A brand designer reimagines the care journey

We have a wonderful guest today. No, it’s great to have you on the show. Why don’t you introduce yourself to our audience and kind of give a little bit of your background for people who may be unfamiliar with you Jack. It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me. I am Noah Waxman. I’m one of the co-founders of cactus cactus is an interdisciplinary design firm. We started the firm with this belief that doing all things brand and strategy related was better. If combined with the skills and know-how to also do physical spaces. So rooms buildings neighborhood Master plans all things architecture related as well as digital. So all things web app interactive experiential when it comes to digital that interdisciplinary nature of our design studio is what really makes it special and you know, we started the firm without focusing at all in healthcare. In fact, none of us three founders had ever worked in healthcare. Specifically before starting this firm, but for the last now it’s almost a decade. We’ve really come to focus in what I would call Health not health care. We have a lot of hospital system clients, of course, but health and well-being and wellness is really a core of what we focus on these days and we’ve covered a number of different activations and stuff that has come out of cactus obviously been very intriguing and it looks so different than say some of the other agency work that we follow in our coverage area. I wanted to ask you because you would said before we had started this conversation like you’re not necessarily in marketing per se but you see Innovation is being this kind of key driver when it comes to Brand work and being able to get especially Health Brands out there in front of different audiences. Can you expand on that a little bit because I’m sure a lot of people just hearing your background are like, I don’t know anything about architecture. I know my marketing stuff or I’m I but you obviously are like no this is their intersections here with the industry that we cover. Absolutely. I love I love this question. It’s close to my heart. It’s part of the reason we started this company in The first place so, you know, my background is in brand and the kind of management consulting that’s focused on Innovation. And in my past often, my clients would have marketing kpi, you know a CMO or someone on the marketing team of a large corporation You know in any industry not health care and we really I sort of came up in this world believing that if you can launch new products and services that are Innovative enough that are interesting enough that solve real problems or meet real unmet needs that you’re going to get amazing organic coverage, right PR and press and so forth. That outweighs the kind of returns you can get on traditional marketing if you can really hit those hit those successes and then they other side of that. I think this is obvious is that if you have a really phenomenal product Innovation the word of mouth with your customers is also really phenomenal. So I just firmly believe in Cactus is really grounded in the idea that it be better. when it comes to healthcare to really try to make strides in improving the experience of users whether those are The patients or the staff nurses and doctors that provide the service. It actually they would cause higher results than perhaps traditional marketing could against those same kpis and are there any examples that come to mind? Because you know, it’s obviously if I’m a listener here. I’m like, oh, yeah, like we all want to be Innovative and I’m sure there are different agencies or brands are like thinking that they do Innovative work, but there’s a lot of investment in time and resources that go into it. Are there any examples on your like this is what I mean when I say Innovation and these are the results they were able to get out of it in terms of press coverage or PR. Yeah. I mean, there’s a handful of really good examples. I’ll start further outside of Health Care industry and end on healthcare industry, you know, we worked on a spot and Jim product where we build this really interesting interactive environment for Fitness where the instructor if you imagine a group fitness class, usually an instructor has control over the music we build a studio where they had control over the music and also a really powerful lighting array and the ceiling almost giving a sort of a nightclub. Fact and giving tremendous control to that to that leader of the class. That class and that space became almost more famous than the brand that we built it for and you know just got a tremendous amount of press people came and they wanted to try out working out in this special environment that we build. Another example is for a Dermatology brand that we helped launch. We built a modular system to actually allow them to open new locations faster with the kind of private rooms. You need in a Dermatology setting. And that also became a big Topic in the press the way that the new facilities were built actually from a construction standpoint was Innovative enough that it was worth coverage and the interior design was interesting and Cutting Edge at the time and enough to Garner Awards and press which drove their business and their value help them raise money actually much faster, I think. And then within Health Care Systems, we’ve worked on a couple of projects one in particular now. It’s eight plus years ago where we build an environment in a very rapid prototype methodology, but we really tried to put in place. New ways of interacting between doctors and patients and a specialty between doctors and their technology and patients and their technology and how they would intersect. And just put a lot of the practices that I think we’re going to talk about on this episode in into the into the public and that got a tremendous amount of attention from The Innovation press, you know magazines that cover technology but also Magazine’s that cover health care. We were on the Today Show for that and I think that hospital system had never really seen Press like that or organic, press like that for something. That’s so positive as user experience Innovation. For example, I appreciate those examples and I’m curious because you would kind of alluded to it in terms of best practices because again, I think they’re probably some of our listeners who are like these sound like they’re very intriguing ideas. I want to be able to pursue that but where do I go about even starting that one in terms of best practices? I’m curious if there’s any sort of advice you would lend to them in terms of hey, this is how you can get started because you know, I’m sure a lot of brands are like, hey, I’ve not only want to be an industry press by wanting to be able to extend my sphere of influence beyond the station show have that word of mouth. Where does somebody even need to start on that front? Yeah. I mean one thing that I think is really important and that I’ve talked about publicly in the past. Is that designers? be brought into the conversations in Health Systems before there are projects before there are specific pieces of land and budgets for a new hospital or before there’s a renovation slated or before someone within or some group within the hospital has green lit and budgeted for a new app or a new kind of interactive software that patients or doctors or nurses would touch Bring designers who are multidisciplinary designers or experiential designers people who think about end users and are familiar with humans entered design bring those people in before. There’s an RFP or an or an agreement or a budget and let those types of designers identify with. the groups that tend to make those decisions where to focus time and money and resources, right? So today if you look at the way and the specialty this is getting better, but especially historically over the last 20 30 years. There have not been designers as part of these planning groups or strategy groups within Health Systems. There are hospitalists, you know business people there are marketers for sure. There are also of course doctors of course super important at that table and there may even be engineers and digital technology experts, but that’s not the same thing. You know, I T is not the same thing as the kind of designer who’s used to working in both digital and experiential design and and fluent enough to be able to affect facility and human-powered service design and digital design. You can get designers Upstream to plan with you. Oh, that’s where the magic happens you start to identify opportunities for impact and then you can write a brief or write an RFP. And act against those opportunities that’s where you’re going to have the ability to have bigger impact that can get the kind of press that we’re talking about and maybe achieve some marketing metrics. And I can imagine too that that those same principles have a universal quality and could apply to say the farm and biotech brands that marketers are audience follow too. It’s not really just siloed off to what provider organizations and Health Systems can do I can imagine the drug makers can say oh, yeah, we could incorporate design more than we have in the past. Absolutely. I mean, I would I would say that I personally have not worked for the Pharma industry in a very long time and not on Innovation, but I would be interested to know what both marketers and CEOs are directors are product leaders within the farmer World think of innovation and how that obviously is there there’s bio and biotech Innovation with the actual drugs, but beyond that What do we mean when we say Innovation? I think that’s a really interesting question for a design-minded group to work on I want to take a little bit of a step back. I’m curious what if from your perspective maybe marketers get wrong about design because I’m sure that they look at themselves and they say hey, we’re in charge of these operations. We’ve got the strategies. We’ve got the protocols and like design maybe like a nice to have for them where it’s like. Oh, yeah, like this could be something that kind of adds to what we’re doing. But like you’re you’re making this case where it’s like you have to incorporate design from the get-go. You want it at the Inception of whatever sort of project you’re going with is their kind of that misunderstanding. Is there a disconnect with with the marketing Community? Yeah. I mean, I think that there is a grouping of of marketing and design or marketing perhaps and what what are often called like the insights team or the consumer experience sometimes customer experience team that essentially everything is about driving. Sales or driving brand awareness. I actually think that design as a word on the disciplines that we’re talking about today, right facilities architecture digital product design and service design specifically at these really can. Can throw more weight can throw more impact around can have more impact? than simply marketing kpi sure, it’s true that marketing kpis are are one of the things that good design can impact when implemented but Recruiting for example and and retention of doctors and nurses is a thing that we recently have worked a lot on the efficiency with which doctors and nurses can get up to speed on any given patients conditions and Status something that we’ve recently worked on the ways in which nurses and doctors do scheduled in their day-to-day life. So affecting the day-to-day operations of some of these organizations is all so I think a great space to to focus the design angle. It’s not just about sort of outward facing Layer, it’s really getting to the heart of some of the key business activities and key business challenges and goals. Once it sounds like kind of what I’ve seen other marketers talk about too where it’s like it’s not only about communicating with consumers and trying to you know have the brand be affected that way but also talking to hcp seeing what their concerns are and being able to remedy that too which is a whole other can of worms totally. It’s you know designers are trained to bring. empathy into business practice empathy for users into into business practice and they’re trained to be able to identify problems and unmet needs in a way that turns them into projects that can be addressed where things can be invented and built. Almost sort of in a fresh eyes. I like to say fresh eyes, you know not polluted by all the knowledge of the weeds of what it takes to sort of day-to-day operate a hospital to be able to look at these really complex problems see opportunity in them and address them against their creativity and Innovation and invention and again goes back to what we’ve heard other guests on the show talk about where it’s this whole idea of not treating patients unlike consumers like other sectors do such a better job in terms of like really emphasizing that experience and saying like, oh no this should be something that’s very seamless and have not have a lot of friction. But then you look at the healthcare experience whether that’s in the provider side we’re saying if I’m trying to figure out how much my procedures going to cost and price transparency is an issue there or if I’m trying to figure out if I’m qualified for this medication on the farm and biotech side and seeing whether or not I’m you know, qualified to be able to have my doctor write that it’s not as seamless it almost Like these kind of things pop up where a organization or companies like. Oh, yeah. Here’s something that’s consumer-friendly and that’s somehow a Eureka moment rather than something that’s more par for the course. I guess you can say for these brands. Yeah, I mean. That that’s totally right. I think that listen when we talk about health care today and how it’s going to change between now and the near future. I think that we’re at a point that’s similar when I look back in the history of computing. You know in the 1950s and 60s and 70s. Computers were really powerful and really strong and we sent a man to the Moon using those computers, right but they were they were operated Bowl only by a very highly trained very few people and that is the same I think for healthcare today. And probably true for biotech and Pharma as well. Right? These are incredible industries that have produced incredible literally quite literally life-saving invention and Innovation and Incredibly rapid pace. Over the last many decades. However, the Corpus of knowledge involved in human health and the way that we take care of each other as a society is actually locked up in the minds of very very few very highly trained people and if you think about the history of computers after the 1970s what happened, right? The graphical user interface was invented in the 80s and all of the sudden by the 90s you’ve got all sorts of different people using computers to do all sorts of different things that no one had ever really imagined before and I actually think that we’re at that similar Tipping Point in healthcare where the explosion in startups taking interest in healthcare a lot of innovation coming from within Hospital Systems a lot of changes to the Health Care landscape in general and the rise in digital technology entering finally sort of consumerist. View of healthcare and digital technology precipitating that is going to be this Tipping Point where more knowledge is made available and accessible to more types of people and more settings and they’ll be able to navigate the care themselves and it’ll also mean that more types of human beings with different types of degrees and trainings will be able to provide care you think about like what’s the role in the future of a social worker or a mental health professional and nutritionists and even a care nicator to your question just understanding. the the dollars and cents on an individual’s Specific care Journey, you know, how do you integrate other types of people into a holistic care Journey? That’s the kind of stuff that I think we see in the near future and its precipitated by by digital technology. It’s wonderful here you talk about on a practical basically, I think people talk in these kind of high-minded terms about what Innovation and what digital Health can look like but it really is kind of taking in saying oh no, this can be something that’s much more democratized as far as Healthcare goes rather than just kind of like, oh, yeah, wouldn’t it be it’s almost the same way that people used to talk about like well now we’ve put it on the moon like we’re going to flying cars and stuff and it was this kind of like, you know, just throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks whereas like, no, we have a lot of stuff already. It’s just being able to spread it out flat in the playing field. If you will and have more people in there. It’s it’s interesting any time talking to people in like people that join the industry and they say, oh, well, you know, I wasn’t as familiar with Healthcare when we all go through our various Healthcare Journeys. We all have our experiences. We’re all very able to bring that expertise there. It doesn’t just have to be if you Have a PhD or an mph or something like that. Like you have a role to play and you can advance the ball down the field totally. I mean, listen, it’s No surprise to anyone regardless of their profession that today when we you know, at least in the United States go. Get health care. Our experience stands in stark contrast to the experience probably of like getting to the doctor’s office. Eating lunch that day, you know, navigating an airport buying something online and having it delivered. There’s all of these parts of our lives that have become so heavily intermediated by digital technology to great effect. and Healthcare tends to not be that way to your point. I think we can all sort of sense that that must change very soon. And I just hope that Hospital systems and the new sort of you know, technology businesses that are entering Healthcare put the kind of design. Phase into these things appropriately and not jump to engineering which is a huge problem. If you look into the recent history in the healthcare industry. Because if you do you’re going to get these great effects, which so many of America’s big tech companies have taught us over the last few Generations know I’ve really appreciate you being on the show here and being able to offer what I think is a very unique lens on the industry and and how our audience in particular can think about things I want to give you the last word in case there’s anything that you want in part to them or just keep in mind and keep on their radar going forward as they kind of, you know, whether they’re on the hospital and health system side or even on the farm and biotech side. Yeah. I think there’s a couple of things that I am thinking about a lot these days and that the cactus is working on these days one is just this idea of being able to as individuals understand our own minds and bodies. We have these incredible vessels that we all exist in our bodies and understanding how they work. Being able to see early warning signs before they become symptoms before they become quote unquote treatable conditions. Is obviously so important to any of us that have a body. It or a mind so thinking about that with a sense of wonder and Intrigue is I think really refreshing within the healthcare industry and I actually do not think that it’s so far off for Healthcare Systems to be able to bring that sense of wonder and possibility back into the picture as they think about Innovation within their service Lines within their facilities within their digital experiences. The second thing I think is really important. As we talk about Innovation is to think about how doctors what it’s like to be a doctor or a nurse. a lot of the reason that people sign up for this type of profession is to help other human’s and to work together in a really fast-paced Dynamic environment with other really smart people who they can learn from and I think that in today’s professional environment in a healthcare system. A lot of that is actually been taken away from the day-to-day job and so a big Focus for us is how do you allow teams of doctors to work more easily together through the application of well, you know well-designed application of Technology. How do you change what it’s like for a nurse to treat a very busy slate of patients? And how do you bring in these other types of caregivers? Right as I mentioned before Mental Health Nutrition family Dynamics and and those those aspects and to what extent can facilities and digital products Aid that kind of broadening of the of the caregiver team? So those are the two things. I would really want your listeners to think about when they think about innovation in the Healthcare System. Awesome. Well, no. Again, this is really intriguing conversation. I appreciate you being able to kind of offer this this different perspective on the industry, and hopefully it’s got people in our audience really thinking about things in a different way and concerning how they can Institute some of these best practices listed off. So, thank you again for being on the show really appreciate it totally a pleasure anytime. Thanks Jack. So for this weeks. Segment we were debating between a number of things one of them being the reunion of Oasis, but for the sake of our listeners, we are going to instead focus on the farm industry and as Mark talked about at the top to direct a consumer plays one from Pfizer one from Eli Lilly. We’ll start with Pfizer Branch into the Lily one and then talk about how both kind of parallel each other in terms of what it’ll mean for the industry. But Pfizer this morning, we’re recording on Tuesday launched Pfizer for all which is their direct consumer site. This has been the subject of some media speculation due to a trademark. They had filed a couple weeks ago for that phrase people were wondering if I was going to be a new marketing effort and it is come to pass that’s going to be a DTC site similar in the vein of what we saw with Lily direct from Eli Lilly back in the spring and Mark. I want to bring you in because we were talking offline. This really does mere what we’ve seen from Lily, but it could be kind of a harbinger of what we see drug makers do in terms of how they’re interacting with the general public and consumers going forward. Yes. Thanks. I think what it shows is, you know, Mark Cuban’s influence, you know, really being felt in the healthcare industry specifically in Pharma Mark Cuban has made no secret of looking for ways to remove friction points and trying to make the health care experience more friendly, you know with his Pharmacy and also his comments and we’ve been kind of stress testing. If you will the notion that these kinds of direct consumer platforms could become the Future Farmers go to market or you know future component at least a farmers go to market Playbook at the last couple of round tables that have moderated and there seems to be you know, a growing majority of marketers that feel that we will see more of these on the horizon and not just from Lily and Pfizer, you know, if you look at the Pfizer one, which launched as Jack noted, you know Pfizer for all it offers a pretty wide range of services from covering. Things various disease States migraine covid-19 flu RSV and pneumococcal pneumonia you can you know connect with a health professional for telemedicine visit. You can get prescribed a drug and I could imagine they’ve got some kind of end-to-end Pharmacy dispensary as well. You can get it delivered to the home and you know, obviously it’s not rocket science, you know, it reflects the growing difficulty that a lot of patients experience with the health system and the complexity involved and what marketers are saying at the round tables is that this is an inevitable part of the Pharma marketing Playbook anywhere or Logistics is an issue. We could see this crop up not just in those kinds of consumer oriented categories, you know, like we’ve seen say with birth control or you know hair loss like we’ve seen the rows of the world and the hems and herses or heed those kinds of things but Pfizer’s offering it as I said for migraine and patients with other disease States even heard one market. Say, you know selling Gene therapies, you know, we could see it expanded to that area, you know because Logistics is such an issue there obviously anywhere or a Rems program is involved, you know, where there’s serious side effects that we monitored. It’s probably a no-go, you know, so we won’t see this obviously with you know, oncology indications, but you know, we could see it again and some of these more complex areas Xcel Energy therapies also anywhere stigmas and as we sell with the products hair loss products and you know, even one person mentioned that it’s also a reflection of the growing wave of physician burnout, you know, and the great resignation which took a toll on healthcare workers in the country and you know, it takes longer now to to get drunk refills to get appointments in some cases and so the contactless experience is sort of the wave of the future. Yeah. I want to bring leche in here because I want to talk about the news that we got from lily as well. But I just want to make one point which is that I’m still kind of amazing. I had the same sentiment when I was covering hospitals during the start of the covid-19 pandemic in 2020. Just like how long it has taken to get to something which I like of people I imagine think is something of common sense. Like when there was this big rush of oh, well Telehealth is taking off because we can’t leave our homes or we have to social distance or whatever. That was something where it’s like well, yeah, it kind of always should have like the fact that it took 20 years into this Century to get to that point and now drug makers are even a step behind that we’re now suddenly they’re saying oh, yeah, we’re gonna go to Consumers and they’re going to be able to go and find where they can set up their RSV vaccine appointment or look for cost saving programs for prescription at their own or something like that. It’s kind of like for lack of a better term like duh, like of course, it should always be to this and maybe we’re going to start to see more drug makers now that Lily is obviously leading the field with their glp ones and Pfizer’s like maybe we start to see other big Pharma Rivals get involved in that but it’s always just kind of struck me as this Kind of yeah, it probably should have always been there to begin with. Yeah, I think to your both of your points and leading into our next topic. the Obesity Weight loss space I think is going to be a big area where these DTC platforms will come into play especially as more farmer players including Pfizer have been trying to break into the Obesity space and just today Eli Lilly announced that it will be making new versions of its weight loss. Drugs that bound available on its DTC platform Lily direct and these new versions are going to be significantly cheaper than the current injectables that cost up to 10 dollars a month for people without insurance. So they’ll be selling 2.5 milligram and five milligrams single dose vials that patients can access through a self-pay farmacy part of Lily direct and among supply of the 2.5 milligram dose will cost 300.99 or about 99 dollars per vial and a month supply of the five milligram dose is 549. So that’s a pretty big savings compared to the 1000 dollars a month of its current injectable version. Of Zeppelins and Patrick Johnson who is EVP and president of Lily cardio metabolic health and the USA. Said in a statement that making these available are going to be part of the company’s efforts to boost the supply of set bound amid growth amid ongoing drug shortages, but some experts are also saying that the move is meant to take action against some of the Telehealth companies and unlicensed clinics that are selling compounded versions of GOP ones as people seek cheaper alternatives and you know, basically Eli Lilly signaling to the space that we’re going to get this market share back from all of these places that are selling compounded versions, even if it means lower pricing, they also said that making sure that patients can get these files through Lily direct is meant to ensure that patients can trust that they’re receiving actual Lily medicine rather than the quotes come counterfeit fake unsafe or untested knockoffs. It was also interesting that Eli Lilly said the self-paid channel allows for more transparency into the price by removing third party supply chain entities and allowing patients to access savings directly outside of insurance. So I think it’s a significant move for Lily on many fronts, you know on drug pricing on efforts to address drug shortages and obviously this compounded dual P1 issue. So it’s a pretty significant move in my opinion. Yeah, I just want to piggyback a little bit on what Lesha brought up there because I agree like if if there is a winner of today or of this week, it seems like it’s Lily with the fact that they’re coming out their first saying like hey, we have a lower cost version of a very popular drug. We’ve already got our service up Lily direct and now we have you know, basically somebody following in their Footsteps in terms of Pfizer and they’re looking across the way if they’re one main competitor at this point the glp one space Novo who has neither they don’t have a lower cost for their drug. They don’t have their own direct-to-consumer model the way that Pfizer is now following and Lilies footsteps. So, you know, I know I’ve just took a look over here and novo’s prices doing fine. But if you type in Novo and see the first headlines that pop up it’s their CEO defending their price points and saying like, oh, yeah. Our price point is a little high but you know, it’s the way it is and talking about the supply issues and Lily which just got back to having their glp ones in full Supply with the FDA per their website is kind of chugging along so I’m with you last I think this is a A great sign for what Lily has going forward. Obviously, we’re going to see more competitors into the space where you’re seeing the likes of roach and Pfizer and other ones trying to make inroads Zealand Pharma as well. But certainly Lily has got a lot of momentum here Mark. What’s your take on this? Yeah. I’m surprised also that Novo hasn’t you know launched one of these platforms of their own as you mentioned Millions. I’ve seen up to 2 million American patients as the estimate are getting regular doses of semaglutide. Chemical name for Nova wagovy ozempic and Rebels this formulations or Teresa tied, which is the active ingredient in zip and Lily through compounded versions, you know, so this seems like an easy way to kind of try to get eaten to that share that they lost during those many months when there were supply issues. And as you mentioned, you know, Lily’s got its supply of the starter doses, you know back off of the shortage list, but no I think is still conspicuously behind there as well. So, you know, maybe they could be working on getting that Supply up and running and perhaps they have this, you know lined up to go once they get the supply on track as the last thing you might do I guess is create demand stimulate demand when you can’t satisfy the market so, you know just kind of reading into that they could be why they haven’t done so but yeah this seems like a very low cost low effort low risk way lawyer of course, but you know from a marketing pears. Effective, you know to kind of to eat into these millions of Americans that are patients that are lost to using copies of The Real McCoy. Yeah, and I like the point unless you’re that you brought up to where it’s this does give a look into the transparency not only of the price which obviously is a main concern for consumers, but also making sure that you’re getting the real product. I mean we’ve we’ve covered it on our site the amount of people have been getting these knockoff glp ones and the sickness and the risk that comes with it. And now Lily is able to say one. We’re cutting out that side or at least giving you a better angle into what you’re getting and I imagine that then the Salvage is a little bit more trust with a consumer which is always the benefit for a brand. Yeah anything that you know Makes You The Trusted one and reinforces that trust that’s not only good for your bottom line, but it’s it’s a so good for the whole industry. So would expect to see Novo our Danish friends there follow suit, so we will keep an eye on this. Thanks for joining us in this week’s episode of the mmm podcast. Be sure to listen to next week’s show. We’ll be joined by a special guest to discuss some mmm related news. That’s it for this week. The mmm podcast is produced by Bill Fitzpatrick Gordon failure lesbian. Our theme music is by Susie himself rate review and follow every episode wherever you listen to podcasts new episodes out every week and be sure to check out our website and then life and online.com for the top news stories at Farmer marketing.