Technology

Novartis and Cadient served up a very successful unbranded campaign on YouTube. Pharma should take note of this Web 2.0 victory.

More control over warehouse data (from drug company to pharmacist) is key to inventory control

Pfizer named first pharmaceutical sponsor of social-networking community custom tailored for physicians and healthcare providers. Sermo CEO Daniel Palestrant explains how the deal will work.

New search engine gives consumers the ability to manage all their health needs from a central location--and offers pharma the opportunity to reach new patients through targeted search ads

The clinical trials space these days is an alphabet soup of technologies: CTMS (clinical trial management systems); CDM (clinical data management); CDR (clinical data repositories); eCTD (electronic common technical document); and many more. But the technology with the most promise for transforming the way clinical trials are performed (and for driving everyone mad throughout implementation) is EDC-electronic data capture. It's taken more than a decade, but today most big pharma companies-and a fair number of smaller ones-are using some form of EDC in clinical trials. The early adopters might have experienced some growing pains, but the benefits seem to be outweighing the high cost of implementation. Few companies would consider going back to paper-based trials.

Gotcha, Big Pharma! Sort of.... Not me, a guy named Jeffrey Light. The young founder and head of tiny DC-based nonprofit Patients not Patents hit the wires recently, charging that Abbott Laboratories had edited its entry in Wikipedia, the online everybody-can-play encyclopedia, trying to make itself look better. Using a brand-new online tool called the Wiki Scanner, which allows anyone to track the source of any change entered into any of Wikipedia's 2 million articles, Light discovered that at 4:38 P.M. on July 2, 2007, several edits to the article on Abbott were made from a computer at Abbott's Chicago office.

If you've been thinking of online video as a toy or, worse yet, as something that's going to happen at some point in the future, let me offer you a picture: Me, a target pharma customer, on the elliptical machine at the gym, watching, no, not CNN or Katie Couric, but "Nephrology Consult 101, Unusual Causes of Renal Failure" and "Internal Jugular Central Line Placement," a pair of free video podcasts I downloaded from the Yale School of Medicine.

Search engine giant says industry lags behind on e-marketing

Pfizer computers infiltrated by spammers

Two Internet superpowers are invading online consumer-health territory. What does it mean for pharma?

From pamphlets to posters to informational magazines, doctors' offices are teeming with direct-to-patient promotions, and patients are starting to overlook them. To cut through the clutter, one healthcare-technology company created a device that replaces the common intake clipboard with a digital pad that collects patient information and responds with branded information.

In the wake of a high-profile death from counterfeit drugs, the industry reacts

Although pricey, serialization with RFID is expected to reduce logistical errors and address some aspects of supply chain security

With gaming technology, pharmaceutical companies can display immersive 3-D animation that allows doctors to explore inside an interactive environment pertaining to a drug's method of action

You remember it well: that day back in the late 1990s, when your brand's Web site first went live. It looked great at the time, and you were so proud to have entered the Internet Age.

Once you get past the Disney allusion, it's easy to see the appeal of the idea that everyone in the world is linked by a short chain of social acquaintances. This "small-world phenomenon" was first advanced four decades ago by social psychologist Stanley Milgram, whose groundbreaking work includes the theory that there are only six links, or acquaintances, between any two randomly selected Americans. Popularized as "six degrees of separation," this notion has been transformed by the digital revolution into a buzzing, booming hyperreality beyond anything even the radical Milgram could have imagined.

Drug giant moves corporate, promotional communications online.

The push for new media is on. Pharma agencies are buzzing about social media tools such as blogs, podcasts, and interactive healthcare forums, but few firms really know how to make these online initiatives work.

Product sites need to offer consumers more than just a hard sell.

Are your static banner ads underperforming? Are you paying through the nose for the perfect ad position only to discover that your click-through rates are in the low single digits? Chances are that your tricked-out, flashy pharma ad is being ignored because people aren't proactively looking for the information that it's offering.

Pharma companies have been blasting out electronic newsletters to consumers since the advent of new media. But far too often, the content is vague and redundant, and instead of striking a responsive chord with potential readers, e-mail campaigns are more likely to prompt a strike of the delete key.

By using rich-media components and data-collection tools in online advertising campaigns, marketers can gather valuable customer information and stimulate brand awareness among their target audiences.

Mobile marketing is paperless and scalable, and allows pharma companies to build one-to-one relationships with customers.

80 percent of Web users search for health information online to make better health choices.

Documents from R&D, clinical affairs, regulatory, and sales and marketing can be in the millions. Throw electronic information into the mix, and the number of documents required for litigation increases exponentially.

Doctors like direct mail as long as the message is concise and to the point. The minute you ask the doctor to actually do something with the direct mail, that's when your effectiveness starts to go downhill.

After decades of disparate attempts to secure supply chains, pharma companies may finally be getting on the same page.

Clinical researchers cannot reliably use many of today's electronic health records because of the variability among collection systems.

Hospitals don't want straight-up advertising. If a branded program is going to be integrated into a health-education or health-services platform that's offered directly to a patient's room, it needs to have objective value.

To avoid the extra expense, many pharmaceutical companies abandon their Spanish sites when a new general-market campaign is launched.