Technology Articles

Information Technology in pharma: enterprise management, business intelligence, clinical trials management, sales force automation, closed-loop marketing, and more.

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How Will Obama HIT Biopharm?

Jan 20, 2009
By:George Laszlo

As 2009 gets started and a new president takes office, the Biopharma industry is left wondering if Obama will be a friend or foe when it comes to healthcare information technology.

Watch that Reputation

Defending your brand through search optimization
Mar 1, 2008
By:Lisa Flaiz, Razorfish

Defending your brand through search optimization

FluTube: What Pharma Can Learn from Novartis' YouTube Campaign

Novartis partnered with Cadient to deliver a very successful unbranded interactive Web video campaign. Watch (at YouTube) and learn.
Feb 1, 2008
By:Sara Donnelly, Associate Editor

Novartis and Cadient served up a very successful unbranded campaign on YouTube. Pharma should take note of this Web 2.0 victory.

The Patient Will See You Now

Video podcasting: The new must-see TV
Oct 1, 2007
By:Grant Winter

If you've been thinking of online video as a toy or, worse yet, as something that's going to happen at some point in the future, let me offer you a picture: Me, a target pharma customer, on the elliptical machine at the gym, watching, no, not CNN or Katie Couric, but "Nephrology Consult 101, Unusual Causes of Renal Failure" and "Internal Jugular Central Line Placement," a pair of free video podcasts I downloaded from the Yale School of Medicine.

The Wiki Incident

How could one little digital deletion build up such a head of steam? It's a question of trust.
Oct 1, 2007
By:Walter Armstrong

Gotcha, Big Pharma! Sort of.... Not me, a guy named Jeffrey Light. The young founder and head of tiny DC-based nonprofit Patients not Patents hit the wires recently, charging that Abbott Laboratories had edited its entry in Wikipedia, the online everybody-can-play encyclopedia, trying to make itself look better. Using a brand-new online tool called the Wiki Scanner, which allows anyone to track the source of any change entered into any of Wikipedia's 2 million articles, Light discovered that at 4:38 P.M. on July 2, 2007, several edits to the article on Abbott were made from a computer at Abbott's Chicago office.

It's Standards Time

Pharma does EDC in clinical trials, but is anyone doing it right?
Oct 1, 2007
By:George Koroneos, Online Content & News Editor

The clinical trials space these days is an alphabet soup of technologies: CTMS (clinical trial management systems); CDM (clinical data management); CDR (clinical data repositories); eCTD (electronic common technical document); and many more. But the technology with the most promise for transforming the way clinical trials are performed (and for driving everyone mad throughout implementation) is EDC—electronic data capture. It's taken more than a decade, but today most big pharma companies—and a fair number of smaller ones—are using some form of EDC in clinical trials. The early adopters might have experienced some growing pains, but the benefits seem to be outweighing the high cost of implementation. Few companies would consider going back to paper-based trials.

Turning Patients onto Tablet PCs

Tablets in the waiting room speed up the check-in process while providing health information to patients
Sep 1, 2007

From pamphlets to posters to informational magazines, doctors' offices are teeming with direct-to-patient promotions, and patients are starting to overlook them. To cut through the clutter, one healthcare-technology company created a device that replaces the common intake clipboard with a digital pad that collects patient information and responds with branded information.

Game On

Marketing that uses gaming and other immersive technology proves to be more than just kids' play
Jul 3, 2007

With gaming technology, pharmaceutical companies can display immersive 3-D animation that allows doctors to explore inside an interactive environment pertaining to a drug's method of action