What Cardiovascular Marketers Can Learn From a Heart Transplant Recipient

Making an emotional connection with your target audience should be a primary goal for marketers.

We talk with our clients all the time about the importance of reaching people on a human level, being authentic and writing copy that speaks to people “in their own words.”

In my view, this video featuring Mr. Ron Murray, a transplant recipient, offers rare insight about the issues that are truly important to patients who are facing the biggest cardiovascular challenges.

He talks about anxiety:

“… if the transplant issue ever comes up for anyone listening, that’s almost the first thing they would think, too. If I had time to think about it over that year, I would have realized, oh my God, I would have apprehension all built up about how I would react to…I mean is it going to change my way of thinking? Is it going to alter my own thoughts? None of that holds up, ultimately.

He talks about the unexpected magnitude of emotions:

“When I realized that there was going to be, forever, an emotional component, and maybe a spiritual component to this thing that I hadn’t thought about, is when I became – God, I don’t even know if I can tell you about it – that I began to grieve for the donor, that brought be to tears several of those nights.

But they weren’t bad tears, they were were just, like tears you feel when you go to a funeral – someone you know – and I didn’t know Kevin but I did now, is the way I looked at it. And so, the rest of my time in the hospital was an alternating time between listening to music in my head and writing it and making it up, and thinking about Kevin and his family and what all of this really means to my future life.”

And, he talks about how the experience changed his view of his life’s purpose:

“So, I formulated a plan to try to reach a lot of people for the specific reason that I passed up so many deserving people on the Austin transplant waiting list. There were 12 people ahead of me who had been waiting for a heart, sometimes up to a year, and I had only been on the list three weeks and here I am jumping ahead to get the heart. (By the way, he saved four or five people that night – he was a donor of everything).

So I figured the reason that I jumped ahead of so many people was because there was such a severe shortage of donors, and ultimately that proved to be true. So anyway, my effort now is to reach as many people as possible, and this is part of that effort…”

If only we had input this powerful and this clear on a regular basis…

Thanks, Ron, and Dr. Wes for sharing.

Does Physician Involvement in Social Media Pose a Threat to Cardiovascular Marketing?

Physicians’ online activity is on the rise.

• In a recent study by Google, 86% of U.S. physicians said they use the Internet to gather health, medical or prescription drug information.
• They’ve joined the social networking revolution too. According to a survey by Mediamix International, 34% of physicians now use social media.

For the most part, I’m excited by these statistics.   Most of the heart and vascular marketers I know have been trying to encourage physician involvement in online activities for a long time.

But is there a downside?

I’ve been hearing a few horror stories lately.

• A marketing director friend recently told me about a patient who appeared at a cardiologist’s office without an appointment.  When the office staff politely told him that he must have his dates mixed up, the patient said, “Oh no, I’m supposed to be here.  I’ve been chatting with Dr. Jones on Facebook, and he told me to stop by.”
• Cases of doctors being sued for giving online advice in venues such as Facebook are also starting to surface.

Should these fears discourage marketers from involving physicians in social media efforts?

I hope not.

Physician and staff involvement adds credibility and knowledge that is hard to find in other sources. Online physician discussions offer amazing opportunities for both patient acquisition and retention.

But, it’s important to use common sense.

American Medical News recently published a post by Arthur R. Derse, MD, on this subject in its ethics forum.

I plan to share this with some of our clients as we plan for future campaigns.   I think it offers some great reminders that communications must be HIPAA compliant and that they should avoid giving specific advice to individual patients.

As Dr. Derse says, the bottom line is that online physician involvement in social networks should begin with the tweetable Hippocratic aphorism, “First, do no harm.”