Pharma & Social Media - PMCPA takes the plunge (and beats the FDA)

The Prescription Medicines Code of Practice Authority (PMCPA) has issued informal guidance on the use of digital communications by the pharma industry, ahead of the FDA, who intended to issue its social media guidance by the end of 2010.

The guidance does what the PMCPA has always said pharma should do: take the Code of Practice and apply it to the relevant social media platform, and in doing so the PMCPA has come up with a helpful Q&A document.

Of particular interest is the question about promoting medicines to doctors using Twitter.  The PMCPA guidance states that the audience for such tweets would need to be healthcare professionals only, which means that pharma companies would have to set their Twitter accounts to “closed profile” and pre-approve anyone who wanted to follow them.  This in turn means a resource consuming verification exercise, not to mention the challenges of finding out if, for example, “@cyberdoc12” is really a healthcare professional…

Not surprisingly, the guidance confirms that pharma companies wishing to run a discussion forum, or host one on a third party website, need to pre-moderate the content to ensure it complies with the Code of Practice.  So if a pharma company wants to keep the experience as interactive as possible, this will mean real time pre-moderation of content.

The guidance also confirms that a website sponsored by a pharma company that allows user comments will need to be monitored by the pharma company for adverse event reports, although it doesn’t comment on how frequent monitoring must be.

There is an interesting question on whether pharma companies can amend Wikipedia entries that contain incorrect information about them or their products.  The PMCPA guidance sensibly cautions against the possible dangers of selective correction of information, which could give rise to allegations of imbalanced or improper editing or, we think, even accusations of "astroturfing".

The guidance also touches on pharma company employees commenting on non-company websites or blogs, and recommends that pharma companies have clear policies in place to govern the use of such sites.  The use of social media at work is a hot topic, and pharma companies need to ensure not only that they have robust, Code compliant policies in place, but also that their employees and contractors are properly trained in relation to those policies (read more on social media policies in the workplace  and also see Suzanne Tyrell’s article "Social media and employers’ duties" in the March issue of Law at Work).

Lawyers Tim Worden