Digital doctor trends

Is the future of healthcare digital?

Market research company Ipsos Mori recently shared a new report: Digital Doctor 2020. It involves 1,745 primary care physicians globally, including the UK, and focuses on digital healthcare.

The results indicate that digital tools – especially following the Covid-19 outbreak – are of growing importance, but more training is needed.

About the research

Researchers interviewed 1,745 primary care physicians across the world, including the UK. All respondents had to be GPs with 2 to 35 years of experience in their current role and more than 25 years old.

The study wanted to better understand the attitude of GPs towards new technologies, their level of actual knowledge, and to what extent they use them with patients.

Terminology

A topic explored in the study is tele-health. This refers to the use of telecommunications and virtual technology to offer healthcare services outside of traditional healthcare facilities, such as GP practices.

Another term discussed is digital therapeutics (DTx). This refers to software programmes that deliver evidence-based therapeutic interventions to patients in order to prevent, manage, or treat a condition or illness. They can be used independently or together with other medications or therapies to optimise healthcare. 

Key results & insights

Awarenss vs Knowledge

What we found most interesting in the report is the fact that, overall, most GPs are aware of new technologies such as tele-health, remote patient monitoring, and AI. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they know how to use them.

In other words, awareness doesn’t equal knowledge.

Barriers

In different countries, GPs are more or less open to the possibility of using more digital tools in their day-to-day activities.

The main barriers for them are:

• The risk of patients mis-interpreting data; not everyone is used to reading and analysing data regularly
• The risk of wrong self-diagnosis
• Data security.

In addition to that, a knowledge gap – especially within the oldest GPs – and a lack of training are both barriers too.

How to best engage with doctors

We’ve advised this for years and now research confirms it! The best way to engage with a GP is the traditional one-on-one meeting with a sales representative.

Of course the lockdown in the UK and many countries poses a real challenge and it remains to be seen how companies respond to it.

Focusing just on digital tools, the least appealing way to engage GPs is social media. The most appealing is email. Somewhat lower than email – but higher than social media – we find webinars and visiting pharmaceutical companies websites.

This was also not surprising for us. In most of our campaigns we find that a mix of traditional and digital channels often makes the trick. The challenge is to understand how to find that balance and how to apply it to the different target groups – ECPs, pharmacists, pharmacy teams, GPs, sales representatives.

That is where we come in of course!

Read the full report

Click here to read the communication by Ipsos Mori. By registering, you will be able to access a webinar which discusses in more detail the report.

If you want to access more information, you will be able to purchase the full report, including country-specific data (the information we have shared here is part of the global study and of course each country will have had different results).