Where are We Now in Providing Medical Information in the Digital Space? A Benchmark Survey of PhactMI™ Member Companies.

Abstract

The Pharma Collaboration for Transparent Medical Information (phactMI™) benchmarking survey was conducted to evaluate the use of technology and websites associated with the medical information (MI) departments of 27 biopharmaceutical companies in the United States. The e-survey was administered to phactMI™ members between December 2017 and February 2018 and included closed and open-ended questions with 7 distinct categories: existence of a MI website, content type available following a search query, website functions, search engine optimization (SEO), website traffic, internal communications/analytics, and additional technology capabilities. Survey findings noted that 20 companies own a MI-specific website through which MI services are provided to healthcare providers (HCPs). When asked about the dissemination of MI content through varying formats, survey results indicated Portable Document Format (PDF) to be the most common (18/27), followed by videos (8/27), presentations (5/27), infographics (3/27), and Hypertext Markup Language (3/27). Many companies have a responsive design website (19/25), webform (24/25), and a 1-800 number (22/25) for MI services. Few companies have a live chat (10/25) or a chatbot (1/25) and 9 of 25 said that content is searchable on Google™. Although website traffic varied among companies, a significant driver of this appeared to be whether the site is indexed. While most of the member companies have a MI website, there is significant room for improvement in content formats available as part of a search. Traditional website features, such as search functionality and webform, are commonly available on websites; however, newer technologies, such as chatbot and live chat, are less featured. Across most member companies, there is also a need for improvement in increasing website traffic, Google™ indexing, and SEO.