• by Les Luchter , 4 hours ago

You could call it “doctor-centered” rather than the current health marketing trope of “patient-centric.”

Marking its fourth year, Cleveland Diagnostics’ (Cleveland Dx) annual “A PSA on PSA” prostate cancer awareness campaign has moved from last year’s emphasis on consumer action to a video series featuring conversations between urologists.

“A PSA on PSA” is short for "A Public Service Announcement on the Prostate-Specific Antigen,” and the campaign is again running to coincide with September’s Prostate Cancer Awareness Month.

“Adding physicians came down to a measure of authenticity,” Chris Fox, Cleveland Dx vice president of marketing, tells Marketing Daily. “As marketers, we’re really good at creating educational content, but oftentimes it just comes off as that.”

Providing “conversations physicians would actually have with one another and allowing patients and families to listen in normally doesn’t happen in the medical community,” Fox says.

But the videos won’t be filled with medical terms and jargon.

“The intent while they were recording was to be patient-facing,” Fox says, noted that the host is Dr. Michael Lutz, president of the Michigan Men’s Health Foundation, whose mission “is to bring men’s healthcare to the people. So he is well-verse in speaking with patients, and specifically in underserved communities.”

The video series, titled “On Call for Men's Health: A PSA on PSA,” consists of four episodes, each some 45 minutes long. It launched Thursday, Sept. 3, with new episodes dropping weekly on to PSAonPSA.com, YouTube and Vimeo.

Dr. Lutz’s guests, one per episode, include doctor experts from the Michigan Institute of Urology, Detroit’s Henry Ford Health, and the University of British Columbia.

The series is being promoted across LinkedIn and other social media platforms, Fox says. In addition to the earned media, “we may do a little bit of paid advertising on LinkedIn to get the message out.”

While the campaign focuses on doctors, the target audience remains “patients and the patient’s family and friends,” Fox says.  The primary target: men 50+, as well as younger men who may be at elevated risk, with an “ultimate goal” to lower the barriers set by fear and anxiety by “getting more men to have conversations with their physicians about a topic that isn’t always comfortable.“

“We can measure if people watch videos or not, but what we ultimately care about is that these conversations happen and people are taking an active role in their health and getting screened,” says Fox.

“You’ve got 333,000 men a year being diagnosed with prostate cancer –- one every 15 minutes -- and we know that if it’s caught early, it’s 99% treatable and curable,” he continues.   “We’ve made tremendous advances in prostate cancer screening diagnoses. But, while “innovation can give people better options, awareness is what helps people engage with those options.”

The “PSA on PSA” campaign also continues its partnership with ZERO Prostate Cancer, with Cleveland Dx making a donation for every educational factsheet downloaded at PSAonPSA.com.

ClevelandDx’s first product, launched in 2021, is a test for prostate cancer, called IsoPSA, that is said to provide greater insight into patients’ elevated PSA levels than traditional PSA tests. 

It’s still the firm’s only product, but Fox notes that a similar test for thyroid cancer is in the pipeline.

Health care providers can get the IsoPSA blood tests done directly through Cleveland Diagnostics or at Quest Diagnostics locations. Additionally, with recent FDA approval of the IsoPSA Assay, labs can now perform the test in-house.