Emerging Ethical Challenges for Healthcare Marketers

Clockwise from top left, Danny Fell, Karen Corrigan, David Feinberg, Greg Green

Daniel Fell, president and CEO of ndp, recently moderated the panel presentation Blurred Lines: Marketing and Ethics in the Brave New World held at the 2018 Healthcare Internet Conference (HCIC) in Scottsdale, Arizona. Panel members include Karen Corrigan, founder and CEO of Corrigan Consulting; David Feinberg, chief marketing officer at Mount Sinai Health System in New York City; and Greg Green, chief data and analytics officer of Valassis.

Here’s an excerpt from that discussion, which addresses some of the emerging challenges as both technology and our industry evolve, and what marketers can do to better prepare themselves and their organizations.

FELL: The lines between hospital, insurance company, and retail setting are beginning to blur with new mergers between pharmacy chains and insurance companies and tech giants like Amazon getting into healthcare. How does that impact the way we use data?

FEINBERG: I don’t know that any of us really know where it’s all going to end, but the effect that the insurance companies and drugstores will have all of our information, and be able to use it, I think is fraught with issues and there is a lot of concern about how they will use that data.

CORRIGAN: You know from the early days of healthcare marketing, there were a lot of questions about how and why we were spending money to advertise this or that. I remember having a conversation with someone about early breast cancer detection. If we have some sort of a screening and we pick up four or five women who need to advance to the next level of care, is that marketing or is that healthcare? And the answer is — it’s a little bit of both.

Read the rest of the discussion now: Blurred Lines: Marketing and Ethics in the Brave New World, Part 2

Best regards,
Matt Humphrey
President