Monday’s sessions at the conference were really informative. The crowd that attended the social media sessions — a mix of entrepreneur doctors, health-related Web 2.0 companies, PR firms, healthcare bloggers, public policy organizations, pharma and medical device execs — were very knowledgeable about the implications of social media environments for patients, doctors and corporate liability.

Not surprisingly, the session I spoke on — “Open Brands: Trading Message Control for Consumer’s Trust” was steeped in conversation about Adverse Drug Effect (ADE) reporting. Lots of discussion about why it is valuable for pharma companies to be more transparent with patients and doctors. One way to do this is by using a monitoring and tracking service such as our Media Intellect offering to track ADE — some of our pharma customers are doing this already using our service.

Some big pharma is afraid to read consumer-generated content, because of the fear of burdensome reporting requirements. I heard many comments at the conference from companies who have talked with the FDA about monitoring social media, and, the consensus is that on a case by case basis, the FDA is willing to let companies monitor social media and only report when they meet the identification requirements (a name and contact info for the poster). Since most message board posts do not have these identifiers, there isn’t a reporting requirement.

As more social media-type of environments come in to play — and I saw many at this conference — it will be interesting to see when pharma will decide to open up this barrier to consumers and doctors. I believe it will happen out of necessity, as more and more people go online to discover the vast amount of healthcare-related information you can find in social media environments.

Tags: Analyzing Consumer Generated Media, Mass Media/Culture //