For Pharma Marketers – a Christmas present

A solid group of experienced pharma marketing and e-healthcare folks contributed chapters to this e-book, called Best Strategic Learning Investment in 2010 (your investment: a bit of time – the download is free!)

If you’re wondering how best to approach the on-line world of patient advocacy, communities, and social media, here’s your starting point.

Contributors include:

Ellen Hoenig Carlson, Consultant, AdvanceMarketWoRx (editor) (thanks, Ellen!)

Marsha Shenk, Business Anthropologist, BestWork

Dave deBronkart, ePatient advocate/blogger

Andrew Spong, PhD, Consultant, STweM

Steve Woodruff, Consultant, Impactiviti

Susannah Fox, Health Researcher, Pew

Jonathan Richman, Strategic Planning, Bridge Worldwide

Adam Cohen, Partner, Rosetta

Wendy Blackburn, EVP, InTouch Solutions

Phil Baumann, RN, Consultant, CareVocate

Fard Johnmar, Consultant, Path of the Blue Eye project

John Mack, Publisher, Pharma Marketing News

Angela Dunn, Director Social Media, Odom Lewis

There are helpful nuggets throughout. In my opinion, if you have time to only dig into one brief chapter, read what Susannah Fox wrote. Great stuff.

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19 Seconds of Pure Joy

What happens when a 1-year old pup encounters her first serious snow of the season?

Pure joy. For everyone.

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Impactiviti Daily 121809

This will be the final Impactiviti Daily for 2009. We’ll pick up again in the new year. Have a delightful holiday season!

TODAY’S NEWS

Deals – J&J and Merck get hits, Biogen strikes out.

From PharmaExec – a new commercialization model needed for pharma? – The days when biopharmaceutical companies could rely upon a steady stream of blockbuster products to fuel sales and support large, fixed-cost infrastructures appear to be over. It is clear that with the issues facing the pharmaceutical industry — coupled with a changing future environment — the current commercial model is too cumbersome to deal with hard economic conditions or to react to new stakeholder environments…more

Pfizer and BI get expanded label for Spiriva for COPD – Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Inc. and Pfizer Inc. announced today that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved SPIRIVA^® HandiHaler^® (tiotropium bromide inhalation powder) for the reduction of exacerbations in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). SPIRIVA HandiHaler is already FDA-approved as a once-daily maintenance treatment for breathing problems associated with COPD, which includes chronic bronchitis, emphysema, or both…more

Cancer genomes revealed – this is pretty cool, actually. A big step toward personalized medicine.

Medical Rep certification – coming soon!

RECOMMENDED

Training and eMarketing. The Impactiviti network has great suppliers for all your training, social media, and eMarketing needs.  We “matchmake” best-in-class vendor/providers with clients’ needs. Contact us (stevew at impactiviti dot com, or phone at 973-947-7429) for recommendations.

PLUS

Top Ten Medical Advances of the decade.

JUST FOR FUN

Business Week gives their visual and descriptive accounting of the 50 ugliest cars of the last 50 years. There are some…umm…beauties in there.

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Impactiviti Daily 121609

TODAY’S NEWS

Crestor – now no high cholesterol needed!

Ah, lawyers. NJ, the judicial hellhole. And, the video Pfizer doesn’t want you to see.

Rare diseases and big pharma.

RECOMMENDED

Compliance training. The Impactiviti network has great suppliers for all your corporate compliance needs.  Contact us (stevew at impactiviti dot com, or phone at 973-947-7429) for recommendations.

PLUS

VaxTrak – Novartis launches a first-version of an iPhone app for tracking your childrens’ vaccinations. I like it.

JUST FOR FUN

15 Stupidest Warning Labels. Some real winners here!

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VaxTrak – a Novartis Goodie for the iPhone (review)

Along with many others, I’m of the opinion that the iPhone will prove to be a very powerful tool for health delivery. It’s a welcome sight to see pharma companies begin to experiment with it, and Novartis Vaccines has just released a nifty cool called VaxTrak (iTunes link), to help parents keep track of their kids’ vaccinations.

Have all your vaccination records stuffed away in various places? Can’t keep track of what’s coming next? This may solve the problem.

Here’s the description from the iTunes store:

I’ve downloaded it and begun to play with it. First blush – VaxTrak is nice and simple.  The interface is completely intuitive, and the app works exactly as it should. You enter in the basic info for each family member, and the Planner then generates all the dates for vaccinations (that should have happened in the past, and pending). You can mark all the ones that have occurred, or “opt out.”

The Spot Shots is really cool – basically, it uses geolocation to show you the nearby stores/pharmacies where meds are available.

Now, you can have all those records (and future dates) handy in one spot. And, it’s free. Awesome.

It should be noted that the schedules and geolocation, etc. are currently only for the United States market. Hopefully an updated version will include country-specific info for other areas of the globe.

What I REALLY like about VaxTrak is that this same concept can be adapted for so many other medical “scheduling” needs. This will serve as a great template for a host of similar applications. Simple. Focused. Intuitive.

Kudos to Novartis Vaccines for rolling this out. Very nicely done.

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Impactiviti Daily 121409

TODAY’S NEWS

Sanofi – now laying off contract sales reps and some others.

Pfizer and compliance. That’s a lot of corporate integrity agreements (from PharmaGossip blog)

From the NYTimes: Menopause, as brought to you by Big Pharma – MILLIONS of American women in the 1990s were told they could help their bodies ward off major illness by taking menopausal hormone drugs. Some medical associations said so. Many gynecologists and physicians said so. Respected medical journals said so, too…more

RECOMMENDED

Instructional Design. The Impactiviti network has great suppliers for all your Instructional Design needs – ISD professionals to create training, or to help with strategy and design.  Contact us (stevew at impactiviti dot com, or phone at 973-947-7429) for recommendations.

PLUS

Thinking about starting (or marketing) a business? Some lessons I’ve learned over 3.5 years…

JUST FOR FUN

Picture gallery from the Hubble telescope. Stunning.

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Impactiviti Daily 121109

TODAY’S NEWS

Bone drugs may help prevent breast cancer? – New results from a landmark women’s health study raise the exciting possibility that bone-building drugs such as Fosamax and Actonel may help prevent breast cancer. Women who already were using these medicines when the study began were about one-third less likely to develop invasive breast cancer over the next seven years than women not taking such pills, doctors reported Thursday…more

An effort to restrict data mining – An amendment to the Senate health care bill would effectively ban data mining which, as you know, involves the practice of buying prescription records to target sales pitches to doctors, the Associated Press reports. Democrats Herb Kohl of Wisconsin and Dick Durbin of Illinois say their measure will combat “harassing sales practices” and “restrain undue influence” of sales reps…more

Gilead Sciences drug get FDA panel nod – Federal health advisers are recommending the use of an experimental Gilead Sciences drug to treat a form of lung infection. A Food and Drug Administration panel voted 15-2 in favor of the safety and effectiveness of the inhalable drug Cayston. Cayston is intended to treat chronic lung infections in patients with cystic fibrosis — an often fatal disease that affects the lungs and digestive system. Lung infections are the biggest killer of people with the disease. Federal health advisers are recommending the use of an experimental Gilead Sciences drug to treat a form of lung infection…more

King: nice and careful with Embeda promotion.ASH update from Sally Church over at Pharma Strategy blog (Sally is a smart cookie, by the way). Along with her update on how OIG guidelines have impacted the exhibit hall.

RECOMMENDED

On-line: Learning Management; Assessment Management; Simulations; Reinforcements. The Impactiviti network has great suppliers for all your technology training needs – and Impactiviti can provide needed technology consulting for needs analysis, RFP design, and vendor selection.  Contact us (stevew at impactiviti dot com, or phone at 973-947-7429) for recommendations.

PLUS

Is social media all that big a deal, anyway? Some startling statistics.

JUST FOR FUN

Rest in peace, kid.

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Impactiviti Daily 121009

TODAY’S NEWS

So…is Roche‘s Tamiflu really that effective? – The effectiveness of Roche Holding AG’s Tamiflu in treating flu complications in healthy adults can’t be determined because the Swiss drugmaker wouldn’t supply data from eight studies, an independent research group said…more

The pharma layoff toll in 2009. Ugly.

Pfizer to move into biosimilars? Not a bad long-term strategy, actually: focused diversification – Pfizer Inc., which became the biggest drugmaker selling widely prescribed pills such as the Lipitor heart medicine, is preparing to enter the business of making cheaper copies of pricey, injectable drugs from biotechnology…more

Do those anti-depressants work? Maybe at a deeper level than previously thought – Antidepressant medications taken by roughly 7% of American adults cause profound personality changes in many patients with depression, far beyond simply lifting the veil of sadness, a study has found. Researchers saw strong drops in neuroticism and increases in extroversion in patients taking antidepressants, two of five traits thought to define personality and shape a person’s day-to-day thoughts and behavior. The findings are striking, researchers said, because psychologists have long thought that such fundamental traits are moorings of an adult’s personality that shift very little over a lifetime…more

RECOMMENDED

Train-the-Trainer. Looking for a well-structured but customizable program for training your new sales trainers? The Impactiviti network can help you.  Contact us (stevew at impactiviti dot com, or phone at 973-947-7429) for recommendations.

PLUS

Major surgery at Sanofi. How the transformation of a top 5 pharma company is taking place.

JUST FOR FUN

Not all subways are boring. Check out the architecture of these!

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Impactiviti Daily 120909

TODAY’S NEWS

Novartis’ “son of Glivec” (Tasigna) carrying on the family tradition – Novartis has reported result of Tasigna Phase III clinical trial. In the study, Tasigna (nilotinib) demonstrated greater efficacy over Glivec (imatinib) in the treatment of adult patients with newly diagnosed Philadelphia chromosome-positive chronic myeloid leukemia (Ph+ CML) in chronic phase…more

Need to count calories as part of your diabetes regimen? Yep – there’s an app for that. Developed by Sanofi-Aventis with InTouch Solutions.

Worried about prostate cancer? There may be an app for that – coffee!

Quick overview of a growing trend – personalized medicine.

RECOMMENDED

Territory Management. Need to train your sales reps in better territory management (and selling skills)? We have vendor/providers for that, in the Impactiviti network.  Contact us (stevew at impactiviti dot com, or phone at 973-947-7429) for recommendations.

PLUS

Updated again: Jon Richman’s excellent Dose of Digital Pharma and Healthcare Social Media Wiki. If you want to know what’s going in the world of social media in pharma, here’s your starting point.

JUST FOR FUN

Start your day off with a smile. Something about this event at a hockey rink is very heartwarming…

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Impactiviti Daily 120809

TODAY’S NEWS

Novartis gets FDA panel nod for transplant drug –  A U.S. advisory panel recommended approval of a Novartis AG drug to prevent rejection of transplanted kidneys, a Food and Drug Administration spokeswoman said on Monday. The panel voted 11-1 to urge FDA clearance of the drug, everolimus, for patients who have undergone kidney transplants, FDA spokeswoman Karen Mahoney said. The agency usually approves drugs that win support from advisory panels…more

New liquid sustained-release formulation coming to market – While in general, the availability of once-daily oral Clonidine will be welcomed by patients using the drug for an extended period, the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) decision has wider implications. This is because, for the first time, a delivery platform combining 24-hour SR technology with the ultra accurate adjustments available to liquid formulations has been granted marketing approval, which, as Tris’ head of R&D, Yu-Hsing Tu, explained, offers significant dosing advantages formulations …more

The pharmaceutical sales model and the future – 3 quick reads. More from Genentech’s McCracken; the trust and inefficiency gaps; and what doctors really want.

RECOMMENDED

Selling to the C-Suite. The Impactiviti network of providers has specialized workshops and other training for account manager and other specialized selling.  Contact us (stevew at impactiviti dot com, or phone at 973-947-7429) for recommendations.

PLUS

Fallback for that 2%. Wise words from Seth Godin, regarding the inevitability that some people, at some tasks, simply won’t “get it.”

JUST FOR FUN

25 Everyday technologies that came from NASA.

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