The importance of measurement when creating digital products for healthcare and pharma

It may seem obvious, but without a functioning measurement strategy, it’s going to be very challenging to prove the impact of your digital product, and therefore your own work and value to the business. Simply delivering the product is not enough as a success measure.

With a combination of clear objectives, analytics and user research it is possible to report effectively on the performance of your product.

• Objectives: You need to have a clear understanding of the purpose of your product, and document this as a set of objectives before attempting to write KPIs or set targets. Everything you measure should link back to the objectives and they should be driving you towards creating a culture of continuous improvement by regularly reviewing your objectives against real-world performance.

• Analytics: Analytics are a fantastic weapon in the armoury of a digital product manager or marketer, however, on their own they are not enough as they lack a crucial and useful component — the “why”. As well as this missing context, analytics are most often a measure of past performance, a lagging indicator that captures a moment in time that has already passed, because of this we recommend balancing them with both customer research and a specific set of leading indicators that will help to drive your decision making directly towards your initial objectives.

• Customer Research: Probably the most direct method for getting feedback from around the success of your digital product, but possibly one of the least utilised methods in the pharma industry. Speaking to customers, watching them use your product and try out new features, services or designs is a fantastic way to measure effectiveness. Don’t be tempted to slap an NPS SaaS product onto your own and call it a day — collecting your own first-party research through a regular repeatable programme will provide you with a continual flow of fantastic insights that you can use to deliver a more effective product for your customers.

Ideally all digital products being developed in health and pharma would have a dedicated product team focused on ensuring their success from day one. However, in reality, many digital products that are developed in this space are developed using a largely “project” methodology.

There are several issues with working in this way, with the most disruptive often being a solely delivery-focused mindset for the team involved, viewing the “go live” moment as the end of the project where it gets handed off to another team (or sometimes nobody at all!) to be maintained.

This contributes to the large number of sites that are approved for use in a limited time, and simply drop off the internet at the end of their approval window without anyone to add new content, get them reapproved or add new features or functionality that would support customers.

A major contributing factor to the number of sites that this happens to is the lack of clear objectives and a corresponding plan for measurement. When you approach a senior stakeholder asking for additional investment to build a product team or further the development of your existing product, but you don’t have a compelling and data-lead argument to make, it can be a challenging conversation to have.

One of the common arguments against having this kind of data to hand is that it’s difficult to prove the return on investment (ROI) for digital products that aren't directly transactional (the majority of pharma websites). Some creative thinking may be required in order to demonstrate the benefits of your digital product — something that’s a lot easier if you have had solid objectives set from the outset.

We recently hosted a virtual event, where we asked Gary Holifield, Director of Digital Strategy at Amryt Pharma to comment on some of the challenges around getting started with measurement and how to work around them in a global pharma organisation.

In case you don’t have time to watch the webinar recording in full, we’ve summarised his advice below:

• Don’t try to ‘boil the ocean’: When looking for a solution to a problem, don’t take on too much all at once or make the scope so big that it becomes difficult or even impossible to find an answer.

• Win friends and influence people: It’s always about the people first in any transformation or cultural mind shift. Think about the people and where they are. Everyone is in a different place. Meet them where they are in their individual evolution and use situational leadership. Have a tailored strategy for Conservatives, Brokers, Mavens, and early adopters.

• Always focus on the “WHY” for each KPI: Use the “5 Whys” — ask why until you get to the root of the insight and change you are trying to influence. The ultimate goal here is to “build a culture of innovation”

• Don’t make yourself ‘busy work’ – automate! If KPIs are difficult to measure they will be short-lived. Connect your data and insights, but try to only focus on what matters — don’t collect data for collection's sake. Understand the value of design and measure the progress, not individual data points.