Costs and technology are both soaring to new heights. America’s healthcare expenditures reached $2 trillion in 2006 and are predicted to double within a decade. Advances in the life sciences are leading to medicine that is personalized and preemptive based on an individual’s DNA. Together, these trends promise to place new demands on healthcare marketers.

Cost pressures are prompting greater outreach with disease management and “healthy lifestyle” programs. The growing number of uninsured/underinsured and concerns about inequities in healthcare are leading to increased emphasis on outreach and health education. Our aging population, the comorbidities of the obesity epidemic and other trends will also drive the shift to prevention and early detection. Increasingly, social marketing methodologies are being used to improve health literacy and compliance, increase chronic disease screening rates, change attitudes about health-adverse behaviors and recruit special populations for clinical trials.

Accelerating developments in the life sciences, ranging from pharmacogenomics to bionanotechnology, will transform the ways diseases are understood, diagnosed, treated and predicted. The standard slate of healthcare services we know and market now will radically change. As translational research moves burgeoning discoveries from bench science to clinical trials with increasing speed, an understanding of life sciences will be critical.

AB&C is anticipating these trends and their impact. We’ve expanded our focus beyond our 25 years of experience with hospitals, health systems, insurers and other healthcare organizations. In 2006, we acquired KFDunn, a life science communications company with 18 years of experience that includes clinical diagnostics, radiology, molecular diagnostics, biotechnology, bioinformatics, genomics, drug discovery and biomedical products. In social marketing, we enhanced our capabilities by adding the expertise of a research and resource development professional with experience at the NCI and CDC.