Social Health 2010: Afternoon Speakers (Part 2 of 3)

This is the second in a series of posts recapping the Social Health 2010 un-conference in Austin. Part 1 covers the morning speakers, and Part 3 covers the breakout sessions I attended.

After the morning breakout sessions, we had a quick lunch (provided by MD2P.net — thanks John) and an opportunity to socialize. I had a very interesting conversation with Abby Lowe, Lauran Driver, Sally Bage, and Marc Monseau about HIPAA (what else?) and the impact patient privacy has on innovation in health (or lack thereof). After lunch we were treated to three more impressive speakers. As in Part 1, I’ve tried to provide notes and links to resources for those who were unable to attend.

Fabio Gratton, Chief Innovation Officer and Founding Partner at Ignite Health (@skypen)

Once we were all suitably fed and caffeinated, Fabio Gratton took us through the story of his creation of the hashtag #FDASM and the site FDASM.com in response to the FDA exploratory on regulations for social media. In addition to his role at Ignite, Fabio is a founding member of WOMMA, on the editorial board for Medical Marketing & Media, and is a regular contributor to several top e-health marketing blogs.

Background on the conversation around FDASM, from FDASM.com:

On November 12-13, 2009, the FDA held a public hearing regarding how FDA-regulated products can use the internet and social media for health-related communications. These hearings were the first step toward developing guidelines around this type of marketing for the industry. This site is dedicated to capturing the conversations, stories, and resources related to this topic.

Fabio led off with a quote from Pepsico Americas SVP Frank Cooper (with regard to Pepsi choosing to invest in social media instead of the Super Bowl): “In 2010, each of our beverage brands has a strategy and marketing platform that will be less about a singular event, less about a moment, more about a movement.”

Three ingredients for a successful movement:

People +
Purpose +
Passion

Fabio illustrated how he used collaborative tools to help gather & organize resources such as draft comments to the FDA from pharma companies in a way that was much more user-friendly than the govt’s own site. (You may need to just spend some time at FDASM.com to see it all in action.) He also took us through a few more projects he launched, such as PharmaTweeps, an aggregator of all the leading pharma brands’ Twitter feeds.

Great closing quote: “Fail forward.” Don’t be afraid to screw up — do it in such a way that you’re making progress even as you’re making mistakes.

Marc Monseau, Director of Corporate Communications and Social Media at Johnson & Johnson (@JNJcomm)

Marc has a rare perspective on what it takes to lead a giant corporation with dozens of subsidiary brands into the social space. He handles media relations for Johnson & Johnson — providing issues management and crisis communications support and counsel. He’s also responsible for Johnson & Johnson’s blog, www.jnjbtw.com, works with different teams in the organization on their social media strategy.

J&J’s approach to social media:

Start simple
Introduce complexity; build confidence
Add more complexity; broaden scope (add more tools/platforms)

Marc highlighted the importance of not trying to launch social media efforts in a silo, but rather to tie them to specific programs & strategic objectives: “Make sure that your social media initiatives connect with other initiatives around your business.”

Marc shared some interesting stats on health seekers online. One in particular stood out, from (I believe) the Pew Internet & American Life Project: 60% of online “health seekers” say that the information they found on the web directly affected a health decision they ultimately made.

Q&A featured a good discussion about the distinction between an individual who represents a brand in social media and the brand itself. Marc represents J&J much as Scott Monty represents Ford; but Forrester struggled with this when Charlene Li, Peter Kim, Jeremiah Owyang and others left (separately) and took their massive audiences of followers and blog subscribers with them. (Forrester has since implemented a policy where blogging employees are more or less required to blog only on Forrester’s properties. Peter Kim reflects on this policy here.)

David Hale, Social Media Strategist at the National Library of Medicine and Project Manager of Pillbox (@lostonroute66)

Just about the time most people hit their post-lunch, early afternoon energy slump, David came out and gave a presentation that jolted us all awake. David is the Project Manager of Pillbox, a National Library of Medicine/ FDA patient-safety initiative which is restructuring federal pharmaceutical data and adding high-resolution images of solid-dosage medications to create a public domain medication identification and reference system. Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Magazine referred to Pillbox as “the Physician’s Desk Reference on steroids.” Pillbox is being built through an open development process, with various health-related communities sharing ownership of the project. And get this: all data from the project is being released through an API to promote disruptive innovation in the Health IT community. Very cool.

What can I say about Pillbox? This is an incredibly exciting project that seeks to take an enormous amount of dense, user-unfriendly data that the government has on FDA-approved drugs, and turn it into an API that has real, practical value for rapid pill identification. There are 1.5 million reported cases of unknown pill overdose resulting in emergency hospitalization every year (hope I didn’t butcher that stat too badly, David), and emergency responders have very few resources on hand to narrow down exactly what that small, blue, partially-digested pill might be after it’s pumped from someone’s stomach.

David’s team has taken the raw FDA data on thousands of drugs and dosages and combined them with original hi-res photos in a slick (and very usable) Adobe Flex-powered interface for rapid identification based on characteristics like color, shape, visible text & numbers, etc. There’s even an HTML-only version of the site for maximum compatibility.

On top of this, the team at Pillbox has created an open API, to provide other developers with access to their cleaned-up data. Already, some savvy hackers out there have created a (more than a little irreverent) Facebook app, and even a realtime text-to-speech IVR system for over-the-phone pill identification (neither are yet available to the public).

Check out Pillbox at http://pillbox.nlm.nih.gov/

That’s it for the afternoon speakers; stay tuned for Part 3 on the breakout sessions.

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