Subscription Update for Pharmaceutical Companies
Jinfo Blog

By Elizabeth Trudell

Abstract

Pharmaceutical companies make up a significant portion of FreePint's customer base, and we work closely with our customers in this industry to produce resources tuned to their needs for information strategy, procurement, skill development and collaboration with other parts of their businesses. We highlight recent items of interest to this market sector from FreePint's Content, Community and Consulting.

Item

Content (Articles, Reports and Webinars)

Current awareness tools are key to tracking drug pipelines and identifying adverse effects, making this article on quantifying the ROI for current awareness of special interest to pharmaceutical information centres. Other articles, such as "Has 'Current Awareness' Become a Bloated Term?" and "Issues of Copyright for Current Awareness" address a range of issues related to the management of current awareness services.

Information managers in pharmaceutical companies are also particularly interested in articles related to use and management of collaboration tools and technologies across the organisation:

• With many new options for enterprise content management tools, one article asks will SharePoint retain its popularity? Another article focuses on drivers and blockers of collaboration in the enterprise

• Best practices for tracking a wide range of technology topics and knowing when to escalate emerging issues was the focus of this webinar (recording available).

Information managers at pharmaceutical companies have also been involved in helping us plan the next FreePint Topic Series "Making Information Visible". With constituencies of scientists and product managers who need constant access to authoritative information, pharmaceutical firms have an ongoing focus on making the right resources more visible, accessible and useful.

If you haven't yet done so, please register your interest in this series to stay informed of when new articles, reports and webinars are added to it.

Recent updates on content sources relevant to pharmaceutical research and market development include:

• Specialist News Offerings - Pharma Sector, offering a detailed look at FirstWord Pharma, Oncology Business Review (OBR) and Pharma & MedTech Business Intelligence

• A look at F1000Research, an open publishing platform for life scientists

• An interview with the Adis Custom Intelligence Service to gain insight into their bespoke pharma research & analysis services.

Community

Information managers at pharmaceutical companies were active as participants and hosts for the onsite Communities of Practice sessions on Determining, Discussing and Measuring Value which occurred in October. These events focused on defining criteria to identify and define value concepts and how to create a value statement.  

Also of interest was a Communities of Practice teleconference session held in December, which featured discussion amongst information centre managers on evaluating alternatives for news sources for use in supporting in-depth research.

We've recently begun offering periodic CoP sessions for information managers in specific industries, starting with an upcoming session for those in government agencies. Watch for announcements of a session for information managers in pharmaceutical companies, to be scheduled in spring 2015.

Consulting

We're working with several organisations on better stakeholder communication around value, including one pharma company that has set goals for 2015 around stakeholder engagement. 

This project is based on FreePint's research and CoP work with a wide range of companies on what "value" means and how to understand stakeholder perspectives to create a better (and measurable) shared understanding of value. You can read about the research and one of our CoP sessions on the topic here.

For this consulting project, we're hosting three web-based meetings with the pharma company's information staff; they complete short exercises between each meeting to define and articulate what they know about stakeholders. Over the course of the project, we are helping them create an action plan, and then we'll be monitoring and coaching them through implementation of that plan.

The project is tightly defined and does not use more than their budgeted 6 hours of time, included in their Consulting-level FreePint Subscription.

A FreePint Subscription at the Content level gives access to all FreePint articles, reports and webinars, at the Community level gives access to all FreePint Communities of Practice (as well as all FreePint Content), and at the Consulting level adds a credit for up to six hours of annual consulting time. Find out more.

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