Insights Out_Angelo Campano: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Natanya Wachtel:
Brands that can connect with their audiences more viscerally and more authentically will always be successful. With the Insights Out podcast, you will get access to deep and detailed conversations with the heads of leading organizations to understand how they are making their customer relationships work best and how we can all become more aligned to deliver strong value exchanges and better realize the benefits. I’m your host, Dr. Natanya Wachtel. Welcome.
Natanya Wachtel:
Hello there! Welcome to another edition of Insights Out, a spotlight on modern solutions that put customer data to work. We unearth game-changing intelligence, predicting customer needs, and seamlessly connecting insights into measurable action everywhere your brand touches your customers. Today, I’m excited to have my dear friend and colleague Angelo Campano. He is the SVP of Marketing Engagement at OptimizeRx. Angelo is a trailblazer in innovation and leadership in the digital and provider experience. He’s got deep experience in strategy, implementation, and optimization. He’s embedded himself as an innovator on the product toolsets for EHR platforms and many EHR service providers with a focus on integrated omnichannel strategies that improve the care journey. Welcome, Angelo.
Angelo Campano:
Thanks for having me.
Natanya Wachtel:
You got it. I was wondering if we could start out with you just telling us a little bit about what you’re doing today and kind of what excites you, and a little bit about sort of your journey into getting this role.
Angelo Campano:
Oh, no, for sure. So my background, I started in pharma. I’ve only known pharma for my entire life, pretty much. Come from a pharma family, my entire family still works for Pfizer, which cracks me up. I went a different direction, didn’t go to Pfizer like all of them, and ended up going to a different manufacturer for many years and carrying the sales bag. From there I moved into agency world, really learning how to support the clients and support the manufacturers in many different ways, before I took a jump to the EHR side. It’s where I am today, but my whole career has been mainly focused in very much delivering information to the clinician, making sure they have the most information available to them, whether it was agency, pharma, current day. My journey there actually is kind of a, give you a little personal story. I actually, I lost my mother at a very young age, I was 16 years old. From a completely avoidable misdiagnosis. She had MS, came down with what they thought was bronchitis, diagnosed with bronchitis, and told her that’s what she had for, gosh, a solid year and a half, I want to say, during the time that she had MMS, but really the MS was masking what she had as lung cancer, as bronchitis. Never went to an oncologist, never once thought it was a concern, but was admitted to a hospital, was diagnosed with lung cancer, passed away seven days later. So my whole health journey, both of my personal life of being able to focus on health and fitness and diet and all those things, as I still do, and it’s my passion in many ways, I’ve moved that into.
Natanya Wachtel:
I’m well aware and very proud of, inspires me often for better health choices.
Angelo Campano:
Yes, it’s, yeah, it’s a little, I guess not a secret anymore about me, but I usually keep that pretty close. But no, I mean that, so I’ve taken a lot of that and kind of applied it to what I do day to day in the pharma world of, if there’s a way that we could find a get a doctor better information to better support a patient or even support a patient in a better way, that they’re more educated with what they’re dealing with. Really, it’s getting people to be aware, ask the questions. I mean, I know clinicians and the health IT world, they typically look at pharma in a like a eh kind of way, but really there’s value there. There’s a lot that we can be giving and doing and getting information in their hands that can be very useful. And I bring it back full circle here to OptimizeRx, my company, being able to deliver that in the doctor’s own EHR system when they’re with the patient is a crucial time, and any way that I can help get that to happen in a smarter way, I’m there every time.
Natanya Wachtel:
No, that’s incredible, and listen, sorry that I had you open a vein, but I think it’s a beautiful thing, and thank you for sharing that publicly, because it also gives an authenticity and I think a compassion to the discipline around how you’re executing that vision and dream and commitment to bettering care. You know, it’s marketing, it’s a vehicle, it’s a means to an end, and I think people often think of it just from sort of the promotional benefit or the sales impact and that kind of thing. And I think shedding a light on why you do what you do and that it is such a personal drive to help others and comes from a personal place is actually really profound. So thank you for that.
Angelo Campano:
You got it.
Natanya Wachtel:
But shifting gears to lighter things, but with that, right, I thought we could talk about, since you’ve been in the space, as you said, for a while, sort of it’s in the blood to some trends that we’re seeing in industry where you’re working. And I thought we could start out with sort of the general trend around, obviously, COVID-19 has taught marketers that technology is continuing to play a role in how people, including HCPs, interact with one another, right? So in and out of the workplace, smartphones, tablets, CTV, wearables, it’s more to day to day interactions are happening over tech. We have 84% or something, I think was the last stat that physicians are now offering virtual visits. We have smartphone use for all customers, if you will, up something exponentially, 240% estimated increase connected wearable devices with health care capabilities, and now the EHR system rate is around 89% in terms of where hospitals are. So I was looking to see your thoughts on some of the digital-first HCPs, which we always look at the, sort of early adopters, is now becoming more mainstream, and how some of this has been informing ad or marketing strategies on the back end, so from the planning side that this consumption is fueling this new approach and discipline to marketing and planning.
Angelo Campano:
No, geez, how much time do we have?
Natanya Wachtel:
Yeah, I know it’s a big question.
Angelo Campano:
I think a lot of folks don’t, I mean, maybe folks do realize this, but when we look at large health systems, we take pick any one of them, Cleveland Clinic, just picking one out of the hat. Right there, their systems are all fully connected. I mean, everything that they’ve created within their health system and what they’re doing, how they do it, it’s meant that everything is to talk to each other. So in a lot of ways, the offices and the different, even though they’re using typically older systems, from what you can see, they’re very well versed in talking to each other. I’ll give you a really good example of that is, I live in northern New Jersey as you, Natanya, so.
Natanya Wachtel:
Not everyone knows all our stuff, …
Angelo Campano:
There you go. Let’s see, New York Presbyterian Hospital, not too far from us, they know, they maintain NYP proper in Midtown. They have Columbia and Cornell and Cornell Medical Centers additionally plus affiliates that are all over the tri-state area. Typically, if you ask any clinician in NYP, what do you use, they’re going to say one name, … Crown is what they call it. The reality of it is Crown actually isn’t anything. It’s what NYP named their data management EHR system that connects all of their systems together. In reality, they’re all using very different systems.
Natanya Wachtel:
With all different API calls and from different places.
Angelo Campano:
Exactly, all their telehealth stuff, their EHR stuff, the connected wearables, the applications that they’ve created for the system. So they’ve made their, and a lot of systems follow suit, we look at like the big oncology systems like MSK or Texas oncology or even going out west to UCLA Berkeley and so on, very similar paths. But we sort of paint this picture as with all these things tethered together, environs have become very data-rich. So not just from a marketing perspective of us utilizing the data, which I’ll talk about for sure in a minute, but also within the system, they’re utilizing things or health system. They’re utilizing things from all of these different connected places to better define how they treat a patient. Another really good example I can give you in that same vein is in the South and in North Carolina, a system called WakeMed, not a big system. They’ve developed AI, artificial intelligence, machine learning, utilizing the data in the system to identify patients that are showing risk of being depressed, utilizing data points that have absolutely nothing to do about depression. So think about that as now switching gears to a marketer, think about everything with data-rich and using that WakeMed example, there’s the ability now within many different places that that data can be used at the manufacturer level to do what WakeMed is doing at scale across all of their customer offices. The data exists, the technology exists, they can learn a lot. We could learn a lot from WakeMed is doing and put that in practice in ourselves, helping identify patients when they’re at risk of things, predicting the behaviors to be ahead of any disease or state that the patient really could be in, or what the doctor could potentially be looking for.
Natanya Wachtel:
That’s brilliant. My head went to also some of the things we were talking about early on in terms of traditional approaches to treatment paradigms. And just in a call I had with someone else, you know, talking about how when I started out as well in chronic and long term diseases, things that today we consider constellations in the same disease set like depression, a major depressive disorder with diabetes, with oncology, with those things. There sort of people accept those things now, right? Is like these are likely comorbids or constellation events, but it’s still being mapped. And the fact that now we can shed a light on, because of these integrated data sets, whether we talk about things, proclivities for addiction, for example, or relapse or other things that may or may not have been had indices in other ways, but now we can look at data on a mass scale as well, right, ultimately. So that’s really incredible. So it can be for how we connect, how we educate, how we support, and how we look at treatment protocols. So I think that’s a great point, thank you.
Angelo Campano:
Absolutely.
Natanya Wachtel:
That’s awesome. So kind of with that, but a level maybe further from the clinical side and more onto the promotional side and functionally in how we do some of these things, I thought maybe we could talk about some of the new trends, if you will, in the awareness on MPI tracking with digital media and how you see what you see sort of the evolution there. Again, I know that’s a big question, but sort of high level where we were maybe pre-pan and where you see brands are today.
Angelo Campano:
No, for sure. Are out of the pandemic? I think we’re still in it.
Natanya Wachtel:
Well, I meant, I didn’t mean we were done, but I just meant the shift that has occurred in terms.
Angelo Campano:
Of saying pre-March 2020.
Natanya Wachtel:
Yeah, pre-March 2020.
Angelo Campano:
Gosh, you know, I struggle with that question a lot. I’ll be honest. It’s like, I’ve been in, like, the digital space, kind of pushing it for so long, not pushing it, but promoting it and talking about its benefits for so long. And I look at the pandemic and then post-pandemic, and I feel like there’s like that part of me that wants to say, like I told you so. I told you digital would work, I told you guys should be moving in this front. So seeing marketers move away from like these big budgets around newsprint and publications and everything, and then work with publishers in a way that they went from, I need to be in this magazine to, Hey, I need to be in your programmatic network, which I can talk a little bit about for sure, folks to know what that means. That’s a huge shift and an exciting one in my mind because we went from going to a publisher and saying, I know this magazine is distributed to X amount of offices across the country, in the offset chance that the clinician is going to read the magazine, see the information, the brochure in the magazine, versus now, when we look at things like from following the data that we talked about and then looking at things like programmatic, point of care, following the clinician by their by who they are, where they are, what they’re doing, and all of those data points, those ads aren’t really ads anymore. They become clinical information that the clinician is seeing at the time that they need it. I talk a lot about, in my current day-to-day, about intent behaviors, clinicians showing signs of what they’re doing by means to diagnose or prescribe essentially. So those intent behaviors become, you know, talking to a clinician when they absolutely need the information. It’s comparable, in really funny ways, like I was shoe shopping this morning and now I’m getting ads for Nike everywhere I go because they know I’m intent to buy and I’m going to buy if I see the right ad with the right coupon, 100%, I’m going to click on it and buy the ad, buy the Nikes because I’m in the market for them at the moment. I know it’s a simple comparison, but clinically.
Natanya Wachtel:
But also across devices, right? So between when you’re at your desk versus on your phone or that’s another thing where we weren’t necessarily able to do cross-device tracking.
Angelo Campano:
Right, it’s funny, you know, I brought up Nike. They’re actually, if you go way back to 2014, 2013, got away back a whole eight years ago, they were really the innovators of that. They, at the time, they developed the Nike FuelBand, if you remember, that was, it was like the first ever Fitbit or before the Apple Watch.
Natanya Wachtel:
Used that as a case study when trying to get people to think about what was the Apple Tool kit, pioneer land of that before Fitbit. …
Angelo Campano:
That’s awesome, I didn’t know that. But they, the vision for the Nike FuelBand was like they were going to track your fitness and kind of what you did day to day, your activity levels, and then they’re going to map that to where you like to shop within Nike, where you like to go online with the Nike, what, five days or marathons or sporting events you are part of, what your sports teams are that you’re a fan of, and really create this like full experience for a Nike customer, making you one more app to buy Nike products, which is the whole point. But two, really staying with you, of course, across your life cycle, your journey, your fitness levels, and really kind of growing with you. So we look at things like programmatic EHR point of care, their intent is very much like the mentality that Nike FuelBand, those, we’re going to follow you where you go, we’re going to grow with you, we’re going to provide you information when you need it, and we’re not going to bother you when you don’t want to be bothered, but really only be there when you need us. Which was, really, again, the view that Nike had with the FuelBand many years ago.
Natanya Wachtel:
Yeah, no, and I think another side of that is so as the customer or the HCP, as the recipient of the end benefit there along the lines of, let’s say information services or products, that’s one level as well as for the manufacturer, Nike or Pfizer or whomever, right, ir the IDN, right, the hospital system, or whomever is sort of managing the decisions around what happens with that data, what you were saying before about the disease indicators or other things that could be predicted, anticipating the needs before they become so urgent where they can’t fulfill them, right? So we’ve seen that around telehealth, for example, and I mean, I saw an announcement a few days ago that Blue Cross Blue Shield was so happy to announce that they’re finally offering telemedicine. And I was like, what, a little late there, buddies. You know, like, I mean, that’s great, but many plans implemented that quite some time ago, even before the pandemic in terms of making sure people are not putting off screenings or getting antibiotics or things that are maybe considered lesser things that may or may not, like the case of, unfortunately, with your mom, where you could have more data about what’s happening with people along the way, from symptoms of things that might seem disjointed or unrelated, and to empower that predictive power for plans, for systems, for tests that are being suggested, you know, whatever or whatever is happening there. So for med students, people in residence, who maybe don’t have the depth and breadth of clinical experience perhaps yet, but to help guide that. So it’s really incredible, and I think when we think about marketing with that power lens to kind of feedback into the system something that’s useful, I think it might shift the perspective of what marketers are trying to accomplish, at least for those who are in it for the right reasons, I should say.
Angelo Campano:
Yeah… The irony in this conversation is you and I met almost ten years ago, it was on the basis of bringing telehealth in to a client, which is pretty funny. It’s like, so, we’ve been ahead of it, so I’m with you.
Natanya Wachtel:
Yeah, I mean, I guess along those lines in the I told you so vein, if there was something that you could impart to your customers, and I say customers, meaning probably the life sciences manufacturers who are the customers of your, in your current position. But if there was something that you felt like because change is difficult, changes happening incredibly rapidly in the last just few years in terms of how we connect with customers, what tools we use, how we do, and all that. And some companies are, let’s say, at the front lines or trying to be pioneers in the space. And some, even though they may be household names and they might have the breadth and depth of touching and impacting millions and billions of lives, there’s some resistance there because this isn’t the old way of doing things. Things happen on the fly and there’s a lot of moving parts. So it’s understandable, but I know that there is sometimes some resistance to change, and I was wondering if you wanted to impart anything, like if you wish everybody could kind of all drink the Kool-Aid about, although that phrase is problematic, apologies. If you can get everyone on board with what might that look like?
Angelo Campano:
No, for sure. Drink the Kool-Aid, that’s a good one, actually. If you ever heard Home Depot’s motto, it’s bleed orange, which cracks me up, it reminds me of that, but anyway. So, you know, I think we talked a lot about data in the last little bit that we’ve been chatting, and I think a lot of folks hear data, real-world data they get tend to get very overloaded once they hear it just because there’s so much to unpack there. But if you had to break it down and it’s like absolute simplest form, folks have been using real-world data now for years, like in many different ways, whether it’s to identify what clinicians are apt to have patients that, or to prescribe their prescribe a drug, prescribe a product, or how to communicate with someone. They’re all data points that are already existing, these are things that people already have. It’s more about finding the right vehicle to deliver the message off of that data than it is to identify the data. I think that’s a big challenge that folks on the manufacturer side always jump on as we are, we don’t have the data, or we have too much data, or we already have an analytics team that does this. It’s like, it’s not as daunting as it seems. You most likely have the data, you don’t have to go crazy with it. It’s more about finding how to deliver it and where to deliver it, that’s the important part, than it is locating the data or buying data or bringing data. And there’s a lot of folks tend to miss quite often, at least from my perspective.
Natanya Wachtel:
Yeah, and to start with the end in mind, sometimes, like you don’t need to be expert in the how, that’s what partnerships are for sometimes, right? But understanding that you can also inform the algorithms, even if you don’t know how to manipulate them, such that if you think about your end goals rather than, and revenue is often one of those goals, but outside of that, in terms of what things you’re trying to improve, whether you the whole cycle of care or the whole relationship between the clinician and the manufacturer in terms of the value exchange that happens there, rather than physicians feeling like they’re just bombarded with ads, as you said, you know, actually providing something useful that they need. And there is often clinically relevant data whether, and that might be something like patient assistance or co-pay or it might be something in the PI that’s, with everything going on, that’s buried in there and that’s some kind of attribute that they want to make sure is clear or something within a co-morbid where the dosing is very different in one category versus another of the same compound. Things that are practical and useful are still part of the story, and I think it’s unfortunate sometimes that marketing gets lumped into the like nice to have annoying fly that you want to shoo away from you and we now have the ability to still be that, but ideally not, and that’s one of the changes I think we’re seeing people try to work towards.
Angelo Campano:
Absolutely, with you there.
Natanya Wachtel:
So I know you are doing some exciting things in many fronts, and one of them that I’m personally excited about, following you to Las Vegas in November speaking, you’re giving a keynote at a pretty great conference there. If you want to just talk a little bit about that and then maybe tell us where we can, the audience can get in touch with you and find out more.
Angelo Campano:
Oh, for sure. So representing Optimizer Rx, my company, I’m, actually I have three pretty interesting speaking engagements coming up in the next few months. There’s one, the first one actually next week hosting a panel for the Digital Health Coalition.
Natanya Wachtel:
Oh, yes, right, yeah.
Angelo Campano:
On RWD, real-world data, actually, so definitely, definitely tune in. Digital Pharma East, which is a pretty decent-sized conference in Philadelphia and then.
Natanya Wachtel:
November 8th and 9th for that I think, or.
Angelo Campano:
… I don’t know. I don’t know either.
Natanya Wachtel:
Yeah, I think that’s the dates for that in Philly, and then, yeah…
Angelo Campano:
And then HLTH with you, that’s right and in mid-November with the keynote so I’m excited about that for sure. 10 minutes in Vegas, I’ll take it.
Natanya Wachtel:
All right, and then would you say maybe LinkedIn is the best way to get you or?
Angelo Campano:
Linkedin is absolutely, would be wonderful. I’m pretty easy to find there. Also any, but of course, if you guys wanted to go to the company website OptimizeRx.com, there’s Contact Us pages that will find its way to me too, to have further to chat around data point of care, more case studies on things like WakeMed, more than happy to share.
Natanya Wachtel:
Thank you so much. This was really great. It’s always a pleasure seeing you and speaking with you and I thank you just so much for your time today and your…
Angelo Campano:
Thanks for having me, you got it. Happy to be here.
Natanya Wachtel:
Thank you for listening to Insights Out. We hope you enjoyed today’s episode. If you have a specific topic in mind and you want us to discuss, please reach out to us by visiting NewSolutionsNetwork.com. See you next time!
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