Communicating About Cannabis to Healthcare Professionals

By Steve Casey, BioCan Healthcare

I try to always keep my eyes

open for healthcare topics that could benefit clients in the cannabis industry.

In a recent edition of Healthcare Analytics News, the editor published an article on the analytics landscape in oncology.

(Why is oncology relevant to the medical cannabis industry? According to a Survey conducted by the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Institute 24% of cancer patients use medical cannabis while 74% wanted more information on medical cannabis from their oncologists.)

What caught my eye was a pie chart which was derived from a survey of 159 frontline oncologists showing how oncologists are using analytics to advance their practices.

I was stunned to learn that 62% of the oncologists reported using real-world evidence or other data sets in their practices, as compared to 21% who said they rely on clinical evidence only. In the medical world, this is a shocking response, as we tend to think that physicians are completely driven by hard scientific information (and oncologists are usually at the cutting edge because of the nature of the disease they treat. Therefore, the best practices of oncologists normally work their way to other specialties and primary care).

If this survey can be extrapolated to all oncologists (and other practice-types downstream), then the fact that oncologists will use real-world evidence over clinical data findings demonstrates a huge opportunity for medical cannabis providers to communicate about cannabis’ benefits. And it supports my belief that the medical cannabis industry is missing a golden opportunity (and underachieving!) because of the misguided belief there is not enough cannabis data available.

What does all this mean for dispensaries and grower producers? It means that there is a large opportunity to increase cannabis revenues within the healthcare market.

To seize this opportunity, existing scientific and localized medical cannabis data needs to be collected, curated, and disseminated into targeted communications. The communications need to be well-crafted - they cannot use a standard consumer approach. They need to be well-designed to attract the attention of healthcare professionals and convince them to change the way they practice medicine. It’s ambitious, but definitely doable.

Medical Communications is a specialized field that raises the awareness of medications via promotion in a very educational way. Typically, the perfect communication to a healthcare professional defines the product in a manner that identifies and addresses his/her need at that moment in time. The challenge is, this is not the mindset of the healthcare professional — they are trained in the scientific method and therefore, your data must be presented in a scientific manner. That is where a true medical marketing firm comes into play to curate and disseminate information in the healthcare market. BioCan Healthcare Marketing is a medical marketing firm that is happy to work with medical cannabis professionals to create and disseminate solid medical communications.

About BioCan Healthcare Marketing:

BioCan Healthcare Marketing (www.biocan-hm.com) a Pennsylvania-based medical marketing firm dedicated to the cannabis market. The company is an evidence-based agency that provides strategy development and tactical execution services to medical cannabis companies looking to improve their healthcare stakeholder awareness and usage. BioCan’s marketing practices utilize proven techniques to develop product awareness, trial, and usage within the health care marketplace. Our focus is on optimizing the medical cannabis patient’s journey through the healthcare system to cannabis treatment. The BioCan team has decades of high level strategic and execution experience in health care across a broad range of disease states and therapeutic areas. This facilitates our ability to provide comprehensive strategic and tactical solutions to assist cannabis enterprises in realizing their full revenue potential. To learn more, please visit www.biocan-hm.com or contact:

Stephen Casey Managing Partner SCasey@biocan-hm.com

Michael Caso Managing Partner MCaso@Biocan-hm.com