v-Fluence Blog

Has Google Become the Largest Unregulated Arbiter of Health Treatment Information?

A few months ago, Google quietly changed the way it displays prescription drug search results. As of late June, when anyone enters a drug name into Google’s engine, the first non-advertisement listing is a Google sanctioned drug summary.

Challenges of facing up to FDA social media scrutiny

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently cautioned Novartis Pharmaceuticals for its use of a Facebook widget (and associated meta data), which was intended to educate consumers about its leukemia drug Tasigna. Similar to recent actions taken by the FDA, this warning letter has been widely reported on a range of news sites and blogs and has lit up robust discussion in social media and topic-specific channels. For instance, Pharma Marketing blogger John Mack notes that the Novartis citation, “clearly warns pharma advertisers that the FDA is looking at metadata content when that content is controlled by the marketer and becomes visible to consumers as in Facebook Share widgets.”

Online monitoring and the pharmaceutical industry

Starting in 2001, our firm began developing systems and approaches to Internet monitoring which helped to ensure regulatory reporting compliance with comprehensive tracking of Web content; this content included blogs, social media and other potentially influential dialogue spaces...

Healthcare “Apps” Exploding in Mobile, Are You Ready?

Does your online monitoring cover new mobile app spaces?  If so, you’re seeing what we are:  i-Tunes’ Health & Fitness or Medical categories now contain more than 6,000 apps for iPhones.  As of January 2010, there were more than 1,700 medical applications; all together, they’ve been downloaded by more than 1 million users.

Turning mobile consumers into food safety inspectors, clinical diagnosticians and more

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