First off, for those who are paying close attention, one of my recommended New Year’s Resolutions was “Stop Talking About Social Media,” so you’re probably appreciating the irony that I am talking about social media. Well, I get a pass on this one because what I’m about to share was done before January 1st…sort of.

At the end of last year, I was invited to speak at the Drug Information Association’s (DIA) conference, “9th DIA Conference for Contemporary Pharmacovigilance and Risk Management Strategies,” which was just held on January 11-13.  I know what you’re thinking. Why would they want me to even attend (much less speak) at this meeting? I thought that too, as the room was to be filled with hundreds of regulatory people whose lives I make just a bit tougher with the information I publish here and ideas I help create with my clients.

It turns out that they actually had a good idea that I hadn’t really considered, which amounted to a new use for social media in healthcare. Essentially, my talk was to be about how new media technologies (i.e., social media) could be used to disseminate risk and safety information. Imagine a few years back when drugs like Baycol or Vioxx were taken off the market because of new safety information. This was critical information to disseminate to the public, but what was the best way to do this? How could you reach the greatest number of people with the most accurate information in the shortest amount of time?

Social media was still fairly young (read: non-existent) for most people during these drug recalls, but today is a different story. So, the question became, how can pharma (or the FDA) use social media to disseminate new safety information for products currently on the market? In addition, how can these technologies be used to find new safety issues before they affect large numbers of people?

I called my presentation “Communicating Drug Risk Using New Media Technologies.” What I discovered in creating this presentation is that regulatory groups ought to get comfortable with social media if only to be able use social media to communicate and react to new safety information. To be sure, social media will be how most people find out about the next “Vioxx,” but will any company be ready to use this channel to help disseminate their view of the situation or will it turn into an uncontrollable firestorm? So beyond needing to learn social media in order to better understand the programs marketing teams dream up, regulatory groups themselves might be called upon to use social media in certain circumstances. What then?

I’m now making my presentation available to all Dose of Digital readers as a PowerPoint download and also as a SlideShare SlideCast. The SlideCast has my slides synced with the audio from my talk. It’s the next best thing to being there, as they say.

I should mention that this is not the first time this presentation has been made available. If you are a “Fan” of Dose of Digital on Facebook or a subscriber to the white paper updates email, then you already had a chance to see and download this presentation. These two groups each get sneak previews of new content from time to time, so if you’re interested in seeing some new things before everyone else, then you should probably become a “Fan” of Dose of Digital on Facebook or jump to the bottom of this page and fill out the email subscription form.

Here’s the link for the presentation and I’ve also embedded the SlideShare SlideCast here as well (direct link to Slidecast: http://bit.ly/613XjP).

Communicating Drug Risk Using New Media Technologies (491 downloads)

Possibly related posts (auto-generated):

1. Pharma Social Media…Yes, It’s Possible
2. 6 Steps to Getting Your Healthcare Social Media Idea Approved
3. How to Make the Social Media Risk Worthwhile