2002

How well do pharmaceutical companies' privacy policies comply with best practices such as the FTC's Fair Information Practice principles? To determine this, an analysis was performed on the privacy policies of the 21 top selling prescription products worldwide (data from 2000). The results are presente in this article.

In July 2001, URAC (aka American Accreditation HealthCare Commission) approved a set of standards for health Web site accreditation. These standards, which cover privacy, security, quality of information, fairness of transactions and professional conduct, borrow heavily from the e-Health Code of Ethics of the Internet Healthcare Coalition. There are thousands of health Web sites on the Internet. Accreditation is not an appropriate path for all these sites to take, but for those sites that can afford it and that meet rigorous standards for quality and accountability, accreditation can help distinguish them from their competitors and increase consumer trust. Pharmaceutical sites focusing on consumers, in particular, stand to benefit

PHARMA MARKETING NEWS is the periodic newsletter of the PHARMA-MKTING email discussion group. It includes original articles, opinions from leaders in the field of interactive pharmaceutical marketing, industry news briefs, and useful information abstracted from subscriber discussion threads.

At the recent eyeforpharma conference, I rocked the boat a little by suggesting that the percent of the pharma DTC promotional budget devoted to the Internet was a miniscule 1-3% and that this percentage has NOT changed since 1998 when I first heard about it.

The current mantra of pharmaceutical e-business is 'integrate e-business into sales and marketing for a better ROI and more sales.' I found out what this means by attending eyeforpharma's e-Sales & Marketing for Pharma USA conference held at the Philadelphia Crowne Plaza Hotel on October 9-11, 2002. The following is a summary of a presentation by by Philippe Barzin, Director Connectivity, Johnson & Johnson. Instead of talking about CRM (Customer Relationship Management), Barzin focused on HRM or 'Healthcare Relationship Management.' While CRM focuses on a single customer at any one point in time, HRM focuses on supporting the customer across multiple channels - Web, email, call center, field visits - and over a lifetime. Considering the physician customer first, Barzin cited research showing that physicians value many sources of contact with pharma companies and actually find online sources less valuable than offline!

The debate surrounding the strategic and economic value of having an online DTC strategy rings loud and clear at most global pharmaceutical companies today. Although the role of using the Web for primary awareness of the product and therapeutic category is very important, we will focus on the power of the product Web site as a conversion tool in this article and illustrate how the Web strategy fits into the overall marketing continuum - from initial engagement all the way to loyalty marketing.

PHARMA MARKETING NEWS is the periodic newsletter of the PHARMA-MKTING email discussion group. It includes original articles, opinions from leaders in the field of interactive pharmaceutical marketing, industry news briefs, and useful information abstracted from subscriber discussion threads. The dot-coms have come and gone. Pharma companies seem to be de-commissioning their e-business divisions. Managers are losing their e prefixes in their titles. The vast unemployed victims of downsizing are eliminating the e words from their resumes. Is this the end of everything e and the Internet? Is it a waste of time and money using technology, including the Internet and wireless PDA applications, to reach physicians? Is it about time that pharmaceutical marketers reverse the lopsided budget spent on physicians vs consumers, at least when it comes to the Internet and other high technology channels?

The current mantra of pharmaceutical e-business is 'integrate e-business into sales and marketing for a better ROI and more sales.' I found out what this means by attending eyeforpharma's e-Sales & Marketing for Pharma USA conference held at the Philadelphia Crowne Plaza Hotel on October 9-11, 2002. The following is a summary of a presentation by by Philippe Barzin, Director Connectivity, Johnson & Johnson. Instead of talking about CRM (Customer Relationship Management), Barzin focused on HRM or 'Healthcare Relationship Management.' While CRM focuses on a single customer at any one point in time, HRM focuses on supporting the customer across multiple channels - Web, email, call center, field visits - and over a lifetime. Considering the physician customer first, Barzin cited research showing that physicians value many sources of contact with pharma companies and actually find online sources less valuable than offline!

Even though spending on Internet promotion may be increasing now, it is still a miniscule portion of the overall promotional budget of a brand - about $14 million for online vs. over $600 million for TV and maybe $400 million or more for print.

Anyone who is even a casual reader of Pharma Marketing News knows that we support consumers' right to privacy and believe that pharmaceutical marketers need to beef up their privacy policies if they hope to improve consumer trust. So it may surprise you when we say that a new Texas privacy law goes too far in its apparent zeal to protect patients' privacy. In fact, we believe that this law's real purpose is to limit the ability of pharmaceutical companies and their agents to communicate product information directly to consumers in Texas. The privacy law we talking about is the Texas Medical Privacy Act (SB 11). SB 11 is known in some quarters as 'super HIPAA' because it applies super-stringent HIPAA-like privacy regulations to pharmaceutical companies, their advertising/ marketing agencies and other entities - even individuals. A covered entity under SB 11 is any person who assembles, collects, analyses, uses, evaluates, stores, or transmits protected health information. The law becomes effective in Texas September 1, 2003.