|
| | | The Patient Will See You Now
| | October 1, 2007 | 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
| | October 1, 2007 | | 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
| | October 1, 2007 | | 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. |
|
|
| 
