Last Wednesday, I had the pleasure of attending the Business Development Institute’s Social Communications & Healthcare conference in New York City. It was the third year that BDI has put on the conference but one of the first times the event has included such robust case studies from industry leaders.
It is unfortunate that in pharma, we really don’t have many social media case studies to look at, yet. And this isn’t just because social media is new, because really, it’s not that new anymore (and what’s new today is old tomorrow). The problem lies more in the fact that so many companies and agencies are doing innovative stuff that they aren’t yet allowed to disclose. Here at Spectrum, a number of our progressive social media-related initiatives are highly sensitive and stay confidential. However, in the meantime, it’s inspiring to see all the ways people are finding to best socially communicate.
I just read an excellent article about crowdsourcing health care solutions by Eliot Van Buskirk at Wired. The article, titled “Harvard-Based Crowdsource Project Seeks New Diabetes Answers,” describes in great detail a new initiative to crowd source diabetes information with an end goal of curing Type I diabetes. (Almost 2.4 million people in the US suffer from Type I diabetes.) “Using federal stimulus funding from the National Institutes of Health, Harvard Catalyst has teamed up with InnoCentive to explore whether open innovation and crowd-sourcing can spark new directions, collaborations and research in the healthcare community.”
Congratulations to the National Institutes of Health for funding this and to Harvard’s medical research department for developing this crowdsourced medical initiative sure to help those with Type I diabetes.
What’s particularly interesting about the first phase of this project is the goal of ideation. The project’s initial objective is not to identify a specific cure, but to start with the basic premises that there are questions or criteria that may not have been considered before now. (more…)
To recap, back in September, Google introduced a downloadable sidebar that allows a Mozilla Firefox, or Internet Explorer, user to leave their comments on any Web site – appropriately named “Sidewiki.” To add method to its madness, Google’s algorithm sorts these comments by relevance, not by date. In a nutshell, the Sidewiki has the potential to transform every Web site into a social media platform. It pairs the voice of the consumer with the voice of the brand, side by side in your browser… and, with an “opt-out” feature not yet available from Google, it is a company’s responsibility to determine the best possible way to approach the online “voices” coming from the metaphorical peanut gallery. (more…)
At the most recent Health2.0 conference in San Francisco we heard from Sanjay Koyani who is charged with web design and usability efforts at the FDA. Prior to joining the FDA Sanjay was in similar roles at both the HHS and the National Cancer Institute. The FDA has been making a lot of news recently for many things. Among the most recent newsworthy events involving the FDA, which monitors both food and drug safety issues was a peanut butter recall. Sanjay’s team did a remarkable job with the dissemination of information to consumers and professionals around the peanut butter recall and the affected products.
Sanjay’s team has become prolific users of Twitter and other social media tools to communicate directly with professionals and the general public. This has resulted in remarkable results both in terms of the speed with which information is disseminated and that at which the public is educated on an issue. Equally notable was the effort on the part of many citizens to aid in the dissemination of this information and to “pick up the torch’ on behalf of the FDA in informing and educating citizens. Social media shows again how it can work at its best for another worthy goal. (more…)
I know the title of this blog post may seem a little odd. What is iPad fever? Can I catch it? What are the symptoms? Who is to blame?
