Boston, MA. – Earlier this year, Wego Health launched a new platform that connects patients with healthcare entities with one goal: connect the patient’s experience with said entity to the patient’s social networks. Those entities, in turn, pay influencers for access to their experiences, expertise, and followers.
While this has been a wildly popular avenue for retail brands to tap into new audiences and networks, this is a first of it’s kind for the pharma industry. With over 100,000 active members, Wego has several processes in place to make sure everything is kept in check. Armed with the latest artificial intelligence software, they constantly monitor members feeds to make sure representation is honored from the original contract.
In some sense, influencers in health care aren’t any different from those in fashion or food blogging; they all have conflicts of interest, says Jeff Belkora, a health policy researcher and director of the Patient Support Corps at the University of California, San Francisco
Why This Matters –
As we continue to monitor our 2017 trends, several touch on the need to continue to bring in the patient’s voice early and often. Another interesting angle is how this article touches on the work our inVentiv Behavioral Insights team is doing around social centricity and the need to not only influence the patient’s immediate caregivers, but also the many layers of influence that surround them. You can read more about our complete 2017 trends here and our recent social centricity report here.
