Nina Dunn's blog

When presenting to potential investors, the majority of startups concentrate on their product or service, the market demand, and the strength of their executive team. This often causes them to ignore a well-thought out marketing plan. Here is where these entrepreneurs get it wrong. Investors are looking for big ideas: ideas that can change our way of thinking, ideas that can build a highly profitable company. Without a strong message and brand positioning plan, it is very hard to imagine a company’s potential.

The time for mobile health has come. Both patients and health care providers (HCPs) are becoming increasingly dependent on mobile technologies.

This year is going to be filled with uncertainty for the health care industry—and, as a result, for health care communications. For starters, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will continue to reshape our health care system, and the Supreme Court will also decide whether an individual health care mandate is constitutional.

But even with so many political, economic and regulatory questions hanging in the air, here are four trends that will affect health care communications in 2012.

The pharmaceutical industry realizes it must participate in social media. After all, that’s where its customers — patients and health care providers — can be found. In fact, more than 65 percent of physicians use social media for professional purposes, while more than 40 percent of patients use it to find health-related information.

Now that the federal government’s CLASS Act has been shelved, the problem of paying for long-term care is back in the public eye. According to a 2011 MetLife report, the cost of a private room in a nursing home averages $87,000-plus a year, while the assisted living facility rate is more than $41,000 a year – and these massive costs are only expected to grow. Worse still, these sums do not include private aids or any of the special equipment a senior or disabled person might need.

As we're approaching the end of the year, many health care companies are creating new or revising existing PR strategies for 2012. So I thought it would be appropriate to look back at the health care developments of the passing 2011 and discuss some of the emerging trends in health care PR.

Leading healthcare companies will consistently return a profit, no matter what the economic climate, and each has its own strategies to achieve high revenues. But one strategy they all share is the streamlining and economizing of processes. This approach needn’t be limited to the production line and business strategies. Many of the world’s largest corporations have recently begun applying many of the same efficiency and quality control techniques to their communications departments.

Social media is becoming an integral part of our lives and a powerful new way to communicate. The digital realm also offers us an opportunity to access health-related information on a whole new level. Today, thanks to social networking sites, patients, healthcare professionals and companies can have personal conversations in real time, wherever they are.

According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, more than half of all Americans search for health-related information online. Across the nation, people are turning to the web to learn more about diseases and their symptoms, research medical treatment options and even select a doctor or medical facility. And these consumers are not just going to medical resources (like WebMD and Mayo Clinic), Wikipedia and company pages: they’re also consulting trusted blogs for their healthcare information and support.

Companies are always looking for foolproof communications techniques to increase the visibility and recognition of their brands. Although there are no silver bullets in public relations, one way to get greater publicity than usual is to leverage news cycles around awareness days, weeks and months. Although the number of such calendar days has significantly increased, and as a result its impact on the media has shrunk, many major awareness days/weeks are still significant enough to attract reporters’ attention.