The week in review in pharma marketing & healthcare news

Here is a summary of some of the stories that made news this week in pharma and healthcare:

Ex-FDA Official: Don’t expect too much guidance when to comes to the FDA and social media.

“If the industry thinks the FDA is going to come out with thoughtful and complete guidance on how to use social media in 110 different circumstances, it’s going be very disappointed.” This quote is from Peter Pitts who was associate commissioner for external relations at the Food and Drug Administration between 2002 and 2004 and helped draft the most current guidance on direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising.

When it comes to guidance, the problem is that the FDA embraces ambiguity because ambiguity gives it tremendous power and elasticity to change its mind given the circumstance. What pharmaceutical marketers are doing is waiting to see what the FDA says and then they’ll act accordingly. However, if the guidance the FDA comes out with isn’t some King James version of the Bible that everybody’s hoping it’s going to be, and it certainly will not, the question then becomes, which marketers will step forward and choose to be more aggressive than they previously have been?

Source: eMarketer interview

According to eMarketer the Web is the first place consumers turn for health information

More and more people are turning to the Internet for health information but because of time constraints the Internet is the go to destination for health information.  To understand this you also need to understand the triggers of health searches.

Source: eMarketer

Rodale DTC Marketing Study Released

• Consumers recognize pharmaceutical companies help people lead better lives • DTC ad effects

– Fewer asked for a branded drug – Fewer received a sample from their doctor – Fewer received written brochures or Web site recommendation from their doctor

• DTC changes this decade – While consumers see the benefits of the ads they face some growing scrutiny

• Recognize “patient type” – 13 years of data show most people “just talk” vs. “ask” for the advertised brand

– For those who have asked, 3-in-4 have also asked for a generic

• Balance of risk and benefits in ads – Consumer recognize it in TV and Magazine

Social Media

• Is a consumer a recognized source for health information • On joining the conversation…

- A Pharmaceutical company is not – “someone like me”

• Where you can pharma have a voice – In ads

-To validate what people say

Source: Rodale DTC Study

Pharma now using Facebook to recruit people for clinical trials

In the last two years, companies like Acurian, a patient recruitment firm that supplies clinical trials with participants, have discovered an inexpensive way to find new patients with social network ads. Their methods are not at all nefarious — they’re not scanning users’ status updates or monitoring the links they post.

Instead, the Horshan, Penn.-based company buys demographic placements that match the requirements of the medical studies it is looking to fill. From there, coincidence, curiosity, and a hunger for cures have compelled millions of Facebook users to click through the ad and fill out a qualifying questionnaire.

“If you really think about Facebook, it’s the ultimate narcissist canvas,” says Scott Connor, Acurian’s vice president of marketing. “People are putting up — of their own volition — personal information in terms of their age, their location, their level of education. I honestly think there’s a very small amount of the [Facebook] population that’s concerned about privacy, because the entity wouldn’t be as big as it was if that were the case.”

Considering the uproar associated with privacy and Facebook, Acurian’s results are surprising — even to Connor. According to him, 20% of the patients the company contributes to a study come from social networking, with 70% coming from its database of 65 million pre-qualified patients, and 10% from traditional media (typically broadcast and newspaper ads).

Source: Fortune Magazine

A new understanding of the link between diabetes and obesity may help drug companies design safer versions of treatments like GlaxoSmithKline’s Avandia.

The researchers had believed Avandia and Takeda Pharmaceutical Co’s Actos work by stimulating a protein known as PPAR-gamma. Now the team thinks the drugs also act on the insulin resistance that diabetics develop through a different route.  And they think it may be possible to tinker with drugs in this class to overcome some of their side effects.

“Our findings strongly suggest that good and bad effects of these drugs can be separated by designing second-generation drugs that focus on the newly uncovered mechanism,” Bruce Spiegelman of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, who worked on the study in the journal Nature, said in a statement.

Source: Reuters

Patients access to physicians notes ?

“The whole idea here is to improve (and) expand the dialogue between patients and physicians,” Jan Walker, an instructor at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and one of the study’s lead researchers, told Reuters Health.

Beth Israel is one of three hospitals that is participating in the trial, called the OpenNotes project. At Geisinger Health System in Danville, Pennsylvania and Harborview Medical Center in Seattle as well as at Beth Israel, over 100 doctors and about 25,000 patients are trying out the system for a year.

Source: Reuters

As I see it ….

• Who cares about Avandia anymore except people taking the drug and physicians who have prescribed it.  In this authors opinion sales of Avandia will decline and it will no longer be a blockbuster.  People on GSK’s Avandia team should be polishing up their resumes.

• The two days of FDA hearings last year did little to move the FDA to “issue” guidelines if what Mr Pitts says comes to pass.  Sorry but agencies and consultants who say dollar signs with new FDA guidelines are out of luck.

• The Rodale DTD study results which showed that over 60% of consumers do not want to hear from pharma on social media is exactly what I  have been hearing via market research over the last year.  That does not mean, however, that pharma marketers can continue to do the same old, same old.  They still can help consumers sort through the wealth of health information on the Internet and integrate tools to help consumers share health experiences.

• Pharma is still cutting staff which is too bad because a lot of consumer companies are recognizing the need to bring digital capabilities in house and add Internet and social media marketing people.

Have a great weekend and always think of patients first and good business will follow !!