Aside from patient-doctor exchanges, medical product information is readily available directly to the public from the Internet, package inserts, waiting room leaflets, word of mouth, and increasingly, direct-to-consumer advertising and direct marketing. As the medical product industry embraces direct-to-patient advertising, medical professionals are challenging the marketing model.

Brands played a minor role in the selection of health care when personal physicians were selected based on family tradition or recommendations from friends or family. It was only when someone faced a serious illness and had to decide which treatment center to enter that the medical provider’s reputation came into play. But with the introduction of managed health care coupled with consumer resistance to paying high prices for medical care, the delivery of health care has become increasingly market driven, and medical branding has become increasingly important to consumers.

But achieving brand awareness has been a long-standing problem in the industry. Very few medical product manufacturers can afford the high power media ads that have served the pharmaceutical companies so well, so many turn to the Internet.

Medtronic’s spinal division recently signed an agreement with a search engine company to ensure that its website would be called out whenever a user types in key words that have to do with back pain. On one orthopedic implant manufacturer’s website, users can find the name of a nearby doctor who uses the company’s product by entering their own address and ZIP code.

Although it may be as some say that the Internet has become America’s family doctor, the web still provides a poor substitute to consultation with a live physician. Unfiltered or just plain wrong information from an unreliable source can be dangerous in the hands of the less than completely informed. Says Dr. Thomas S. Thornhill, chairman of the department of orthopedics at Boston’s Brigham & Women’s Hospital, “Many of my clinic days are spent dispelling rumors. These are not dumb people; these are smart patients.”

Warsaw, Indiana-based Zimmer Holdings, said to be the world’s largest orthopedic implant manufacturer, makes artificial hips and knees as well as other implants. The company recently embarked on a direct-to-patient marketing campaign to promote its trademarked minimally invasive hip replacement procedure. Zimmer’s Sheryl Conley told The Indianapolis Star last year, “We would love to get to a point where patients are calling out our product by brand” (January 15, 2002)

Reports in that same article are that the company’s multimedia campaign has boosted sales for Zimmer implants by 150 percent. And the company does not seem to have spared any effort to make Zimmer a household name. Among the items for sale on Zimmer’s website are briefcases, desk accessories, cups, hats, polo shirts, sweat shirts, sweaters, and writing utensils -- all emblazoned with the company’s logo.

But many medical professionals have looked askance at Zimmer’s marketing campaign, arguing that trademarking a surgical procedure is more hype than good medicine. Says professor of orthopedic surgery Kristaps J. Keggi of Yale University School of Medicine, “The first publication that Zimmer had was not in the peer-reviewed literature, but in USA Today. The next hoopla they had was on ABC News with Peter Jennings. It’s kind of amazing to have this kind of publicity in the national press. It’s bizarre.”

Keggi also objects to Zimmer’s meteoric market launch, with the company having completed so few cases studies. “If I had a new operation that I wanted to present at the Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons and I sent in an abstract saying that I had done 50 of these new operations with an average follow-up of eight months or a year, I’d be laughed off the stage. Nobody would accept that. They would say, ‘Come back in five years. You can’t publish this kind of stuff.’ ”

Most orthopedic surgeons, conservative by nature, seem to have taken a wait-and-see attitude toward Zimmer’s new procedure. Says industry analyst Stassen, “The surgeons typically say, ‘I see your two-year data, show me your five-year data. And then maybe I’ll consider using it.’ ”

According to Zimmer’s website, the trademarked Zimmer MIS 2-Incision hip procedure is superior to the traditional technique because it involves two 1.5-to-2-inch incisions instead of a single 10-to-12 inch incision; because it does not cut muscles or tendons; and because it requires a 1-to-2 day hospital stay as opposed to a 3-to-5 day hospitalization. In a recent lecture describing the new procedure to potential hip replacement patients, orthopedic surgeon Carol Huchinson, who works closely with Zimmer to market the technique, referred to the 10-inch hip surgery as the gold standard, but predicted that it would soon be replaced by Zimmer’s two-incision technique.    

[17-Nov-2003]