Educating patients about what to expect after surgery needs to start in the weeks beforehand. By helping patients understand what their surgery involves and preparing them both for the procedure and recovery, providers can improve patient satisfaction and make a real difference in how patients perceive their entire surgical experience and results.

This week, Apple released the latest version of its mobile operating system, iOS 9 to the masses. While iOS 9 brings many new features, marketers have been paying particular attention to the fact that Apple has made it possible for users to block advertisements on mobile websites. Interestingly, currently applications utilizing this new feature, such as Peace, have quickly surged to the top of Apple's App store suggesting that people are eager for ad blocking software.

Getting mired in the complexities of social media is becoming something of a sport in healthcare. There's all the FDA guidance and understanding what medical/regulatory teams do and don't know. For some teams, the prospect of effectively taking a brand to social is nothing short of an existential crisis.

Pharmaceutical companies are finding the notion of programmatic marketing a lot more palatable these days. In fact, some of them are jumping in with both feet. Some pharma brands have hired dedicated managers of programmatic ad buying. ExL Pharma hosted its Life Science Programmatic Buying Summit in August to help professionals from pharmaceutical, biotechnology, medical device and generic research companies sharpen learn how to adopt programmatic buying within their organizations. And trading desks are seeing significant budgets from big pharma come their way.

One of the most common pitfalls happening in healthcare marketing is that we are becoming the victims of being experts. From wearable devices to educational campaigns and product platforms, we believe dogmatically in new technology, eschew the basics of what created our problems in the first place, and expect the market to immediately embrace our solution.

We recently started a new experience website for caregivers, and got exactly what we'd hoped for in terms of response. It was the where of that response that came as a bit of a surprise.