Social Media and Pharma: Adverse Events Reporting Revisited
Last week I attended the Advanced Learning Institute’s conference on social media and pharma. During several question and answer periods, I raised the idea about using social medial tools to improve adverse effects (AE) reporting and post marketing drug surveillance activities. While there was a lot of head nodding suggesting that many of the conference attendees agreed with the points I was making, the conversation about social media and AE reporting was extremely muted. I suspect that most pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies don’t want to discuss the topic until the US Food and Drug Administration issues its mythical regulatory guidance on the use of social media for promotional and other purposes some time next year (?).
John Mack aka Pharmaguy is an ardent supporter (like me) of the use of social media for AE reporting. John was at the meeting and he mentioned that the next day he would be giving a talk on that topic to the World Drug Safety Congress in Washington, DC. Conveniently, he posted a copy of the talk to Slideshare and his blog, Pharma Marketing Blog before his talk.
John’s ideas and insights into the use of social media tools for AE reporting are spot on (and consistent with mine of course!). I highly recommend that those of you who are interested in learning more about this topic take a look at the presentation; it is very informative and quite well done.
It is anybody’s guess at this point whether or not pharma will embrace social media and use it for more than promotional and marketing purposes. However, there is a growing body of evidence which suggests that pharma is beginning to realize that they can no longer fight the pressure from its stakeholders to embrace social media.
Stay tuned for late-breaking social media and pharma news!
Until next time...
Good Luck and Good Tweeting, Blogging, Videoing etc!
Social media would be a good way to get out the truth about certain drugs. The way it is now, rumors just float around all the time.It's worth a shot at least.