Envisioning 2.0

Since early this year, Abbott Laboratories and the PR firm Fleishman Hilliard have been producing a contest designed to encourage young people to enter the clinical laboratory profession.  According to Abbott, the program, Labs Are Vital, was a smashing success.  It reached more than 1.8 million students interested in the sciences.

Students participating in the contests were asked to develop videos, T-shirts and advertisements encouraging people to start a career in laboratory medicine.  A key part of the programs’ success was the fact that Fleishman Hilliard was heavily engaged with the Facebook community surrounding the contest.  With a few exceptions, the contest sponsors were very responsive to community members’ needs and quickly answered questions.

Intimate interaction with community members was critically important, as Abbott changed the program’s various deadlines a few times over the past few months to give students more time to participate in the contest.  These changes confused community members.  In addition, Fleishman did a good job defusing negative commentary about the contest by quickly and honestly addressing criticism about the effort.

This contest illustrates that social networks have the power to “seed and grow” online communities around a common cause.  “Seeding” means providing the community with an online home.  Growth entails giving the community room to evolve at its own pace and constantly making adjustments as its needs change.

To learn more about the contest, click here.  To view the Facebook group, please click here (Facebook account required to view site).

With all of the news about Walter Reed, you may have missed some other health-related Congressional action that has been brewing over the past few weeks.

First, Congress has responded to news reports about drug eluting stents and Eli Lilly’s Zyprexa by launching probes into how these and other medications are marketed and researched. Rep. Henry Waxman sent letters to several companies requesting information about these issues earlier this week.

Second, the drive for generic biologics is proceeding apace and the former head of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid, Mark McClellan, is bullish on this new trend. In an article I wrote on HealthCareVox, I said that the growing furor over expensive biologics may damage the otherwise stellar reputation of the biotech industry. BIO, the industry trade group, is lobbying Congress hard to shape legislation favorable to its members, but if McClellan is correct, we should see a bill (written by Waxman) debated sometime this year. However, McClellan warns that before passing a bill, Congress must address concerns about potential adverse events and other safety problems caused by biogenerics that are not manufactured properly.

Clearly, recent events indicate that Congress is taking aim at two issues critics of the biotech and pharma industries have longed complained about. The off-label marketing investigation may cause pharma’s communications departments to become even more risk adverse and conservative than they already are. Depending on how biotech companies respond to the push for generic biologics, we could see a spate of negative media coverage or none at all.

It will be interesting to see how the Democratic Congress continues to flex its (healthcare related) muscles in the future.