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At my agency, Cambridge Biomarketing, we’ve been working hard to redefine our digital offering as we enhance our positioning for 2011. With digital services becoming such an integral aspect of healthcare communications, we’re focusing on developing a services platform that will help our clients reach their audiences and build awareness on the fastest growing healthcare channel.

Below is a short presentation on Cambridge Biomarketing’s digital capabilities.

Where was this kind of run when Marshawn was in Buffalo? Figures…

Take a look at a recent post I made to Cambridge BioMarketing’s company blog on the benefits of going digital with medical publications.

So why go digital? Here are a few clear benefits:
Faster to Publish and Distribute – The traditional printing process is much more time consuming than electronic publishing. eBooks may also offer quicker lead time to publication and distribution due to much improved ease-of-edit. eBooks can be emailed or transmitted wireless.

Vastly Increased Interactivity – eBooks can be embedded with multimedia, linked to references, and developed with a truly interactive user experience. Readers will be able to interact with content not possible with flat print pieces.

Cost Benefit – Easier to publish and distribute. No more printing costs.

Digital Book Readers are Evolving – With nearly 75% of healthcare professionals using some sort of smarthphone or PDA, it’s clear that the user base is ready and willing to embrace eBooks as the format of choice. And digital book readers are only getting more advanced (and going down in cost).

Read the whole post here…

My company, Cambridge Biomarketing, is a finalist for a 2010 Webby Award in the pharmaceuticals category. We developed an awesome site for Millennium: The Takeda Oncology Company.

The site, 1000CranesOfHope.com, is a cancer awareness tool that allows users to post wishes online. The site takes the Japanese tradition of senbazuru (which promises that a person who folds 1000 origami cranes will be granted a wish) and applies to the site — users can design, post, and share wishes. We’ve generated nearly 1500 wishes to date.

Congrats to the team at Cambridge Biomarketing and the talented group at Millennium that we partnered with.

Voting is now open for the People’s Choice awards, and we’d very much appreciate your vote!

Re-blogging a new post I made at the Cambridge Biomarketing company blog:

A couple of key points:

• More focus on preventative care: Healthcare companies are going to need to understand their customers much better. Profiling and CRM programs will become more important; understanding how customers “tick” will be more critical than ever.
• Patient Retention: Along those lines, customer retention will also become increasingly important. Drug manufacturers will need to take an even more pressing role in treatment management–more options and choices for patients will increase need for intensive customer and relationship management.

  Read more…

Microsoft Pivot is an experimental new platform from Microsoft Labs that allows users to interact and visualize massive amounts of data.

Pivot garnered quite a bit of attention at the 2010 MIX conference, and attendees were apparently wowed by the elegant and engaging interaction model.

I can see numerous applications for this technology in my field of healthcare technology. Pivot could be used to track symptoms across thousands of patients, identifying trends, common side-effects, and adverse events. The application could also have use for processing and analyzing electronic medical records.

Check out the demo video here:

The Microsoft Pivot platform is a free download from Microsoft Labs. Worth a look!

You may also want to check out Mike Demopoulos’ write up on healthcare applications of technologies promoted at the 2010 MIX Conference at Cambridge BioMarketing’s Biorhythms blog. Mike also hosts two great blogs on Silverlight and WPF development.

Posted via web from bzipkin’s posterous

via twitpic.com

Strikin’ a pose with the team and client. Cambridge Biomarketing won a Clio for Kiosk work we did for Millennium Pharmaceuticals

Posted via web from bzipkin’s posterous

Posted via web from bzipkin’s posterous

I’m one of the lucky 300 who’ll be attending in person at the FDA’s public hearing on social media. The meeting represents an unprecedented step by the FDA to provide the digital pharma community with an opportunity to offer insights about how medical information and marketing is delivered through online channels.

The agenda and speaker list was released this morning. Many of the likely suspects will be in attendance, and the speaking roster includes representatives from big (and small) pharma (surprised not to see more!), healthcare marketing agencies, consultants, and technology companies. It will be interesting to see how the meeting unfolds.

My wishlist:

• I hope the agency folks keep the pitches and business development to a minimum (and I’m an agency guy). This meeting provides an opportunity to communicate about issues that may have long-term implications on our businesses. Let’s hope it doesn’t turn into an agency pitch/bitch.
• Focus on the future, and don’t try to fix the past (or present). Yes — we need to look at the current state of social media, but most of us believe we’re at the onset of the revolution; let’s talk about what’s coming down the pike and prepare–not focus on current roadblocks.
• Meaningful discussion about search marketing, with feasible outcomes. The FDA’s unexpected crack-down on pharmaceutical search ads last Spring sent a collective shutter down the spines of pharmaceutical companies and agencies alike. Healthcare is one the top online spenders and search marketing has become a critical component in any campaign. When will the FDA offer meaningful and substantial guidelines?
• Let’s talk personalized medicine. How will this emerging area be addressed by the FDA?

More to come…

Note: all the information on the event has been gathered in one place by @Skypen over here.