In the 1990s, our founder, Daniel Ghinn, started his career working in technology and data analysis. He was fascinated by the possibilities of using data to learn and improve, and after the World Wide Web launched, he started developing early Internet software. He quickly saw the potential to deliver personalised digital experiences online, and in 1998, he launched CREATION.co together with his wife, Joanna.
CREATION.co’s first clients included doctors, who Daniel helped to get online and set up websites to engage their patients. Soon he was serving clinics with online booking systems, and as the team grew, CREATION.co developed some of the first-ever content-managed websites for international pharmaceutical companies.
In the early 2000s, when social media platforms including Facebook and then Twitter launched, and blogging started to grow in popularity, the team at CREATION.co were excited about how insights from open social media content could help tackle health challenges.
As social media continued to play a key part in health communications, Daniel advised the World Health Organisation on how to put social media at the heart of health communication and drive positive health outcomes by collaborating effectively with other online stakeholders.
While the team continued to learn, they worked with patient advocacy groups and industry across Europe, engaging patients in a major social media content-sharing initiative. In one campaign, Daniel and his team coached advocacy groups covering sixteen European countries to improve their social media skills to drive changes in health policy.
By the early 2010s, it was clear that social media was now playing a significant part in healthcare engagement and outcomes. Doctors and other healthcare professionals were blogging, podcasting, and using Twitter to collaborate and learn from each other internationally. As Daniel interviewed doctors about their experiences, he learned about doctors solving specific medical cases via social media, even in emergency settings. He also discovered how collaboration was taking place among different HCP roles on social media – doctors were collaborating with nurses and pharmacists in a way that did not always take place in an in-person setting.
Soon it became clear that some healthcare professionals were making a particularly significant impact upon their HCP peers online, becoming trusted thought leaders. Daniel first introduced the idea of an emerging concept of “Digital Opinion Leaders” at a medical information congress in Basel, Switzerland in 2013.
But there was no technology available to distil the HCP voice, or discover the impact of an HCP upon their peers, in order to classify Digital Opinion Leaders. So the CREATION.co team set about developing an AI algorithm to identify likely HCPs on social media, and a process whereby each candidate would be manually reviewed by a human analyst. Soon, the team was tracking more than 20,000 HCPs on social media, and CREATION Pinpoint was born.
As CREATION Pinpoint kept learning, and as more HCPs joined social media, hundreds of thousands more HCPs were identified and classified by CREATION.co, providing a wealth of knowledge that was shared with health policy shapers, government and non-government organisations, healthcare professionals and industry. CREATION.co teamed up with Doctors 2.0 Conference in Paris in 2014, to present the largest-ever diabetes social media study on healthcare professional views. Later the same year, CREATION.co’s work was recognised with an award at the DIA European Medical Information and Communications Conference, where the team presented a poster showing the results of a study of more than 100,000 geolocated HCPs using Twitter.
One aspect of CREATION Pinpoint’s growing dataset of HCPs was its ability to map connections between HCPs on social media. In 2015, Daniel presented at The King’s Fund Digital Health & Care Congress, illustrating the powerful, highly-connected network of HCPs on Twitter. In 2019, CREATION.co’s Jamie Doggett collaborated with colorectal surgeon, Dr Richard Brady, to present insights from the network of HCPs on social media in the North East of England, at Digital Catalyst 2019.
In the hands of CREATION.co’s award-winning data analysts, CREATION Pinpoint was now providing insights to industry leaders, NGOs and governments to shape healthcare engagement strategies, inspire innovation in health communication and inform highly effective collaborations between health stakeholders and online HCPs.
In 2023, CREATION.co launched the latest version of its Global Top-50 Digital Opinion Leaders in Type 2 Diabetes study, and shared some of the deep behavioural profiles with Digital Opinion Leaders (DOLs) at EASD Congress in Hamburg, Germany. Seeing how the DOLs themselves were excited to see their impact illustrated, Daniel determined that CREATION.co must now put more of its data into the hands of the data subjects themselves, Healthcare Professionals. It was a vision that had started ten years prior, but over the next year that vision would take shape as the development of CREATION Pinpoint for Healthcare Professionals was envisioned and the app was designed and built.
CREATION Pinpoint for Healthcare Professionals, or Pinpoint for HCPs, is produced by CREATION.co, the insights consultancy for healthcare.
After almost three decades serving doctors, NGOs and health companies, CREATION.co has gained a wealth of knowledge through a powerful methodology that uses data to understand the needs and interests of healthcare professionals (HCPs) by studying their online behaviours. With Pinpoint for HCPs, that knowledge is shared back with the people who made it possible: the doctors, nurses and pharmacists who collaborate on social media to learn and drive better health outcomes together.