussions are more public on Twitter, whereas Facebook is more of a closed, private social network.

Another opportunity for companies with an established presence in HCV, and newcomers to the space, is to build an “influencer network,” to keep new information and announcements front and center online. Last May, the CDC made an announcement urging baby boomers to get screened for HCV. Although there was a spike in online conversation around this announcement, it only lasted for a couple of days, according to the ISR report. “If someone wants to own [the HCV] space, whether it’s Vertex or Genentech or whomever…I think it’s in everyone’s interest – pharma, patients, providers – to grow the influencer network, so that these kinds of stories have longer legs, and more people get tested,” says Shafer.

This is particularly true in HCV, since “the vast majority of people that have it don’t know they have it,” says Shafer. “From a pharma perspective, increasing your addressable market by going out and testing everybody is probably a pretty good investment.”