Pharma Industry News Update: 14 June 2016
Pharma Speaker Dinners Popular with Docs, Symposia Too
Speaker dinners and symposia are the most popular pharmaceutical events, according to an American Express Meeting & Events survey on the meetings preferences of physicians.
52% of physician respondents said product meetings were useful.
Meanwhile, many speaker programs are held in circumstances in which it would have been “virtually impossible for any presentation to be made” claimed a DOJ suit against Novartis, which famously hosted physician speaker events at Hooters! For more on that, read “Novartis Wines — er, Beers — and Dines Docs at Hooters!“
Can Pharma Develop Mobile Apps Likely to be Useful in Engaging Patients?
Current pharma apps are at the bottom of this pyramid. As you move up the pyramid, pharma would have a more difficult task to develop useful engaging apps for patients.
A systematic search of the iOS and Android app stores for a broad set of medical conditions revealed 6% of iOS apps and 16% of Android apps appeared to have limited engagement beyond traditional media.
Infographic: What About Social Media Do Healthcare Professionals Find Useful?
View the entire infographic…
You might also be interested in these data charts archived by PharmaGuy on Pinterest.
Apple Moves to Put Users of HealthKit Apps in Control of Their Own Health
Apple will add support for HL7’s Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) and the Continuity of Care Document (CCD) directly to HealthKit. For those unfamiliar with CDA/CCD, it’s basically a standard way (using XML) to describe an individual’s health history in a single, structured data format.
This means that any app (such an EHR patient portal app) will be able to share a CCD with the user in order to save it to HealthKit, and that any app can then get permission to read the CCD from HealthKit.
This comes at the same time that FDA is loosening restrictions on medical device makers for sharing data with patients (read “FDA Issues Guidance That Allows Medical Device Makers to Share Data with Patients“). Apple, however, is empowering patients to access their medical data directly.
Mining LinkedIn Profiles to Determine “Digital Density” of Pharma Companies
What makes a company a digital leader in the Pharma space? People working in Digital Health in Pharma are just like anyone else and like to compare their own efforts with their peers and see how they measure up. To help with this, we’ve been looking to find a measure of how much effort each Pharma company is putting into Digital Health, their digital intensity.
The perfect measure would be interviews and a look behind the scenes to understand the financial investment, managerial intent and most importantly, shift to a digital mindset at each of the big pharma companies. In the absence of teams of analysts and access to each of the companies, we have taken a different approach. We have harnessed the spirit of big data and defined “Digital Intensity” as the number of employees who refer to digital in their LinkedIn title per thousand employees.
