Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Dan Hickey, SVP of Products at Alliance Health (Part 1)

Dan Hickey is the senior vice president of products at Alliance Health, a social networking company that provides a community platform for people with health conditions. Dan has almost 17 years of experience in digital media, having worked for AOL and Meredith Corporation. In this interview he talks about how people are able connect with and share their issues and experiences through the Alliance Health platform and what benefits the company’s service brings to healthcare providers and patients.

Sramana Mitra: Dan, let’s start with what Alliance does. Introduce us to Alliance, tell us what the company does, what you are doing and especially what you are doing in the mobile and social area.

Dan Hickey: Alliance Health Networks has been at the forefront of health and social media since around 2008, when we launched Diabetic Connect. Based on the most recent comScore data, Diabetic Connect reaches more than 1.7 million uniques on a monthly basis, making it the leading online social destination for people with diabetes. We are number one, ahead of the American Diabetes Association by almost one million uniques on a monthly basis. Overall Euroline Cell Networks has more than 2.5 million people visiting our destination sites on a monthly basis. All in all, Alliance Networks has more than 50 condition specific sites covering a broad range of chronic and complex conditions ranging from diabetes and depression to multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis. Our mission at Alliance Networks is to connect people with these conditions to other patients as well as to health-related products and services. As such, many of today’s leading brands from Bayer to Pfizer want to connect and engage with those consumers and leverage the relationships we are building with those consumers. Fifty condition-specific sites, allowing the consumer to connect with the information, products, services and the peers, to support better health outcomes. That is what Alliance Health does as a whole.

On the mobile side, we have great success on two fronts. One is in mobile applications. As of today we have 17 mobile apps on conditions ranging from addiction, anxiety, or arthritis to migraines, hepatitis, HIV, and of course diabetes. So we launched 17 apps, both in mobile iOS and Android. We have had great success in consumers finding us in those marketplaces, downloading our apps, and engaging with others to essentially extend their experience, which they may not have started on the desktop. Our feeling about mobile is to extend and enhance those core capabilities that we provide on the desktop, but also to look further at the mobile consumer as being different from the desktop consumer in terms of what products are needed, what is close to one’s location, etc.

We have had tremendous success on the apps side. Recently we re-launched Diabetic Connect and we re-instituted a responsive design, which allows us to build once and then have the experience optimized – whether customers come to us through a tablet, smartphone, or desktop. This is providing a much better experience for those audience members who are already engaged with our brand and who are using our site. We think that it is really a two-pronged approach for us, both on the apps side and on the mobile website side.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Dan Hickey, SVP of Products at Alliance Health
1 2 3 4 5 6 7