Thank you to Matt Arnold for writing this, Matt is Principal Analyst at DRG, follow Matt @MattArnoldRx
- Facebook is now offering pharma advertisers a scrolling ISI (Important Safety Info) feature, a design fix for a problem that has bedeviled marketers trying to work within FDA guidelines in space-constrained media. Bayer piloted it with ads for their Betaconnect autoinjector, for MS patients, and announced it at last week’s Digital Pharma East conference. The Bayer ad also features a “Call now” button connecting users to live nurse support.
- Perhaps equally importantly, Facebook is reversing its policy prohibiting pharmas from turning off comments for posts about branded products, thereby removing the burden of monitoring them for reports of adverse events that they’d have to pass on to FDA. It’s a far cry from 5 years ago, when Facebook basically shrugged in the face of industry exasperation over the comments-on mandate, and suggests that the digital megalith is finally taking pharma seriously as a revenue center.
- Drug prices are the number one health concern among U.S. voters, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll, with 74% saying making sure high cost drugs for chronic conditions are affordable should be a top priority for the next president and congress, and more than half agreeing that government should take action to lower drug prices. By contrast, a little over a third (37%) saying repealing the ACA was most important to them. Meanwhile, 4 out of 5 respondents to a Harris/HealthDay poll indicated support for price controls or caps on drugs and devices.
- PhRMA is gearing up for a postelection rumble as Washington answers all that constituent ire, and large pharmas are warning investors that the pricing environment in the U.S. is about to get uglier, while Rich Meyer predicts that pricing pressures will take a bite out of DTC advertising budgets next year.
- Incidentally, a study published earlier this month calculated doctors’ partisan political affiliation by specialty. Surgeons were the most GOP-leaning — 67% were registered Republicans, while infectious disease specialists were equally Democratic-leaning. Overall, physicians lean slightly to the left – 54% are registered Democrats.
- Prices aren’t just on the up for innovative specialty drugs – prices for several brands of insulin have risen sharply in recent years. Says The Post: “The history of insulin captures one of the mystifying complexities of the pharmaceutical market — how long-standing drugs become more expensive with time and competition fails to hold down prices.”
- The City of Chicago plans to license pharma sales reps – ostensibly to fight opioid abuse. The opioid abuse epidemic continues to make headlines – Stat and John Oliver have examined its origins in recent reports.
- Pharmas are pushing back on a pair of planned FDA studies aimed at determining whetherconsumers process animated ads differently and understanding how animation in ads affects consumer understanding. GSK says the studies’ designs “oversimplify animation” by assuming basic similarity across a diverse medium.
- The advent of the AI/IoT Age is nearly upon us, and Gartner is predicting that nearly 1 in 3 searches will be done without a screen by 2020.
- Teva and IBM are deepening their partnership to focus on finding new indications for existing drugs and improving chronic disease management. As mobihealthnews notes, Teva acquired smart inhaler maker Gecko Health Innovations last year, so this isn’t their first time around the disease management rodeo.
- Brigham and Women’s Hospital is partnering with Evidation Health to measure the impact of digital health solutions on clinical and financial outcomes, with a view toward “developing methods of creating direct to patient trials of digital health solutions.”
- GSK’s recent turn towards consumer products and expertise might be bleeding into its digital marketing. An election-themed Twitter campaign for Excedrin, #DebateHeadache, has garnered yuuge engagement, and the company’s earlier The Migraine Experience campaign, which cleverly incorporates VR, is winning accolades.
- Pharmas are highly active on Twitter, following initial reticence. It’s become an important channel for both clinical trial and employee recruitment, among other functions.
- One big reinsurer foresees Big Data, including social data, allowing insurers to assess risk and adjust their prices to consumers – for example, a sentiment analysis of your Tweets might influence the premium you pay for health insurance. Maybe not surprising, given that sentiment analysis of Twitter has been shown in the past to be a better predictor of heart disease than income or comorbid conditions.
- How about a prescription for a video game? Akili Labs is seeking FDA approval to market its Project: Evo game for prescription to ADHD patients, and the developer’s CEO foresees the use of multiple games in combination acting as “a neural CrossFit training.”
- AARP launched (in beta) a comprehensive caregiver support website, dubbed CareConnection, that combines telehealth features (from Teladoc), in-home care support (from CareLinx and Hometeam), meal delivery (bistroMD) and advice from UnitedHealthcare professionals, along with a mobile app and a social component.
- Genentech is doing a podcast series, dubbed Two Scientists Walk Into a Bar, featuring scientists from the company’s early scientific R&D group.
- Mindful that people often exhibit signs of suicidality and self-harm in social media before they act. Instagram introduced a tool allowing users to flag worrying posts of friends, who then receive a message offering them support. Facebook rolled out a similar feature earlier this year.
- By tracing generational mutations in HIV, scientists have cleared “Patient Zero” and established that the virus was circulating in the U.S. by 1971 – much earlier than previously thought.
- Meanwhile, research using the CRISPR gene editing technology has identified a half-dozen genes that can hobble the virus by inhibiting or barring its ability to get into T cells (though some fear that CRISPR could open a Pandora’s box).
