HealthTalker head Andy Levitt returned a bit bleary eyed from San Francisco on Friday morning to attend eyeforpharma’s 3rd Annual eCommunication and Online Marketing Summit.

Day Two of this event focused first on how physicians are using the web. CEO Daniel Palestrant from Sermo gave a compelling overview of how his company is becoming the dominant player in the physician online space. In contrast to the consumer-focused search and portal sites that I commented about in my previous post who are still competing to earn the trust of Internet health seekers, Sermo appears to have won the trust game with US physicians.

Sermo announced a new partnership with Bloomberg the day before at Health 2.0, and that they expect to break the 100,000 mark of physician registrations by the time the rest of us eat our holiday turkey dinner next month. What’s exciting to see about Sermo, among other things, is the deep level of engagement from their physician user base. Physicians are finding value in connecting with other colleagues around the country, engaging in the community, providing second opinions and collaborating on various issues. (more…)

I’ve always been interested in pre-approval access because it is at the cutting-edge of bringing science and patients together - and it really is about helping those in need. But research presented today in Baltimore, at CBI’s conference on Pre-Approval Access (sponsored by IDIS), shows that there is a financial return for providing these programs as well.

Based on an eight country, decade-long analysis, Dr. Andree Bates, president of Eularis, reports that named patient programs have a positive effect on revenue.How positive? By observing how 33 drugs performed in cash markets a year after commercial launch, Eularis deemed there was a 1.362 times higher odds of spending $1 on a drug that participated in these pre-launch programs compared with one that did not. (For those of us who are “statistically challenged,” Bates put it another way: Let’s say a pharma company was about to launch a drug and expected a 5 percent market share. If that same company launched the drug, but had run a pre-approval access program, they can expect that market share to be 6.7 percent.) (more…)