Technology

Still hoping the journal article on your drug's adverse reactions will go unnoticed? Think again. A new partnership between medical journals and physician social networking site Sermo just made chatting about drugs a lot easier.

Pharmacoactuarial analysis helps drug companies communicate value to health plans

Bill Gates and Co. officially released Office for Business Applications (OBA) for the life sciences industry. This set of tools allows software developers to build applications that seamlessly connect back-end enterprise systems with MS Office programs.

GSK, Pfizer, and Merck have jumped on the cell-phone marketing bandwagon, but most of pharma is still tiptoeing around the technology. A new report details how pharma can get consumers to text for health info.

California's plan for full-blown ePedigree implementation by 2009 just got a reality check. The hang-up? The systems are cost more and are taking longer than expected to get up and running.

Defending your brand through search optimization

Electronic pedigree is the future of supply chain security. Those still waiting and seeing might what to stop waiting and start tracking

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

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

Drug giant moves corporate, promotional communications online.

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

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.