Marketers and others engaged in Internet marketing have opened a sort of Pandora's Box on exactly what should be done to ensure quality healthcare information on the Internet.
Imagine a consumer who has just been diagnosed with cancer desperately surfing the Net for information on his condition. The wealth of medical information at his fingertips would be mind boggling, but how much of it would be useful and credible?
Since consumers are flooded with medical information on the Web, some of which is questionable, lively discussion has been devoted to developing guidelines to ensure quality medical information for healthcare surfers. Most recently, the editors at the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA, April 16) broached this subject in an editorial tagged, "Assessing, Controlling, and Assuring the Quality of Medical Information on the Internet."
In the editorial, the editors felt it described a "cocktail conversation" approach to some medical information on the Internet and proposed some basic standards to ensure credible, reasonable and useful content.
But these standards, which stipulated what most marketers deemed obvious: that authorship, attribution, disclosure and currency be included with all medical information, were not what raised eyebrows. What had PR and marketing professionals buzzing was the question of which organization(s) would be appropriate evaluators of quality healthcare information on the Net.
In fact, like it or not, we are already seeing a number of Web sites emerging as review services, like the Geneva-based Health On the Net Foundation (http://www.hon.ch), with its eight-point code of conduct, the government-drafted Healthfinder (http://www.healthfinder.gov) and Physicians Choice (http://mdchoice.com). Although the intentions are valid enough, the burning question is will they be effective? Or will they too serve to confuse the consumer by their increasing magnitude? And consumer online confusion is not what any healthcare marketer wants to see.
This medium, which is evolving at the speed of light, commanded over $1.7 million in healthcare advertising, according to New York-based Competitive Media Reporting and USAData.
Lee Duffey, president of Atlanta-based Duffey Communications, Inc., who agrees with the overall concept of the JAMA editorial, contends that "everyone has an opinion on the Internet but no one fully understands it." Because the Internet is content-driven, there will always be problems with inaccuracy, according to Duffey who has such healthcare clients as Genzyme, American Cancer Society, and Kaiser Permanente.
When Jeannie Nicole, vice president of the Southfield, Mich.-based Caponigro Public Relations Inc., read the editorial she quickly became concerned about the blurred lines between evaluation and regulation. "Who's agenda are we dealing with here and will [evaluation services] be of real value to the consumer?" said Nicole. At this point, she wouldn't be that comfortable suggesting these services to her primarily not-for-profit midwest healthcare clients like the Greater Detroit Health Care Coalition, Oakwood Hospital System, and the Coalition for Communities on Hospitals.
But she does acknowledge the prevailing concerns over inaccurate online medical information that may be construed as useful medical advice. "If someone is ill, they may go online for healthcare alternatives; how do we ensure that those alternatives are on equal footing with the well-documented information on the Net?"
It is exactly this level of debate for providers and consumers that the editorial aimed to raise, according to William M. Silberg, one of the authors of the JAMA editorial. "It is important to raise explicit issues involving the Net because it is new, exciting and much more democratic than other mediums."
But Duffey is still not altogether convinced that the greatest problems lie in what JAMA described as "vast chunks of incomplete, misleading or inaccurate" medical information. "The greatest mistake some healthcare marketers make is underestimating the power of the Web and being sloppy," he said.
Citing incorrect vocabulary and visuals as the main mistakes, Duffey believes that many healthcare marketers are infatuated by the Net but don't know how to make the most effective use of it's power. "There are much more sophisticated ways to utilize this medium (like telemedicine and remodeling), therefore marketing must be packaged differently with interactive components and compelling reasons for people to come back to your site."
Evaluation/Regulation?
What about when the government steps in to take consumers by the hand and guide them through the health information maze on the Net? "Any time the government gets involved with creating standards, bottleneck problems like time constraints can arise," said Ann M. Moravick, senior vice president and director of New York-based Manning Salvage & Lee's Global Health Care Practice. With such clients as Baxter International, Pfizer Inc. and Pharmacia & Upjohn, Moravick strongly advocates self-regulation. "If you have too much of a 'buyer beware' attitude or if the Net becomes too regulated, you lose the real joy of the medium."
Responding to concerns that Healthfinder is a regulation vehicle in its infantile stages, Mary Jo Deering, the site's project director, affirms "Healthfinder was not created out of a regulatory spirit at all." She also reminds that the Department of Health and Human Services already had a few online sites and that Healthfinder is just an extension of historical efforts to provide access to federal health information. The site, which was launched April 15, positions itself as a "gateway" site for first-time Net users seeking health information. The federal government is just one of many entities that would like to see quality health information maximized on the Net.
A highly respected site that could prevent regulation from becoming a reality is the Geneva-based Health On the Net. Born purely of a democratic spirit, this site aims to be the international medical community consensus on credible medical information. HON efforts were actually spearheaded three years ago from a round table discussion involving the world's leading medical information providers from countries like Japan, Europe and the U.S. "Because many online users have access to international medical information, we have a global responsibility to provide reassurance," said Mark Welby, HON's executive director.
Some of the pressing issues that HON will address is how prescription drugs are marketed and purchased on the Net and "spamming" which refers to unrestricted online direct mail efforts. "We need to develop swift guidelines in this area," said Welby, who encourages medical information providers to participate in the drafting of the upcoming 1.7 version due in September. (JAMA, 312/464-5374; HON, 011/41-22-372-6273; Duffey Comm., 404/266-2600; Caponigro PR, 810/355-3200; Manning, Selvage & Lee, 404/875-1444)