OrganizedWisdom Health Blog

White Paper Provides Strategy to Help Drug Firms Leverage Social Media Safely

Over the past year and a half, we have met with marketing executives, compliance officers, and lawyers from more than 20 of the world's top pharmaceutical companies to discuss how they could and should be using social media to join the conversation and connect better with patients.

We felt there was (and still is) a significant opportunity for them to leverage the power of social media to share information and education to try and bridge the massive divide that currently exists between Big Pharma and the people who buy their products.

But meeting after meeting, we would be met with resistance to the effect of, "We don't do social media; We don't want to lose control; We can't use blogs..." and so on.

Being the resilient entrepreneurial types that we are, we pressed on determined to convince these companies that a healthy dose of transparency and openness would go a long way in improving relations with customers. We even developed a presentation called Pharma-Friendly Social Media to try and bridge the gap between these companies and their customers. Still, it was always an uphill battle trying to get these companies to start listening and communicating to their own customers. (If they listen, they might learn about adverse events, which is a big no-no.  Then they have to file lots of paperwork and disclose issues that may impact their drugs, etc.).

One of the biggest challenges was that the FDA has yet to issue guidance on how to conduct monitoring and marketing practices in social media so pharmaceutical companies are unsure how to proceed. And as we quickly learned, no one wants to be the guinea pig with new innovations in the pharmaceutical industry. And for good reason, Big Pharma must be cautious, conservative, and follow the letter of the law.

It is unclear when or if the FDA will issue guidance on the many new issues that have come up as a result of social media, the Internet, and online marketing. Until the waters settle, we recommend each company take baby steps and get involved. Bring your marketing teams and compliance teams together to figure out how to take the first steps.

And step one should be reading this new White Paper just co-authored by Fard Johnmar from Envision Solutions.

The Difference Between Web 2.0 and Health 2.0 Movement

Healthcare blogger Scott Shreve, MD has a well thought out post today that does a great job of outlining the differences between Health 1.0 and 2.0 and outlines how the Health 2.0 movement differs from Web 2.0. See the charts below and click here to read his complete post which is well worth the read.

Only An Inch Down The Road Of Organizing The World's Information

Seth Godin has a great post today about the numerous opportunities and need to better organize information today.

It's easy to be wowed by what a magical job the search engines do in finding you just the right needle in the haystack.

The fact is that search engines are very good at fairly simple searches, and very good at finding information about single products, services, people and ideas.

But they're terrible at connections, at rankings, at horizontal results. They can't help me find the 25 most important up and coming artists in the United States. They can't help me find six products that are viable alternatives to something that was just discontinued. They can't help me rank the service of four accounting firms.

People are starting to organize real estate data, entertainment content, and reviews in really interesting ways.  And a few new health companies (including OrgnaizedWisdom Health) are just getting started at organizing the world's health information. There's a seemingly endless amount of work to be done, but thanks to the power of collaboration and social media we have a feeling things are about to get a whole lot more useful in how people find the most useful health wisdom and resources.

Look for our official OrganizedWisdom announcement about how we intend to solve this problem later this week.

MedBillManager Makes The Wall Street Journal

There's a great article in the September 4th issue of the Wall Street Journal about new services that are helping consumers better manage their medical bills.  Several of our good friends were featured including MedBillManager.com, WebMD, and Revolution Health.

Read the full article here: Slew of Online Tools Let Consumers Create and Manage Their Digital Records;
Typing It In Yourself

We were particularly happy to see MedBillManager featured.  If you haven't met Christopher Parks yet, one of the founders of MedbillManager and you care about the Health 2.0 space than you really should.  He is one of the most passionate people in the space and he is on a mission to truly improve people's lives based on his own experience and challenges with the health care system when taking care of his parents. They continue to innovate tirelessly and it is great to see their hard work making a difference in people's lives.

Congrats to all featured in the article and we look forward to seeing you a;; at the Health 2.0 conference this month.

New Facebook Group for Health 2.0

Even though Matthew Holt's upcoming Health 2.0 Conference this month is sold out, you can still participate by joining the new Health 2.0 Group on Facebook here.  Looks like there are about 63 members already, and I'm sure by the time the conference ends there will be several hundred more. It doesn't look like there is much activity yet, but it looks like it could be a useful communication tool for all of us in the space.

OrganizedWisdom Featured in The Economist: Health 2.0 Picks Up Steam

The past 18 months or so have been a tremendous whirlwind of innovation, trial and error, new ideas, change and progress in the online healthcare space -- what many now call Health 2.0.

Dozens of new companies have launched and secured funding from venture capitalists. Consumers continue to use the Internet as a critical tool to manage their health care.  We now have our own Health 2.0 conference this month that is sold out! And the most influential media outlets are now covering this trend.

This week's Economist Magazine has a full-page trend piece by Jeanette Borzo titled, Health 2.0: Technology and society: Is the outbreak of cancer videos, bulimia blogs and other forms of “user generated” medical information a healthy trend?" which OrganizedWisdom was happy to be featured in.

From the article:

To gauge the size of this snowball, look at OrganizedWisdom, a firm based in New York. It launched in October 2006 as a health-care Wikipedia of sorts: a site to which consumers could contribute their own nuggets of health wisdom. Yet after only a few months it transformed itself into an index of the existing web content. The firm's founders had discovered that there already was quite enough user-generated health information online; the real problem was finding the good stuff.

The explosion of user-generated content in health care is, in part, the result of broader internet trends: more and more people have broadband access and the tools for creating content are getting easier to use. New software, for instance, makes it easy to launch and maintain a site such as FluWikie (which provides information about preparing for an influenza pandemic), and digital cameras make it a snap to take and upload photos of, say, epigastric hernia surgery.

But there are other drivers, too. Those with multiple chronic conditions, such as diabetes and depression, or lesser-known illnesses such as chronic fatigue syndrome, are anxious to get tips from others in similar situations.

Other Health Bloggers who we respect have already been blogging about it (here and here) and with the upcoming Health 2.0 Conference (which we'll be speaking at), we suspect there will be a lot more conversation this month on the topic of how technology, social media and collaboration can help improve some of today's most challenging health care issues.

Index Spam, Melanoma and Google

Do a search for "what is melanoma" in Google today and the first link on the very first page is something called index spam. (Yes, index spam.) Most people still think spam is only when you get junk mail in your email box. Unfortunately, that's not the case anymore.

INDEX SPAM is when web site owners themselves or through the "black hat" search engine optimizers they hire, get their undeserving sites listed at the top of Google and other machine-generated search engines. This highjacking of the search results is done by taking advantage of the algorithm. They are able to do this because machines, not humans, make the determination of what is included in your search results.

It's amazing to me that in late 2007, here you are researching a serious, life-threatening cancer and in your very first search on the very first page in the very first link, you get hit with Index Spam

Here it is for your very own eyes to see...the first link in google's search results for "What is Melanoma":/





If you click that, you are brought to a definitions page, which has been planted to drive you to this site:





The final result: a useless link with useless information with no value whatsoever. And that, my friend, is Index Spam.

Click Here to View

People are the new software. They are the algorithm.

Great quote in today's email newsletter, Steve Harmon's Innovation Report, 2008:

“People are the new software. They are the new algorithm.... Clutter-free is in. Clean is back. Ad-free information, like a park bench without graffiti, a restroom without gang scribbles. Seeds of change are planted today and I think 2008 will pave new ground for new ideas, better ways and means. New names and players emerging.”