FDA pharma social media ‘guidelines’ leave pharma wanting

While most of us (myself included) were preoccupied with our holiday celebrations, the FDA quietly released a Social Media guidance.

Sort of, anyway.

Ad Age‘s Rich Thomaselli reported last Friday that the FDA announced new Social Media marketing guidelines for pharmaceutical companies. But the document, titled “Guidance for Industry Responding to Unsolicited Requests for Off-Label Information About Prescription Drugs and Medical Devices,” only covers the discussion of off-label information.

For that reason alone, it falls far short of what the pharmaceutical industry not only was looking for, but needs.

“What everybody was expecting was actual guidelines around social media,” Jim Dayton, senior director of emerging media for Overland Park, Kan.-based InTouch Solutions, a pharma-centric digital-marketing agency, told Ad Age.

“I still think it’s monumental,” he added. “The FDA finally addressed the digital channel in a specific way by mentioning Twitter and YouTube in the document, and those have never been mentioned before. But this is an industry that wants specific instructions and rules, and that didn’t happen here.”

The document provides pharma companies with instructions for responding to consumers who use Social Media to ask about potential off-label uses for prescription drugs. A thorough, complete Social Media guidance – the kind the FDA held a public hearing more than two years ago to develop – would have been far more encompassing. Perhaps it’s no wonder then that the FDA released these guidelines during the Holidays (when they’re less likely to get noticed) and did so without even a press release.

“We understand the level of interest and wanted to get out what we had available to provide guidance,” FDA spokeswoman Karen Mahoney told Ad Age. She also added that this was just “the first of multiple planned guidances that respond to testimony and comments from the Part 15 public hearing that FDA held in November 2009.”

But when will those guidances come? And why does it have to be done piecemeal? This is all the FDA could get done in 2+ years?

 

Hospitals, healthcare providers should be smartphone-friendly

Last night, on the weekly Health Communication Social Media tweetchat, one of the discussion topics was the impact of the increased proliferation of smartphones in regards to health communication. If it is an opportunity, how can hospitals and providers tap into it? If it is a potential problem, what can they do about it?

I take the former view. With 54% of all mobile phone sales in the U.S. now being for smartphones, hospitals and healthcare providers need to become smartphone-friendly.

They don’t necessarily need to go out and develop their own apps for smartphones, though that’s something they should consider if they find it is the best way to reach their patients. But hospitals and larger medical practices should, as a start, build smartphone-optimized versions of their websites.

I’ve been a smartphone user for a few years now. If I’m away from my computer, it makes it relatively easy to look up information online. But websites that are not smartphone-optimized take a long time to load and are difficult to view on smartphone screens. You may also not be able to use all the features of the website on your smartphone.

I can read the New York Times in a smartphone-friendly format. Why shouldn’t I be able to get information on hospitals or healthcare providers the same way?

I understand that, especially in these difficult economic times, this may be beyond the budget of smaller practices. And even if they could financially afford it, it may not make business sense if its customers/patients don’t use smartphones heavily. After all, any business purchase decision has to provide some kind of a return.

But the larger practices, hospitals and healthcare systems that serve large numbers of people should do this. For them, it does not require that large of an investment. And it would help them better reach a public that will only increase its usage of smartphones.

What do you think?

With Social Media, one size does NOT fit all

This past Sunday, on the weekly Healthcare Social Media tweet chat, we discussed whether or not patients need to find their own way with Social Media. Is there a right way for every patient, provider or hospital to use Social Media?

The answer to that question is a resounding NO.

One size does not fit all with Social Media. Sure, there are some general guidelines people (and certainly for providers and hospitals) should or must follow. But that’s the key – they’re general. What works specifically for one entity isn’t guaranteed to work for another, no matter how similar they appear to be. This is true for all fields.

In the case of healthcare patients, you particularly need to let them find their own way. Not everyone has the same degree of comfort in sharing information about their health over Social Media. For various reasons, not everyone can share the same information over Social Media. And people have different degrees of comfort using these new tools at all. As with any tool, Social Media can backfire if you don’t know what you’re doing with it.

Similarly, not all healthcare providers can or should use Social Media the exact same way. Their patients are different, with unique needs and characteristics.

Think of it this way: if you were a public relations professional pitching a story for a pharmaceutical company in the Philadelphia area, you wouldn’t pitch the story to the Doylestown (Pa.) Intelligencer or the Philadelphia Inquirer the same way you’d pitch it to Drug Topics. Or, to use a non-PR example, you don’t tell a story to a 4-year-old child the exact same way you’d tell it to a 30-year-old adult.

When working with clients, agencies should help them develop specific plans tailored to their specific needs, then teach them how to execute those plans. Whether you hire an agency to help you or go completely on your own, you need to carefully develop and execute your own strategy, a strategy based on methodical research of your customers or patients, the market you serve and your competition. A generic, one-size-fits-all approach is not only lazy, but a recipe for failure.

E-patients: The changing face of healthcare

In honor of its 100th Anniversary, Swedish Medical Center of Seattle ran a two-day symposium on health care in the age of reform. I really wish I had been able to attend this in person (if only it didn’t take 6 hours and more than $500 to get from Philadelphia to Seattle, not even including hotel), but technology and my work schedule fortunately allowed me to watch parts of it online. I especially enjoyed one of the preliminary events covered health care in the age of social media – a topic very dear to my heart (as you can probably tell from this blog!).

There were two featured speakers at this preliminary event – Seattle Pediatrician Wendy Sue Swanson (author of the Seattle Mama Doc blog) and Dave deBronkart (better known in the twitter-verse as “epatientdave“). Dr. Swanson’s keynote speech was certainly outstanding in its own right. But deBronkart’s speech was particularly noteworthy because he discussed a concept for which he is one of the leading champions – the “e-patient.” And that concept is becoming an increasing factor in healthcare, one which patients, providers, pharmaceutical companies and insurers alike would be well-advised to heed.

In January 2007, deBronkart was faced with Stage IV cancer. He was given about 24 weeks to live. But he beat the odds, and defeated the disease by that September. Since then, he has advocated for patients to have more access to health information, and for patients to use this information.

The graphic in this post (credit Kru Research) gives a very specific definition of an e-patient, but the bottom line is that e-patients are smarter health care consumers who are able and willing to participate more in their health care. Both through reading on their own and conversing with others through social media tools, patients are entering the doctor’s office armed with more knowledge about their condition(s) than ever before.

The resulting practice, commonly called “participatory medicine,” is having a major impact on health care. Patients who know more about health issues and treatment options are able to ask better questions in the doctor’s office. Rather than blindly follow “doctor’s orders,” patients are increasingly managing their health in partnership with their doctors. This trend is also apparent with pharmaceutical manufacturers and even with insurers.

deBronkart’s story is a very moving and inspirational one, and can be read in more detail in his book Laugh, Sing and Eat Like a Pig – How an Empowered Patient Beat Stage IV Cancer (and what healthcare can learn from it).  Click here to order it through Amazon.com.