Digital Pharma: European doctors turn to the social web
pharmafile | June 10, 2011 | News story | Medical Communications | Digital Pharma blog, digital doctors, social media
European GPs are making increasing use of the social web and new research has shown Wikipedia to be the most popular destination there.
Now ten years old, the online collaborative encyclopaedia is the world’s fifth most popular website, attracting more than 400 million visitors each month, and its accuracy, if not readability, has been praised in several studies.
Insight Research Group surveyed 300 primary care doctors in the first quarter of this year, drawing equal numbers from Germany, Italy and the UK.
The agency found 69% of physicians said they used some form of social media for work, and 60% said they used Wikipedia professionally.
After Wikipedia, the most popular sites were YouTube (used professionally by 18% of respondents), Facebook (5.7%), LinkedIn (4.7%) and Twitter (1.3%).
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The popularity of Wikipedia will give European pharma cause for thought – whether companies can correct articles on the site, what they are responsible for if they do and how far they can go are all debatable.
The UK industry was issued with specific pharma social media guidance by the PMCPA in April this year and the Code of Practice regulator did offer some guidelines for Wikipedia.
“Simple cross referring to the regulatory documents such as SPCs and PILs either on a company site or to the eMC, would not be considered to be unreasonable,” it said.
It went on to suggest that a simple “more information is available in the SPC or PIL” would be probably better than referring to a particular section of those documents.
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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