COMMENT: The impact of social media on the MedTech marketplace

SOCIAL media has brought a revolution, not only in social interaction, communication and change, as well as a political change in some countries, but also in the way the customers and consumers express their opinions and experiences about the products, including the medical devices, that they use.

The user community of social media is growing day by day as more and more sites and tools are developed and access to the internet is increased to those people who were hitherto not connected to the world through the cyber media. For example, twitter, which is a micro blogging tool, had 175 million registered users and there were 95 million ‘tweets’ written per day, as of 14 September 2010.

Social media users exchange a range of information including their views on issues of interest, their experiences of using products, and photos, videos, documents and so on. Consequently there has been a rise in social medial tools and websites and some of them have a specific focus such as Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and numerous blog sites.

Blogs can be individual blogs, group discussions and commercial blogs; hence, blogs are very diverse and voluminous. According to the Technorati, which is a specialised blog search engine, about 1.5 million new blog are posted every day on a wide variety of issues, including healthcare and medical devices. In addition, blogs are written, not only by youngsters, but by people of all ages, ethnicities, religions, regions and social classes; for example, blogs on health issues including medical design technology (MDT) by doctors, patients, carers and other healthcare providers. It is therefore important for medical device manufactures to benefit from the information available through social media in general, and blogs in particular, to know what their customers or users are saying about the devices they are using, or have used in the past, and to actually identify what their unmet needs are. The advantages of using this type of data include anonymous and open access data, which is voluntary, spontaneous and free from the researcher’s bias as well as devoid of cumbersome ethics formalities.

In this regard, Shah and Robinson (2011) searched the blogosphere using the Google search engine to find out patients’ perspectives and needs about self-testing of their PT/INR levels using portable coagulometer devices. The authors analysed this qualitative data using various software and techniques, for example use of a free online tool called Wordle for creation of a word frequency/tag cloud which helped in checking suitability of the data relevant to the objectives of the study. They found a range of issues that patients had in relation to using this device for monitoring oral anticoagulation therapy. The themes identified were benefits for patients and issues related to the device and testing strips, such as the cost, makes and models, purchasing training, reliability, quality, accuracy, calibration and maintenance. Other themes were the involvement of insurance companies in obtaining the equipment; the comparison of results by self-testing and hospital/laboratory tests; and healthcare providers’ involvement in PT/INR self-testing. This study concluded that data obtained from patients’ blogs can help medical device manufactures to identify problems that patients encounter in using specific devices. Therefore, this information can help manufacturers in the redesigning and upgrading of existing devices, or the planning of new devices for particular medical conditions.

However, Shah and Robinson have reported that there might be some difficulties in locating patients’ blogs on every type of MDT because the postings are usually centered on particular medical conditions and patients with similar medical conditions join relevant discussion groups and exchange their opinions and experiences with other patients in that group. In addition, access to some of patient discussion groups would require prior approval from the group moderator. Therefore, it can be better for a medical device manufacturer, especially the SMEs that may not be able to afford market research, to use social media and set up their own blogs and discussion groups about their technologies. In this way, the manufacturer is able to communicate instantaneously with users at a global level, keeping their costs low and saving time. In fact, several companies, especially the larger ones such as fortune 500, are using social media for marketing and other purposes. The SMEs can, however, take advantage of free social media monitoring and analysis tools such as Social Media 2 (SM2) from Techrigy.

But MDT manufacturers do need to take into account regulatory requirements about the use of social media for medical device marketing, which might be in offing, including FDA regulations about the promotion of medical products via the internet.