What's a Current Example of How Marketers Are Using Health Data to Market Directly with Patients?

I think we're starting to see some, as classic customer relationship marketing campaigns begin to go mobile. You'll start to see better examples of behavioral modification kick in and not just message pushing across multiple channels. So a good example that we worked on recently was a project for Novartis where they were trying to get people to adhere to their hypertension medication.

If you think about it, I've worked with companies that build products that keep you from rejecting a kidney after you've had a kidney transplant, and if you think, they have problems adhering to that. Think about that, you've waited for three to five years for a new kidney going in for dialysis two to three times a week for up to five years, you finally get your kidney, and then you still don't take the drug that keeps your body from rejecting it.

And you think you're going to solve it for hypertension, that's mortality that you're trying to solve for mortality, and we're hard wired not to think about our health, because that means we have to admit that we're going that we have a terminal nature to our existence. So what we did for Novartis essentially is just build in this program based on the Nudge Theory of building a choice architecture, right? So these little decisions that you can make throughout the course of the day and what happens is you essentially get little pains, little things like, just so you know your arteries are like your underwear, once they're stretched they can't go back, and we found that those little nudges help people make smarter healthcare decisions and some of the preliminary data around this program is working pretty well.