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Jul 12th 2012 

Are Meta Tags a Regulatory Time Bomb?

Your branded pharma site is non-compliant. Yes, yours.

Paying attention yet?

As pharma marketers, we operate in a world governed by strict rules. As digital pharma marketers, those strict rules can often be ambiguous, poorly-defined, or simply absent, requiring us to interpret vague requirements and/or extrapolate from other (presumably) relevant precedents. (Yeah, I know, it’s almost exactly like having a girlfriend.)

Which brings me back to your Brand.com.

What’s to worry about, you say? Everything’s ship-shape, buttoned-up, right? On-label messaging, appropriate fair balance, all content submitted and approved by the FDA. Looks like everyone else’s.

Well, perhaps there is one aspect of your branded product site that you’ve overlooked. One that is routinely ignored as it seems so tucked away and safe from scrutiny. But one that is on the FDA’s radar and which might be the source of some serious compliance headaches one day soon. Could it be that deep down within the HTML code of your website there exists a regulatory time bomb?

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Jun 26th 2012 

Healthcare & Technology – Where Does Pharma Fit In?

Even as the Supreme Court continues to debate the legality of the Obama health care law, most specifically the Affordable Care Act’s individual health-insurance mandate, many key initiatives of the plan’s overall intent are here to stay.  Critically, they are already changing the entire healthcare landscape and cannot be ignored.  To ensure a full share of the benefits, Pharma needs to engage with HIT now and fully understand the new landscape unfolding.

Better living through technology

While most other major industries such as music, publishing, and banking have already seen the disruption and reinvention of the digital revolution, healthcare has been characteristically slow to the party.  Fortunately, the HITECH ACT of 2009, designed to promote the adoption and meaningful use of health information technology, has helped to greatly motivate the digitization of healthcare.  

HITECH is the first big push into digitization and it is accomplishing its goals.  Over $6 billion of the $27 billion allocated has been spent to date.  According to recent CDC data there’s been a 33.8% adoption rate for EHRs in NY and over 60% of physicians are using tablets in daily practice (presumably to view EHRs).  And judging by the hundreds, even thousands of presenters, exhibitors, and attendees of eHealth conferences such as HIMSS, Health2.0, and the mHealth Summit, the overall market for HIT is extremely robust.  Until you walk the many miles of the HIMSS exhibits it’s hard to understand the growth of this market.  EHRs are just the tip of the iceberg as entrepreneurs launch new apps and sites while major players like Phillips, Cisco, GE, Dell, and countless others line up to help drive the connected future of healthcare.

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Jun 15th 2012 

Will Penguin Freeze Out Pharma?

For pharmaceutical brands in today’s market, search engine optimization is a critical component of every web initiative. Research by ComScore (2010) suggests that over 80% of all Internet sessions start at a search engine and, when we say “search engine optimization,” we generally mean “optimization for Google.” Google searches account for over 80% of search traffic to our client sites; while the second most popular engine, Yahoo, drives less than 10% of that volume:

A major goal for any website project, and the purpose of SEO, is to get the site listed in the top few results on the first page of Google’s results for the most common search terms—the keywords that HCPs are typing into the search engine’s interface around the site’s content.  Unfortunately, many sites that have aggressively pursued that goal – or worked with unscrupulous SEO vendors – have recently been severely penalized by Google.

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