Moving Digital Health

Moving Digital Health: Chris Cullmann of Rev Health

Episode Summary

Chris Cullmann, Executive Vice President and General Manager at RevHealth, joins MindSea CEO Reuben Hall to discuss opportunities and challenges in marketing to physicians. An experienced digital strategist, Chris unpacks several pivotal questions around privacy and data ownership in the context of healthcare. He offers a glimpse into the patient perspective and illustrates the potential of digital marketing to serve patient populations in unprecedented ways. https://mindsea.com/moving-digital-health-chris-cullmann-of-revhealth/

Episode Notes

Over his more than 20 years as a digital strategist and 15 years in healthcare, Chris has developed a well-rounded perspective that unites marketing, technology, and the user experience. He particularly enjoys working at the intersection of technology and communication.

At RevHealth, Chris brings his unique expertise to bear toward empowering clients to effectively reach and educate physicians and patients exploring therapy options.

Chris outlines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on data usage and nonpersonal communications, describes recent breakthroughs he’s observed in digital therapeutics, and shares what elements of his current RevHealth projects have him most excited. 

Moving Digital Health: Chris Cullmann of RevHealth - MindSea: App Design & Dev Agency, focusing on HealthTech

Key takeaways include specific use cases and examples: 

• How a single API, with the right add-ons, can provide both non-invasive support for a patient and peace of mind for their caregivers—if the necessary data is accessible
• How data from a wearable device like the Apple Watch can create a shared language and change the parameters of a patient-physician dialogue
• Instances where data creates opportunity for intervention and helps solve for the problem of poor patient self-reporting

Challenges around patient perceptions of data sharing: 

• Ethical questions around the ownership of personal health data
• Critical differences between individual data and group data
• “Data philanthropy,” and how physicians can help encourage this modern benevolence among patients
• Viable value propositions for which consumers might be motivated to trade their data

The critical role of storytelling in patient communications:

• Creating a narrative that meets the user in their journey
• Mediums and techniques Chris sees working best for patient communications
• How privacy restrictions have impacted marketers’ ability to reach patient populations

Chris also shares some future-facing insights, such as: 

• Usage possibilities and the vast potential value of high-volume data
• Data integrity and ownership questions that must be resolved
• Why he believes data inoperability will be the next major challenge for the U.S. healthcare market, and what he thinks might be necessary to address it

Links 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/cullmann/

https://www.revhealth.com

Quotes

• “What's really interesting about the healthcare market is we have an audience, the prescriber, who's not our end user—the patient is the one we're addressing with therapies—but the decision maker, and one that in some cases rate limits what our actual end user, the patient, is seeing. Because they're making the recommendations against their professional experience and the craft and training.”
• “There's still a lot of opportunity for us to intelligently listen, in a respectful way for privacy, to help lend a narrative that's going to have a more meaningful user experience, and one that's going to really help participate in putting the right materials in front of someone who's in a position to make a decision about either their own therapy or a therapy for their patients.
• “We need to discuss culturally and figure out how comfortable we are and what are going to be the guidelines. I don't mean necessarily federal guidelines, although they are important, but what are the cultural agreements we're going to have about anonymized data, and, in particular, being able to help other people who exist inside of the same patient population that we do, and being able to provide something that is really giving back to the community in the true sense of the word.”
• “If you're a patient suffering from a disease, that's content that is really not only valuable, but that you find personally compelling. And you’re going to be drawn to those people like you who are going through the same kind of experiences.”
• “When we talk about people's perception of data and privacy, I think one of the stumbling blocks is people don't have context to their data . . . they don't know what they're exchanging because they don't know where they fit.”
• “There's going to be a value adjustment against that data model. People are going to start to realize they're giving up a lot in exchange for a little. And there's either going to be a rise of privacy and paying for services, or there are going to be a lot more protection mechanics…put in place in order to allow people to have a clear delineation into what they're putting forth versus what they're getting in exchange for their data.”
• “[Storytelling] has got to be specific to the product. And it's got to be specific to where the product is in the marketplace too. Not every brand’s a hero. Sometimes, being able to have information in front of the patient that's really matter-of-fact is everything that patient needs.”