eyeforpharma Barcelona Awards 2016

Mar 15, 2016 - Mar 17, 2016, Barcelona

The search for the most valuable and innovative patient-centric initiatives

Standing Out from the Crowd

Five Barcelona Awards finalists changing the possibilities of service delivery for HCPs.



There is a common perception that innovation takes place at the frontier of technology, and therefore, this is where we should look to discover new opportunities. But what inspired us about 2016’s crop of finalists for the Most Valuable HCP or Healthcare Initiative Award was that they managed to find a new edge with problems considered ‘solved’ or ‘not possible’.

Take AstraZeneca’s ‘Dialogue’ program as an example. With a new product launching within the saturatedoral hypoglycemic market, the brand team faced no small challenge to position product services with differentiated added-value. Most existing services address a familiar issue: regular exercise is critical for health for patients with type-II diabetes, but many are unable to motivate themselves to do so.

HCP support is really important for these at-risk patients, but with type-II diabetes disproportionately affecting non-English speaking patients, AstraZeneca's team realized that communication challenges were a major hindrance.  In response, they created education materials and digital motivation tools that were translated for the first time into Polish, Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi and Nepali. Their figures shows they found an unmet need in a crowded space, with requests for 570,290 printed leaflets for patients and HCPs and 87,410 unique page views on their digital toolkit. You can check out the project here: www.talkingtype2.co.uk

Breaking boundaries 

Whereas most companies struggle to define a strategy to manage social media product pages, MSD France were audacious enough to launch their own social network, Comuniti. It seems unbelievable that the team managed to get sign-off from legal, regulatory, compliance and IT, and we are told it was a process that took 9 months.

More surprising is that the outcome of this approval wasn’t a stripped down service. Comuniti is packed with features, including real-time secured chat between HCPs, videoconferencing, document sharing and personalized content. The uptake has also been huge within the HCP community in France. After a 6-month multichannel launch across radio, facebook, banner placements and email marketing, they’ve hit 65,000 registered users and now have plans to scale it globally.

Genzyme also challenged assumptions on what was possible with their digital health project in South Africa.

The dominant consensus has been that in countries such as South Africa where there are such disparities in access to ICT, digital learning programs just do not work. But Genzyme used an innovative technology to deliver low-bandwidth video to remote HCPs to educate them on rare diseases. Incredibly, users were able to access the 20-minute webinar recordings with just 1 bar of bandwidth connection.

Helping HCPs share with peers

Others took a more traditional approach to HCP education, but with a unique spin.

We loved Pharmiweb’s TIGGER project, which helps HCPs explore data through visualizations. As a less attractive market, it is rare that platforms are developed to help academia, even though so much obvious value can be created from tools that boost collaboration. TIGGER is doing just this, as it allows HCPs to make sharing research more exciting through beautiful animation.

Lastly, Boehringer Ingelheim’s ‘IPF Digital Initiative’ created three genuinely innovative assets to help HCPs in their work to diagnose Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis (IPF), a poorly recognized fatal orphan disease. Boehringer Ingelheim’s ‘IPF Digital Initiative’ showed an impressive depth of thinking with the design of complementary learning experiences.

The bottom line was that HCPs can have fun too, users were challenged to compete with a ‘Sound Challenge’ to test auditory diagnosis skills, and with an ‘Images of ILD’ library to quickly recap visual indicators. The team also delivered a cloud-based ‘virtual hospital’ that allowed users to view experts' cases or create their own and share with peers globally. Even though there are just a few thousand ILD experts worldwide, the project has received 88,000 hits to date, showing it is being well received by this community.


Looking for more inspiration? Follow these innovators and others as they battle it out for industry recognition at this year’s eyeforpharma Barcelona Awards.



eyeforpharma Barcelona Awards 2016

Mar 15, 2016 - Mar 17, 2016, Barcelona

The search for the most valuable and innovative patient-centric initiatives