Concept · Framing
36 minutes a week. Every supplier in your market. Combined.
The market for a decision-maker’s time is now scarcer than the market for their signature. Whoever earns the minutes wins the relationship.
What it is not
Not TikTok. Not doomscrolling.
When people hear “attention economy” they usually picture consumer media: algorithms, Instagram, the war for eyeballs on a phone screen. That is one attention economy. It is not the one we are talking about when the phrase appears on this site.
Read it that way and the framing sounds trivial, maybe even a bit dismissive of healthcare. It is not. The healthcare attention economy is a specific, measurable, commercial problem.
What it actually means
Supplier access to HCPs has collapsed.
Twenty years ago, a sales rep could walk a hospital corridor and have meaningful conversations. Reception would wave them through. Consultants would give ten minutes between clinics. Procurement teams were smaller, less gated, less process-heavy.
Rep access to US physicians fell from nearly 80% in 2008 to 44% by 2016 (ZS Associates AccessMonitor). On our own arithmetic, a clinician gives suppliers around twelve minutes a meeting and perhaps three meetings a week: thirty-six minutes for the entire supplier market. Split that across every company that wants a meeting. The minutes are gone before your territory manager hits redial.
That is the scarcity. The attention economy, in this context, is the zero-sum competition between suppliers for a decision-maker’s professional time. When we say we are operating inside the healthcare attention economy, we mean we are building commercial programmes that assume access is already lost and has to be re-earned.
Why it matters
Marketing has to do what sales used to.
If a rep can no longer reach a clinician in person, someone has to reach them before the meeting happens. That is the job marketing inherits. Content, thought leadership, events, patient-side programmes, digital campaigns. Not as a brand exercise. As the mechanism that earns back the minutes.
Every service on this site is designed around that premise. Sales enablement works because the rep uses the twelve minutes better. Patient marketing works because patients start the conversation the rep no longer gets invited to. Congress strategy works because a booth is one of the few places an HCP still chooses to spend minutes. Thought leadership works because it travels ahead of the rep into the research the HCP does at 10pm.
The attention economy is not a marketing buzzword here. It is the economic condition the whole playbook is designed to survive.
Where this concept shows up
Now you know it, here is where it drives the work.
Service
Sales Enablement
Build the tooling the rep needs to make the twelve minutes count.
Service
Patient Product Marketing
Start the conversation at the patient end of the chain, not the HCP end.
Service
Promotional Events
One of the few settings where HCPs still elect to give time to suppliers.
Book
It's Not a Sales Problem
The full argument for why the attention economy has changed the commercial model.
Healthcare innovations deserve recognition. We help them get it.