Understanding US healthcare provider preferences for consumption of publication content: opportunities to leverage omnichannel approaches

Abstract

Objective

Understanding the healthcare provider (HCP) journey of discovering and consuming medical and scientific information is critical for optimizing publication reach. A survey was conducted in 2019-2020 to understand how HCPs in the United States discover, review, and share publications of interest. A follow-up survey was conducted in 2021-2022 to assess how HCP behavior in the United States has evolved over the past 2 years, including due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Methods

Expanding on the survey completed in March 2020, a 24-question, online survey was conducted via SurveyMonkey. Survey invitations were sent via email list, social media, and personal outreach to practicing US-based HCPs with MD or DO degrees.

Results

Thirty-nine HCPs responded in 2020. Of the 33 HCPs who responded in 2021-2022, 67% were community practitioners; 45% had practiced for >20 years, while 30% had practiced for <5 years. Medical media channels (preferred by 73%) were the most common means of discovering publications of interest (vs targeted PubMed/Embase searches in early 2020). Sixty-seven percent of HCPs found supplemental digital information (also called publication enhancers) moderately/very useful for understanding article content vs 56% in the 2020 survey. When asked about pandemic-related behavior changes, HCPs reported increases in social media use (55%), medical media use (52%), direct reading of research articles (45%), accessing supplemental digital information (39%), and sharing/recommending articles to colleagues (33%).

Conclusions

These survey results suggest that how HCPs interact with publication content is evolving and that these changes appear accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. This evolution is important to understand, and be accounted for, in the framework of omnichannel publication planning.

Keywords:

• Publications
• surveys and questionnaires
• COVID-19
• omnichannel

Transparency

Declaration of funding

This study was funded by Nucleus Global, an Inizio Company.

Declaration of financial/other relationships

All authors are employees of Nucleus Global, an Inizio Company. Peer reviewers on this manuscript have no relevant financial or other relationships to disclose.

Author contributions

All authors contributed to the study concept, analysis of data, interpretation of the results, and drafting and editing of the manuscript and approved submission of the manuscript.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank their Nucleus Global colleagues who distributed surveys, contributed ideas, created design concepts, and analyzed online metrics for this body of work.

Previous presentation

A poster containing the results of the 2019-2020 survey was presented at the 16th Annual Meeting of the International Society for Medical Publication Professionals (ISMPP; Virtual; June 16–18, 2020). A poster containing the results of the 2021-2022 survey was presented at the 18th Annual Meeting of ISMPP (Washington, DC; May 9-11, 2022).