Attending #e4pbarca Remotely: Second Day

There's been a lot of tweeting during the eyeforpharma Barcelona conference yesterday and today. I summarized a few of the issues being discussed that were of interest to me during yesterday's session (see here). Here's some impressions data from Symplur for the #e4pbarca hashtag:

I'm happy to see that I'm #3 on the list! That's pretty good for someone following remotely in a time zone that is 5 hours later than the time in Barcelona! I had to wake up at 3 AM yesterday to catch the opening presentations! Compare that to a day in the life of a typical digital marketer here.

Today, I woke a little later and missed most of the morning sessions, but there was still a good deal of interesting insights from attendees.

I would say that today was patients' day at the conference. Several patients gave presentations in an attempt to tell the pharma people in the audience what the life of a patient is like. As one tweet put it, "Patients are 24/7 not 9 till 5." Weekends too!

Although we are all patients, not all of us are invited to speak in front of such a large group of pharma people. Of course, some patients like Andrew Schorr, Founder and Host of PatientPower.info, make a living speaking at such conferences and consulting with the pharmaceutical industry. Andrew and his wife, Esther, presented: "The Increasing Role of Patients and 'Care Partners' in Decisions About the Use of Your Product." They made the point often stated that patients don't trust pharma (see here) and that patients are sometimes frustrated with #pharma for not fully disclosing info that exists (see slide from the presentation below). They also pointed out that "patient centricity extends to family and caregivers."

I interviewed Andrew some time ago and tweeted about that. You can listen to a snippet from that interview below:

To Engage Patients Pharma Must Commit to the Long Haul

In this 3-minute audio snippet, Andrew Schorr, Founder and Host of PatientPower.info, notes that pharma agency accounts come and go, but patients are living with their conditions day in and day out. Pharma has to be careful, says Schorr, when approaching patients about how they view the commitment. You can hear the full interview of Andrew Schorr here: Podcast: Patient Power and Pharma: The Role of Patient Advocates in Pharma Marketing

Keith Allan, Global Medical Director, Novartis described what a win-win pharma-patient group partnership looks like and presented this slide about the challenges:

Transparency, as I've said before, is good in theory but not in practice. Pharma seems to have a problem getting beyond lip service on this issue (see here).

Gamification was on the early morning agenda. Louella Morton, Vice President of International Sales and General Manager, Qstream, presented "Gamification and mobile reinforcement: How science from Harvard Medical School is driving a new approach to pharmaceutical sales enablement." @TuLupus tweeted "#Gamification can make the difference to treatment adherence, education and life quality. Learning is fun!" Her tweet included an image of the Mission T1D app, which was created by Sanofi Diabetes to address the need for greater understanding of T1D amongst children, parents and carers. I asked: "Sanofi's Mission T1D: Does it Employ 'Gamification' Principles?" and "Will Kids Abandon This Diabetes Mobile Game App from Sanofi Before Reaching Level 2?" I invite Sanofi to talk about it on my BlogTalkRadio show here.

That's it for now. Here's the tweet stream from #e4pbarca if you wish to review what people were saying the whole day:

#e4pbarca Tweets