Digital Pharma: GSK pushes patient information boundaries
pharmafile | October 12, 2009 | Feature | Medical Communications |Â Â GSK, digi, digital pharma, patient informationÂ
GlaxoSmithKline has launched a product information website for patients in the UK, becoming the second major pharma company to push the boundaries of what information the industry can make available to UK patients.
Quietly launched last month GSK’s site is devoted to providing the public with “high-quality, up-to-date information about GSK medicines”.
The public can search the site for a particular product, or browse for products – either by their brand or generic names.
Generally UK pharma restricts its patient-focused efforts to disease awareness campaigns, which provide information on conditions but don’t mention medicines by name, for fear of being seen to promote medicines to the general public and thereby breaching the UK industry’s self-regulatory Code of Practice.
But authoritative, non-promotional information about pharma products has long been available online – if you know where to look – despite its absence from UK pharma’s own websites, which tend to err on the side of caution.
AstraZeneca’s simply4patients website was the first notable exception to this, and now it is joined by GSK’s own online information resource for the general public.
GSK’s site includes a section for reporting adverse events, which links out to UK medicines regulator the MHRA’s YellowCard site, among a slew of non-promotional product information.
Take, for example, GSK’s blockbuster respiratory treatment Seretide. Previously if patients wanted information on the drug from the company they might go to its corporate website, where they would find the revelatory information that “Seretide has a number of formulations”. And that’s it, apart from a link to the electronic Medicines Compendium (eMC) site, where they would find patient information leaflets.
But the new page for Seretide on GSK’s new information site includes a full product overview, links to patient information leaflets on the eMC as well as the Medicines Guides page for the drug.
There’s also a section on Patient Information, that links out to useful websites like Asthma UK, the British Lung Foundation and the Global Initiative for Chronic Obstructive Lung Disease.
Parallel site for UK healthcare professionals
The site does still cling to online pharma marketing’s first commandment – thou shalt pretend patients don’t visit doctor websites – and offers a parallel site for UK healthcare professionals – from the same landing page.
The site for healthcare professionals aims to support them in their daily practice and provide information as an “aid to treatment”.
Here GSK says it wants to “enable a legitimate exchange of scientific information with healthcare professional about [our] medicines”.
The pages are expanded, and more technical, versions of their patient-focused equivalents, and include an additional section on medical indications. There, under asthma for example, are entries for the company’s respiratory brands Becodisks, Flixotide, Seretide, Serevent and Ventolin, all linked to their product information page.
The initiative seems like a common sense step forward for patient information in the UK. But, as with so many of pharma’s online initiatives, it is once again a case of watch this space to see how it is received by patients, healthcare professionals and, more importantly, regulators.
Dominic Tyer is web editor for Pharmafocus and InPharm.com and the author of the Digital Pharma blog. He can be contacted via email, Twitter or LinkedIn.
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