The Qstream Blog

iPad users love the touch screen experience – it’s simply a more natural way to interact compared to the keyboard or mouse. Users have quickly become accustomed to the quality of this experience.

But one common mistake trainers make when taking an existing library of web-based training content is to simply re-purpose it for delivery via the iPad. This not only has technical challenges, one of which is that the iPad does not support flash, but another problem, and probably the most annoying, is with buttons and clickable areas that work fine with a mouse, but are often too small to work with a finger – aka the ‘fat finger’ frustration.

Tip number two from our iPad Learning Strategies paper shares a recommended approach for this problem, one that your learners are sure to thank you for! Check it out in 5 iPad Learning Strategies Doomed To Failure.

With its 9.7” screen it’s easy to think of an iPad as nothing more than an ultra-portable laptop for training – a big mistake.

Although the device is obviously larger than a smart phone, it’s best to think of it more like an iPhone and less like a laptop.  Read this article to gain practical insight on how to organize, develop and deliver content to leverage the platform and help your reps.

 iPad Tips and Tricks

Over on their Ideas blog, TIME contributor Annie Murphy Hall has a piece on the origins of Qstream and its underlying method (termed "spaced education") developed by Qstream co-founder Price Kerfoot.

Speaking of some of the original motivations behind the development of Qstream at Harvard she writes:

Kerfoot, an associate professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School, was frustrated at how much knowledge his students seemed to forget over the course of their education.

Murphy Hall captures one of the critical elements of what makes Qstream work so well – its easy for learners to participate:

Kerfoot’s innovation was to make these spaced-out learning sessions easy and convenient.

This, together with the underlying science of the method, lets us drive the learning outcomes we are looking for:

The students took a few minutes to answer the questions on their laptops or smartphones; each week brought a new round of queries, mixing new material with material already covered. At the end of the year, the students who received the spaced emails scored significantly higher on a test of their urology knowledge.

Read more over at TIME.

The January 10, 2012 Wall Street Journal ran a timely article titled, “Drug Reps Soften Their Sales Pitches”, on the changing environment of the pharmaceutical sales rep.

The article notes the obsolescence of the scripted sales pitch delivered in a one way dialog with a physician designed to meet the needs of the rep and their employers.  Rather, a dialog is developing and we must be preparing the rep to excel in the dialog by possessing relevant knowledge, data and clinical context to the physician when they need it.  Reps have to be prepared to “sense and respond” to physicians needs for information.  As we like to say, “Reps need to provide more value to physicians than Google”.

 

The article presents the challenge as follows:

“…soft sell reflects a major shift in how more pharmaceutical companies target physicians, as the industry remakes its commercial model in response to changing economic and regulatory conditions. Traditionally, armies of sales reps have fanned out to “detail” doctors with aggressive, well-rehearsed sales pitches and pressure to boost prescriptions. Multiple sales reps from one company might call on the same physician. That strategy over the past 15 years helped propel the industry to $300 billion in yearly U.S. sales today.

But the approach has been in flux. Physicians, under pressure from health plans to curb costs, have less time for, and patience with, persistent sales pitches. The government has been cracking down on aggressive, illegal marketing of drugs for unapproved uses. And drug makers, unable to bring enough new products to market to fully offset patent losses, have been forced to tighten belts.”

 

The new requirements for success are presented:

“Drug makers including GlaxoSmithKline PLC Merck & Co,. and Lilly are also asking their representatives to switch from making forceful, tightly scripted sales pitches to acting more like a resource supporting physicians’ treatment. Companies hope to get a foot in the door by providing practical help, such as assistance educating patients about their diseases or navigating reimbursement.

“Increasing physician satisfaction, it turns out, is a much better way to promote a pharmaceutical agent than simply telling them to write more prescriptions or what the benefits” are, said David Ricks, president of Lilly’s global business unit.

 

To provide this level of value requires the rep to posses in depth knowledge of their drug, disease states, reimbursement issues – and to be able to recall that knowledge when the physician needs it – not when it is convenient for the rep.  The successful rep provides what has long been called a “consultative approach” and the consultative approach requires a firm grasp of a much broader set of knowledge as well as the ability to listen, to adjust and to respond appropriately to individual physician needs.

This is a challenging, but welcome, development that requires the rep to “up their game” and promises to enhance the value of pharmaceutical representatives to physicians and result in improved financial results for those who prepare their reps to excel in this environment.

It has been a great year for us at Qstream and we are delighted to share the news about some big and exciting changes underway.

Over the last two years we have trained tens of thousands of healthcare professionals – from medical students, to physicians and nurses, to sales and marketing professionals at pharmaceutical and medical device companies. Learners consistently tell us they enjoy learning in three minutes a day, whether it is on their laptop or their smart-phone. Organizations tell us they love the positive feedback from their learners. And, they love the data – the reports and insights we provide on how learners are doing.

Now we are getting ready to take things to the next level.

The first and most obvious development is that we are changing our product name from SpacedEd to Qstream. We have planned this for a while. The new name better reflects some upcoming product enhancements, which build on the strengths and features everyone loves about SpacedEd. We think it’s catchier too! We will begin rolling out the new name and by the end of the year the SpacedEd name will be phased out.

As part of the transition to the Qstream name, our domain will change to qstream.com. This will be totally transparent to our partners and customers; all old email addresses, web sites, and URLs will continue to work during the transition and afterwards through March 31, 2012. Please note: If your organization has a private SpacedEd site, you can start transitioning to your new URL after January 1, 2012. Simply replace the word ‘spaceded’ with ‘qstream’ in your URL. For example, if your private site URL is PharmaABC.spaceded.com then your new private site URL will be PharmaABC.qstream.com

Individual learners do not need to do anything in order to continue using our platform or receive emails from us.  However, we recommend that all users add Qbot@qstream.com to their email address book to help ensure proper delivery of emails.

This change comes as part of an exciting leap forward for us at Qstream. It coincides with a significant infusion of new capital to accelerate our product development, customer service, and marketing activities.

Please feel free to contact us with any questions. Our phone numbers and mailing address all remain the same. We look forward to sharing more of our product roadmap with you in the coming months, and think you will be as excited as we are.

 

During a fascinating debate about the changing role of the pharmaceutical representative at the recent PharmaForce conference, industry leaders agreed upon the following:

Clinical acumen gets your foot in the door but to keep physicians listening it is essential to talk about outcomes in three areas.

1. The outcome for the patient (e.g., if you write our drug your patient will pay this co-pay and “X$” for renewal based on their insurance and your diagnosis).
2. The outcome for the physician (e.g., if you write our drug your patient satisfaction scores will go up 10%, which means “X$” to your revenues given reimbursement models that include patient satisfaction).
3. The outcome for the organization the physician works for (e.g., if you write this drug your ACO/ IDN or hospital system will reduce the total cost of care by 20% across inpatient and outpatient populations).

This informative debate featured Tim Ryan, Executive Director Prescription Medicine & Development, from Boehringer-Ingelheim and Eric Kimble, VP, Sales and Marketing, from Cubist Pharmaceuticals.

Our View: What we heard is what we consistently see from our customers, particularly around the need to be competent and confident in multiple subject areas.  How we have been doing it traditionally doesn’t work.  In our next post we’ll get into more detail about what Tim and Eric said about complexity and helping physicians navigate it.

The Boston Herald featured Qstream in today’s paper and of course the article is available online too.

Quoting our own Dr. Price Kerfoot, Goodison wrote:

“We were applying rigorous clinical trial methods to evaluate education and education technology,” said Kerfoot. “What we found was that the retention of learning from traditional online modules was extremely poor.”

Its a nice overview of what we do and why we are doing it. Thanks to Donna Goodison at the Herald for the interview and Patrick Whittemore for the photo shoot – we had fun!

The White House has announced that Qstream founder and Harvard Medical School professor Dr. B. Price Kerfoot has been honored by President Obama with the Presidential Early Career Award (PECASE) for his work on education technology research that led to the development of Qstream.

The Presidential Early Career Award is the highest honor bestowed by the United States government on outstanding scientists and engineers in the early stages of their independent research careers.

“It is inspiring to see the innovative work being done by these scientists and engineers as they ramp up their careers—careers that I know will be not only personally rewarding but also invaluable to the Nation,” President Obama said.

Everyone at Qstream is so excited and proud of Price and the work he has done and we are honored to have him as an advisor to the company.

Our mission to transform learning is based on his years of research and his development of the spaced education methodology which powers Qstream and has been proven to increase retention and change even ingrained behaviors.

He will be presented with his award at an upcoming ceremony in Washinton D.C. and we will report back with an update and hopefully some pictures following that.

Congratulations Price! It is well deserved and the whole Qstream team couldn’t be happier for you!

The full press release is available The White House web site.

Today we are honored and incredibly excited to have been selected as one of the finalists for MassChallenge 2011.

In its second year, MassChallenge is the largest start-up accelerator program in the world. This year they received over 700 applications from 24 countries and 34 states.

Commenting on the announcement of the finalists, Deval Patrick, Governor of Massachusetts said:

The MassChallenge competition is a great example of the robust, collaborative community of innovators in the Commonwealth. Our ability to attract and engage high-growth startups from around the world is a reflection of our global competiveness, and is an excellent indication that we will continue to lead the country in innovation, job creation and economic growth for years to come.

We are looking forward to actively participating in the 3 month long accelerator program in Boston over the Summer and working hard to be among the ultimate winners, to be announced in October.

We extend our heartfelt thanks and appreciation to the patient judges, the volunteers and all the folks at MassChallenge for creating such a great program and providing us the opportunity to participate. We would also like to thanks all those folks who endorsed our application, provided feedback and help fine tuning our pitch, as well as moral support. We won’t let you down.

You can learn more about MassChallenge and view a full list of finalists on their web site. The official press release is also available.

Scott Kirsner of the Boston Globe also has a write-up on boston.com about the finalists announcement.

ReadWriteWeb highlights a recent survey of over 300,000 students (as well as thousands of teachers, librarians, administrators and parents) that shows wide adoption already happening for smart-phones in schools. Not only did 44% of kids in grades 9-12 own smart-phones, but 16% of kids in K-2 did also.

There are valid concerns over the efficacy and impact of smart-phones with especially younger kids but it certainly demonstrates that they are here to stay in our schools as much as they are in the home or workplace. As RWW puts it:

Smart-phone and cellphone ownership opens a lot of doors to the much-touted mobile learning, the ability for students to have 24-7 access to a computing device, whether they are at home or at school.

The survey seems to raise a lot of issues about school policy and what is appropriate with 67% of parents saying they would buy their child a mobile device if the school allowed it, especially for access to learning materials (with textbooks specifically cited.) Administrators however were not supportive:

When we asked administrators about the likelihood of them allowing their students to use their own mobile devices for instructional purposes at school this year, a resounding 65% of principals said “no way!”

This is quite similar to the almost universally negative reaction we hear from teachers and professors to Facebook, which is seen purely as a time waster. A demo of Qstream running inside of Facebook delivering effective learning and generating solid community discussion on answer blogs is usually required, and even then teachers are usually more comfortable seeing our regular web-native interface or iPhone app.

There is a growing disconnect between what students want and expect with what teachers and administrators are ready for. We think we can help with that and are already seeing positive signs of it in the early Qstream private beta.