UK pharma needs online pharmacovigilance guidance, says Digital Pioneer
pharmafile | July 16, 2010 | News story | Medical Communications | Code of Practice, Sublime Digital, digital pharma
Pharma companies need more help from UK authorities on the issue of online pharmacovigilance, according to the winner of the PM Society’s first Digital Pioneer award.
Mark Prince, who won the trophy in January, said the bodies that oversee the UK industry’s Code of Practice needed to be clearer on what pharma companies can do.
“There are interesting questions over social media,” he said. “But if there’s one area that the ABPI and PMCPA should offer more guidance on it’s pharmacovigilance regulations.”
“It’s a really difficult one to navigate at the moment: how do you manage it online? At what point do you start taking responsibility for it?”
These are important questions for Prince, who last month set up Sublime Digital, an agency dedicated to handling online marketing work for pharma firms. “Pharma is a specialist, quite highly regulated sector,” he says.
“Pharma companies are looking at their digital footprint and people are gaining the confidence to see where this fits into the marketing mix, particularly when it comes to reaching wider groups of people and bigger numbers of people.”
The industry must move towards digital communication as traditional sales reps struggle to access GPs, he believes, and he cites GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca as companies who have made good use of online platforms.
Based in London, Sublime has 12 staff and currently four unnamed clients for whom the agency is working on new websites and iPhone apps.
In a six-year career in pharma, Prince worked for Lundbeck as product manager for Cipralex until earlier this year. Before that he was a healthcare development manager at Teva UK.
Sublime specialises in web design and build, iPhone, iPad and Android phone apps, content management systems and bespoke software.
“I think there are some very good pharma digital agencies out there but I certainly don’t think it’s the norm,” he goes on.
Despite calling for more guidance in one area of digital media, Prince believes that the ABPI Code of Practice in fact offers a reasonable amount of help if companies simply seek to work within the “spirit” of it.
“Maybe we have more than we think we have,” he goes on. “More and more pharma companies are starting to realise that it’s about being able to apply the spirit of the Code.”
However, there are specific questions on issues like search engine optimisation on which he thinks there is confusion.
“Where do we sit with Google AdWords? What happens about paying for sponsored links to our websites? And what do we do if a patient deep links into the health professional part of our website?” he asks.
Prince is to be a judge for the next PM Society Digital Media Awards and is to give a talk at September’s DigiPharm Europe 2010 event.
Adam Hill
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