#socpharm

“Patients struggle with medication adherence for various reasons. When a non-adherent patient is not seeing results and the physician believes a patient is taking a medication, this may lead to unnecessary changes in treatment which can be costly for the patient and the health system,” Dr. Purvance, CEO of Barton Health, said in a statement. “This new product offering provides a data-driven communication channel between the medical provider and the patient that empowers the patient to take the appropriate dose of medication and better understand the importance of daily activity levels and other lifestyle changes.”

Whether it’s the mounting pressure of the coming outcomes-based payment structures, or just the slow train of pharma development catching up with the times, most of the experts, consultants, and stakeholders MobiHealthNews spoke with in recent weeks believe that pharma has finally reached a turning point, and we’ll begin seeing serious investments in digital health this year. In fact, a few have already happened, including two major pharma companies — Roche and Novartis — teaming up with Qualcomm Life to make use of Qualcomm’s telehealth 2net Hub in research projects.

Regulators and pharmaceutical companies are monitoring social media posts for potential adverse drug reaction signals. Up to 90% of side effects to drugs are not reported, according to some estimates. “Adverse drug reactions (ADRs) are grossly under reported by everyone, including healthcare professionals, but particularly so by patients,” says David Lewis, head of global safety at Novartis, who is co-ordinating the involvement of pharmaceutical companies in a €2.3m three-year public-private project called Web-RADR (Recognising Adverse Drug Reactions). Data from the European Medicines Agency (EMA) indicate that patients are not reporting side effects adequately through official channels and several regulators are exploring the possibility of making use of the abundant information swirling around social networks. “Mining data from social media gives us a greater chance of capturing ADRs that a patient wouldn’t necessarily complain about to their doctor or nurse. Physicians are great at diagnosing illnesses and noting objective signs, but patients are great at reporting subjective reactions and feelings,” says Lewis. “For example, a psychiatrist can’t see suicidal ideation as an ADR while a patient can describe it perfectly.”

As in 2013, Pew Research asked users of each platform how often they engage with the site, whether on a daily, weekly or less frequent basis. Facebook users continue to be highly engaged, while the proportion of daily Twitter users decreased, and users of Instagram, Pinterest and LinkedIn mostly log on with similar frequency compared with last year.

In the rather ambiguously entitled session "We've got your social media guidelines right here!" we thought we'd cover some of the digital and social media activities pharma companies could be doing NOW, despite a lack of (formal Internet and Social Media) Guidelines from the the FDA. But as we started developing our slides and materials it suddenly struck us -- is this REALLY what people want to hear? Are we answering the questions people want answered? If we put together a fantastic presentation, will people EVEN CARE??? Rather than second guess what people are looking for, we thought we would instead eat a bit of our own dogfood and ask you -- our potential audience -- to submit the questions YOU want answered in this session on what social media activities companies could be doing today. We would then address the crowdsourced presentation (Well, ok, I guess the presentation won't be crowdsourced, but the questions will be. Anyway, you get the idea...) So with that in mind, please let us know what questions you'd like answered. (Keep in mind, now that Shwen and I are no longer working directly for our corporate pharma overlords organizations, so we may be a wee bit more free in what we can say in response... :) Don't be shy -- please submit your questions in the comments field below and we hope to see you at the virtual summit! THANKS!