This project showcase Philips' launching strategy for personal health record.
Healthcare is at the time of writing (2018) one of the most vulnerable industries for digital disruption.
We believe that stepping on board shouldn’t be seen as an individualistic action. The strength of this new platform lies in its possibilities for collaboration. The personal health record is envisioned as Philips Syncare with the slogan ‘Always Better Together’. This report describes the rationale behind this idea, and how Philips Healthcare can leverage it to get launch this digital platform to the consumer market.
2018 AUG
Jiun Tyng Dai / Dan Florescu /
Max Kersten / Jorn Koot
All Videos
BRANDING
Philips PHR -- SYNCARE
Hero archetype,
Empower People
PURPOSE
True collaboration creates the healthiest future.
POSITION
PERSONALITY
Trust, Intelligent,
Tailored Control,
Collaboration of Professionals
For future oriented people Philips PHR offers
a data management portal that is based on tailored collaboration with care professionals, delivering people effortless control
to achieve the confidence to let life unfold.
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The branding is aimed at future oriented people. That means people that are constantly looking to the future, which can be great as a vision, but can heavily impair your life when it comes to healthcare. People dare to take less risks, because they are afraid of what the future might hold. They don’t life in the now.
This is important for healthcare, because such a mindset brings a lot of stress and leaves out the joy. Such an emotional state worsens recovery time. So we want people to let their life unfold, don’t worry about the future. To give people this mindset they need to feel they have the power to conquer the future, be the hero of your own life. The PHR gives this confidence by building on two elements. The first element is the trust in an established company such as Philips. You are certain your personal data will be handled with care.
The second part is building a good relation with health professionals (e.g. doctors). As the research indicates healthcare need a proper two-way communication for patients to accept the provide care and thus also heal properly. The Philips PHR offers this collaboration with the possibility to connect with anyone without any effort.
COMMUNICATION
A good launch strategy requires focus, so the goal is not lost out of sight. With the use of value proposition canvasses we expanded upon the exploration of potential target user of the Philips PHR. These canvasses (appendix 1) give overview of what different target groups have to deal with. The focus was first of all decided by the fact that almost 50% of healthcare expanses goes to the top 5% of patients. A large group that is at risk for going in this group is the chronic patients. The added potential of focussing on this group is that chronic patients often have minor diseases coming along with their main problem (NVZ, 2017). This means the use of the PHR will spread to multiple departments in the hospital quite quickly.
Target Group for SYNCARE
EVERYONE
CVD PATIENT
CHRONIC PATIENT
Target group Pyramid
(Mental Disorders)
(Cancer)
(Cardiovascular disease)
size = amount of burden
CVD is the biggest physical illness that put the most burden on patients.(RVIM, 2014)
Within the group of chronic patients, an interesting sub-group was found; cardiovascular disease patients. From the physical illnesses they have the heaviest burden (RVIM, 2014), which means that it spans a long duration and requires much attention during daily life.
As a third group everyone was considered. This is a sort of base line of the possibilities. If the communication can be more generalized it has as benefit that promotion materials can be spread under a bigger group, which is cost efficient.
Insight for SYNCARE
By overlapping the value proposition canvasses for the three groups stated in the chapter before it became apparent that there are some returning factors in every case. These have been clustered into 3 key insights.
1. Communicating your situation to other people: With you have a disease that affects your lifestyle you often have to explain family and friends why you cannot do certain things. This is especially prevalent for chronic patients. Currently you also have to separately communicate to a whole bunch of care professionals your situation, since they are not yet sharing health data.
2. Dealing with changes in your lifestyle: In your life you have to face many changes which can impact your wellbeing. New technologies can make it easier, while losing someone next to you can worsen it. A disease can restrain you from even more lifestyle choices.
3. Monitoring your way of life: from cardiovascular patients having to measure their blood pressure regularly to the quantified self becoming a more prevalent way of life for everyone.
Interaction between Key Insights
Our Key Message
These 3 insights have been chosen due to their interaction with each other. As figure 10 show, the insights can be considered as being something personal or as being something that requires communication with other people (collaboration & community).
We believe that this can be the unique direction of the PHR. Most platforms focus on improving you personally, however connections to other people are almost unavoidable in your life. This is especially key for healthcare where communication is of great importance to getting you healthy as soon as possible. The Philips PHR offers this by letting you connect to any party you want.
Be open to change, and
together we can collaborate
on making your future better.
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For building a promotional campaign we need to have an idea on how to communicate the 3 key insights and their interaction. This is captured in the key message. After some iterations the result is: “Be open to change, and together we can collaborate on making your future better.”
What this key message wants to communicate to people is that your life will change, and related to health, change often doesn’t come in a good way. So it is important that you know how to deal with it. Here three problems tend to pop-up. Based on previous analyses, people can go to two extremes, they become very individualistic and want to do everything by themselves, or everything is left to the decision of the doctor, which also has been shown to worsen recovery. The third problem is when people become very future aimed to be sure they won’t get sick, but this often impairs them from enjoying the now.
Now you can collaborate with doctors, other people with the disease and Philips in an easy manner so you don’t have to be afraid of the change anymore.
SYNCARE Slogan
ALWAYS BETTER TOGETHER
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From the key message there are three words which are the essence, they are: Change, Together and Future. We established a slogan which incorporates these aspects: “always better together”, indicating that no matter how the future might change, being together will get you through it.
This slogan also fits well with the current slogan of Philips, “innovation and you”. Both are build around the idea that two (or more) entities can be make each other better. As the saying goes: the whole is greater than the sum of it’s parts.
This slogan will be a constant throughout the manifestation .
Product Name -- SYNCARE
Considering the insights and message the communication will be build on, the PHR also need a name that reflect it. To structure the creation of the name in a more objective manner the product was broken down into different levels of abstraction ranging from a straightforward description to the end values it creates. Based on this three clusters were identified: health data management, social platform for wellbeing and collaboration on a healthy future. These were used to brainstorm on names.
To evaluate which name would work best a look was taken into the name conventions that Philips has applied in the past. A clear structure is observable from this. Names often consist of the combination of two words (PerfectCare (iron), PowerPro (vacuum cleaner), FlexCare (toothbrush)) and these are combined into a new word on some occasions (Sonicare (toothbrush), Senseo (coffee machine), Ambilight (lighting)).
Based on these considerations it was decided upon Syncare-- a combination of sync (synchronizing) and care. Care is a regular returning element for Philips products and is an obvious connection to healthcare. Sync indicates the process of multiple entities merging, which often happens through some form of communication, so another way of saying collaboration
SYNCARE Visual Guildlines
A good promotional campaign needs consistency between all parts, which is why guidelines have been set-up.
Philips: we want to build upon the strong position Philips has in the perception of the consumer, which is why this style is used as a main inspiration. This means a lot of blue and grey scales.
Empowered: the main characters on the materials have to express joy with their situation, as being open to the change. As a contrast imagery of sad people can be used to indicated the state change of starting to use the platform.
Contrast: to further emphasize the benefit of using Syncare contrast are used. Next to sad and happy (people or color use), the contrast is show by having people together or alone, as the reference to the collaborative nature of the platform
Example of a SYNCARE poster
EXECUTION
A full scale launch is not possible due to the limited resources the startup subsidiary of Philips that develops the platform has available. This means a strategy is required that grows big from a small scale. Next to having to balance resources, there is also some benefit to starting small. It gives the opportunity to optimize the platform with user feedback, and creates the possibility of adjusting the launch strategy based on people’s reaction.
Launching Strategy Background.
(Cardiovascular disease)
Assuming that ambulatory contact is similarly distributed over the clusters as hospitalization. Cardiovascular disease is the most patients per diagnostic clustered in a year. (LBZ 2017)
As stated during the briefing, the preliminary plan for the launch of the PHR was to go from department to department within a hospital to keep it small scale. The branding communication was based upon insights of cardiovascular disease patients, which turns out to also be the largest diagnostic cluster (comparable to departments) in hospitals. With this cluster being twice the amount of next two clusters, it provides an excellent opportunity for scaling up use of Philips Syncare within a hospital. If every time extra departments are added to come to at least a similar amount patients as the group of departments before an exponential growth is possible.
This raises the question when extra departments should be added to roll- out. Based on the adoption curve of Rogers, Moore and Maloney say that 16% is the percentage that needs to be reached to achieve autonomous market adoption, meaning that the amount of users will increase without having to increase your promotion.
To consider what sort of promotion should be done some recognisance was undertaken into the available options at hospitals. Observed was that hospitals don’t have many fixed spots for advertisement (e.g. poster wall). Most waiting rooms feature a tv- screen, but of course this has to be shared with other videos to be shown. Looking at the flow of people, it is clear that they are very goal focussed when they move around the hospital. There are two points at which people let their gaze wander around. This is in the large lobby at the entrance and in the surroundings of the waiting room, when they are waiting. Another certainty you have for their attention, is of course the doctor or the assistant. Potentially these parties could be leveraged for the launch of Philips Syncare.
Launching Phases
Proposed is to implement the launch of Philips Syncare in different phases.
During the development doctors of the first department and their assistants will be educated to be able to use the platform as well as explain it to potential users. Also personnel, employed by Philips, is educated to man small booths that will be located in the specified department locations of the hospital. During this development phase, Philips will develop the foundation for the digital platform as well as create the content for the online presence of Syncare. of the infrastructure of Philips Syncare is needed.
Phase 1 - Infrastructure
Phase 2 - Department Launch
For the second phase Philips Syncare starts launching within the first department. As mentioned in the execution background this department is the cardiovascular department. Phase 2 will consist of a web application which is the portal to Syncare. To sign up to the web application the trained doctors and assistants can help patients coming into the department. At the entrance of the CVD department a small round table with a Philips employee will be present for advertisement and to help new users. The first phase ends when 16% (Rogers, 2003), (Maloney, 2010) of all the CVD patients have been converted to use Philips Syncare, which takes approximately 2 months.
Phase 3 - Hospital Promotion
After completing the first phase of the launch strategy Philips Syncare will be rolled out to the rest of the hospital. This will be done by taking on the rest of the departments going from largest to smallest, to have the most rapid growth. In this phase the web application will also roll-out towards the mobile phone. Lastly, the information booth will move to a more centralized area in the hospital, usually this is the main entrance hal. This phase ends when all departments have reached the 16% tipping point.
In the last phase the Syncare booth will become permanent within the hospital. It is a helpdesk people can always come to. A comparable example of how this would work is like the Apple Genius bar.
Phase 4 - Service Station
Implementation Phases for Philips SYNCARE
Implementation
The roadmap below shows the implementation of the phases for the launch. It details how the phases overlap and which materials are required for executing this plan. For the detailing the phases are explained separately.
Implementation Roadmap
Phase 1 - Infrastructure
The development doctors of the first department and their assistants will be educated to be able to use the platform as well as explain it to potential users.
Illustration of Phase 1. People from Philips demonstrating SYNCARE platform to medical professionals.
Phase 2 - Department Launch
In the second phase, Philips Syncare starts launching within the first department.The focus will be mostly on easy advertisement and registration.
Illustration of Phase 2. Stand within department..
Example of brochure for further information of Syncare
After completing the first phase of the launch strategy Philips Syncare will be rolled out to the rest of the hospital. This phase will be focusing on general assistance and promotion within the whole hospital.
Phase 3 - Hospital Promotion
Illustration of Phase 3. Lobby stand in the common area of the hospital.
The launching strategy will move onto phase 3 if the promotion of Syncare went well. We should have more budget by this phase. Ideally, Syncare will be able to have a fixed location or office in medical centers or hospital (Figure 18). Users or medical professionals will be able to walk in for help and registration in person.
Phase 4 - Long Term Service Station
Illustration of Phase 4. Syncare Service Bar in the hospital.
CONCLUSION
With the proposed launch strategy Philips is able to exponentially grow Syncare allowing for successful disruption of the healthcare industry.
The strategy takes advantage of the ongoing trend regarding the management of personal data by connecting and facilitating the collaboration between the main actors in the healthcare continuum; the patients and the medical professionals. With our proposed positioning and key message, “Always Better Together”, besides offering a quality and trustworthy data management portal, Philips will be able to differentiate Syncare from other PHR’s by focusing on the power of collaboration between people, their family and friends, and medical professionals to bring a better future for everyone.
This strategy consists of four phases. After the development phase, when the infrastructure and the necessary trainings will take place, in Phase 2 the Cardiovascular Department in the hospital will be targeted, being the biggest and having the patients with the greatest burden due to the disease. Phase 2 will last approx. two months which should allow for 16% enrollment. Phase 3 will move the focus of the campaign to the next biggest department, on one hand, and to the main common areas of the hospital, on the other. After achieving a 16% enrolment of the hospital’s patients, Phase 4 implies the set up of a long-term service point for Philips Syncare. Our research-based strategy gives Philips a roadmap and a communication plan that will maximize the patients enrolment seamlessly taking the context and resources in consideration.
Syncare, Always better together.
APPENDIX
．Appendix．
Appendix 1 - Value Proposition Canvas
