Pharma Beware: Google Sidewiki is Spreading Like...... H1N1 (not)!
For the past several weeks, the EyeonFDA blog has been reporting on the possible regulatory impact of Google’s Sidewiki on life sciences companies. For those of you who may not be familiar with Sidewiki (released in late September) it is a new feature of the Google toolbar which can turn a static web 1.0 website into an interactive web 2.0 experience by allowing website visitors to leave comments behind.
When you use side-wiki, you have the ability to leave your comments and associate them with a website whether or not the website owner has enabled commenting. Since the comments are maintained by Google, there is no direct relationship with the website. Basically, anybody who visits a website that has Sidewiki enabled can say or comment on whatever they like and immortalize it (until Google removes it) for the entire world to see. Apparently, this doesn’t sit well with many website owners and Google purportedly recently release code to disable Sidewiki at websites that don’t want to support it. However, it isn’t clear how robust the anti-sidewiki code is!
While I haven’t formulated an opinion on Side Wiki yet (mostly because it isn’t that interesting to me), it does represent a regulatory dilemma for life sciences companies with marketed drugs and devices. According to today’s EyeonFDA post “If someone writes of an adverse event on a Sidewiki, or promotes an off-label use, it is now on the company's home page. Is the company under a duty to monitor and correct such misinformation or if they do, do they incur liability for doing so? It is a conundrum - and there is no insight apparent from the FDA on the matter.” Further, most life sciences companies have yet to craft a legal or regulatory policy for Sidewiki usage.
EyeonFDA has been assiduously monitoring life sciences company websites for the appearance of Sidewiki. To date EyeonFDA has found it on the following company websites:
- Abbott
- Amgen
- AstraZeneca
- Bayer
- Baxter
- Bristol-Myers Squibb
- GSK
- Johnson & Johnson
- Lilly
- Novartis
- Novo Nordisk
- Pfizer
- Roche
- Sanofi-Aventis
- Takeda
While Google would like everyone to believe that Sidewiki is taking the Internet by storm and spreading like the H1N1 virus, a show of hands at yesterdays e-Patient Connections 2009 meeting in Philly, which was attended by many computer geeks and social media enthusiasts, revealed that about4 out of about 150 had heard of it! Nevertheless, it is out there and life sciences companies would be well advised to formulate internal legal and regulatory guidelines despite the fact that FDA hasn’t issued any guidance on its use.
P.S. Shortly after I posted this, @pharmaguy alerted me to an article that appeared on the today's online PharmaExec.com entitled "SideWiki: What's Pharma To Do"?
Until next time...
Good Luck and Good Commenting
