Pharma Influence Over ePatients: Marketing Tactics That Worked for Physicians are Working for Patients, But It's Called "Patient Centricity"

I attended ExL Pharma's ePatient Connections conference (#ePatCon on Twitter) in Philadelphia this past Thursday and met a few interesting people. Although some pundits doubt the usefulness of these conferences, it's always good to get out of the box of your office and talk to people - you might learn something. Let me share what I learned.

A majority of the ePatients attending were presenters sponsored by my friends at WEGO Health who paid their expenses. WEGO Health funds its support for its Health Activist community through transparent, community-vetted advertising and sponsorships from health companies: research, content development, education, events, conferences, distribution programs, ad networks and more.

Every ePatient I spoke to at the conference wants a pharmaceutical company to hire him or her. As one person told me, "I want to turn my avocation into a vocation." That person has a Twitter account (@tvsoccerdad) with less than a thousand followers. Other ePatients boast of having a few thousand followers on Twitter. But it's their experience and passion that really qualifies them as paid consultants to pharma.

Indeed, many ePatient tweeters and bloggers are being paid by pharma. One example is the German MS patient blogger/journalist I wrote about some time ago who contributes articles to "Living Like You," a Novartis Pharma AG website. The problem is, most of the time these ePatients do not reveal the nature of their relationship with pharma (read "Transparency is Good in Theory, But Not in Practice").

What other ways can ePatients work with pharma?

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