Digital Pharma: AZ presses the case for social media in pharma
pharmafile | February 11, 2011 | News story | Medical Communications | AZ, AstraZeneca, Digital Pharma blog, FDA, social media
Seemingly fed up with waiting for the FDA’s delayed social media guidance, AstraZeneca has published details of its own feedback exercise on the area.
The company sought opinions from health bloggers and influential online leaders last autumn and has just published a white paper that concludes patient interests are served through appropriate pharma use of social media.
Looking to boost its own place in the ongoing debate, AZ’s Social Media In The Pharmaceutical Industry report also talks up the guiding principles that were part of its submission to the FDA’s inquiry into social media and the internet last year.
“We are hopeful that using guidelines such as AstraZeneca‘s Social Media Principles will be useful tools for AstraZeneca and for others who choose to engage in the discussion,” it says.
It’s now nearly a year since the FDA received final submissions for its inquiry into social media, but the US regulator doesn’t appear in any hurry to issue guidelines.
This has left the industry stuck in a “period of uncertainty in social media engagement”, AZ says, but notes that the lack of guidance and clarity has not stopped companies from experimenting with social media to varying degrees.
AZ itself has been increasingly active in the space, launching a range of initiatives, include a corporate blog just ahead of the FDA’s November 2009 public hearing on social media.
And it was on AZ Health Connections that the company published details of its white paper, which outlines feedback to its February 2010 submission to the FDA’s investigation, and also suggests approaches the US regulator might take.
The recommendations include:
• The FDA recognise social media is a new communication channel that can appear to intermix the dissemination of information and advertising in the digital space
• The regulator should work with pharma so both can help provide balance to ‘bad’ – misleading or inaccurate – online information
• Acknowledging that in regulating social media the FDA will find itself addressing many shades of gray
• The perspective of the patient/caregiver should be a critical factor for the FDA to consider when regulating in this space
• The FDA should be encouraged to engage with the pharmaceutical industry to help them research and resolve issues raised in social media
AstraZeneca and social media
The white paper also sheds light on AZ’s own approach to social media and reveals the company is in the early stages of setting up a ‘patient-focused advisory panel’
AZ says such a group could help it identify “opportunities and challenges from the patient perspective”.
“AstraZeneca has already taken some preliminary steps to investigate how such a group would be established as well as setting forth expectations for all participants,” it adds.
The company also reveals that it formed an internal social media team in the autumn of 2009 – presumably shortly after the FDA first announced its social media hearing in September of that year.
The team’s remit was to consider the implications of social media for the company from a commercial, legal, policy, political, regulatory and safety standpoint.
The AstraZeneca Social Media Team then developed the central principles of its response to the FDA Call for Comments with a view to using them as a basis for its use of social media.
AstraZeneca’s digital vision
The five principles AstraZeneca included in its FDA submission were:
• Truth and accuracy: Content must be truthful, balanced, accurate and not misleading
• To be respectful: Respect the interests of patients, caregivers and health care providers, particularly where related to matters of privacy and the primacy of the patient/physician relationship
• Protect and advance patient health: Facilitate patient access to quality information for use with their physician to improve their health and protect patients through encouraging accurate and timely reporting on medicine safety
• Transparency: Participation should at all times be entirely transparent to other participants as to the role of product sponsors as participants in online discussion
• Respect the views of others: Acknowledge that social media users have their own opinions and that, when they differ from those of the product sponsor, it is not the role of a product sponsor to censor or limit time, just to add the product sponsor’s own views to the discussion
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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