Hot Topics / Healthcare Highlights

Who Gets Shots?
While children routinely get inoculated before attending public school, mandating ADULT vaccines is a different story. For the first time, some large healthcare organizations are requiring worker vaccinations. MedStar, a health system serving the Baltimore-Washington area, and the Hospital Corporation of America, representing more than 270 healthcare facilities across the U.S., have mandated seasonal influenza shots for their employees this year. Many healthcare workers don’t want it. Mandatory flu vaccination is rare, but in a typical year only 40% to 50% of healthcare workers take advantage of voluntary programs, according to Newsday. Healthcare workers and their unions are not happy about being forced to get vaccinated. Hospitals requiring the shots are hoping to prevent complications with patients, keep workers healthy to reduce absenteeism, and protect their co-workers and families. Herd immunity doesn’t apply in a hospital, where a single nurse with the flu can infect vulnerable patients. "This is all about patient safety," said William L. Thomas, chief medical officer of MedStar Health in Columbia, MD, to the Washington Post.

Other hospitals with a newly mandated flu vaccine policy include the Virginia Mason Health System in Seattle, Loyola University Health System in Chicago, the University of Maryland, the University of Pennsylvania, and Emory University in Atlanta, according to ABC News. For employees who refuse to comply, the penalties range from
dismissal to the requirement of wearing a surgical mask during flu season.

—Andrew Matthius

Regulating the Web
Pharmaceutical companies may soon have clearer federal guidance on using Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. The FDA is holding a public hearing this month to discuss the use of the Internet and social media to promote prescription pharmaceuticals. The last time the FDA held a meeting to discuss Internet regulation was in 1996—before the advent of video-sharing, blogs, podcasts, wikis, and widgets. Some of the issues to be discussed this month include what online communications pharmaceutical companies are accountable for, how they can fulfill regulatory requirements, what parameters for disclosure should there be with third-party Website involvement, when are links appropriate, and how adverse event reporting should be handled online. Fitting fair balance information in a tweet or one-line Google ad is impossible. And how many minutes into an online video do a drug’s risks need to be mentioned? Can companies provide links or banner ads for their drugs on sites devoted to a disease they are not approved to treat? Are drug companies allowed to correct what they believe to be wrong information on third-party Websites? The hearing takes place November 12 and 13. The FDA is accepting written or online comments about this issue until February 28, 2010. To send an online comment or view a transcript of the hearing, which will be available in mid-December, go to http://www.regulations.gov. —Andrew Matthius

ONLINE CARE
Attention Pharma: Nurses spend as much time online for professional purposes as doctors do and are more likely to recommend health Websites to patients. According to Manhattan Research’s “Taking the Pulse Nurses,” a 2009 national online survey of 1,001 nurses and physician assistants, nurses spend about eight hours a week online for work-related purposes such as seeking pharmaceutical information. They also play a big part in patient education, as 3 out of 4 nurses recommended Websites ranging from general sites such as WebMd, to government sites such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH), to pharmaceutical product sites. Or in other words, if you reach nurses, the patients will come.

The good news is that over 80% of nurses have visited the corporate site of a pharmaceutical, biotech, or device company in the past year, with Merck, AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Eli Lilly, and Sanofi-aventis the most popular. Nurses are also more likely to visit sites geared toward physicians, such as UpToDate, Epocrates, the American Medical Association, and Medscape. Although nurses visit sites such as Nursing Link, they are more concerned with the quality and usefulness of a site than whether it’s targeted to them. “In an age of heated debates around health reform, the role of nurses becomes even more critical in the evolution of the U.S. healthcare system,” said Manhattan Research President Mark Bard. “The addition of the nurse segment to the digital landscape review process is a natural step for most pharmaceutical companies embracing the online channel today with their patient and physician customers.” —A.M.