When news of the H1N1 flu pandemic hit, concerned consumers turned to the Internet to get educated and raced to the stores to buy preventative, treatment, and sanitizing products at increased rates. The demand is far from over.

Melissa Davies
The Pew Internet & American Life Project today released the results of its latest survey into how and when Americans use the Internet to gather health information. In The Social Life of Health Information, Pew reports that Americans are turning to an increasingly broader array of online and offline resources in their search for health information.
Highlights from the report include:

83 percent of online adults have looked on the Web for health information. (Since 2002, Pew Internet Project surveys have consistently found that 75-83 percent of Internet users look online …

Melissa Davies
The FDA announced yesterday that it is launching a Transparency Task Force, charged with “making useful and understandable information about FDA activities and decision-making more readily available to the public in a timely manner and in a user-friendly format.” The task force will seek public input on how the FDA can be more transparent, including identifying “new technologies for informing the public.” To this end, there will be a public meeting on June 24, 2009, to solicit recommendations.

Melissa Davies
My colleague Pete Blackshaw recently hosted a conference call through Nielsen Online’s Social Media and Advocacy Round Table, focused on how brands can leverage the power of consumers’ contributions to the online community. In the call, Scott Wilder, Small Business Online Communities manager for software publisher Intuit, described listening to customer feedback through Intuit’s call center and realizing that customers thought their problems were unique, and that they felt alone in trying to deal with these problems. The solution: Intuit created an online community to help users connect to …

Melissa Davies
Last week brought an exciting new development for pharmaceutical companies interested in social media: blogger Mark Senak (EyeonFDA.com) posted an interview with an official from the FDA/Division for Drug Marketing, Advertising and Communications (DDMAC) about pharmas and Web 2.0. Until now, there has been so little mention of social media and the like from the FDA that many pharma companies have come to assume that Web 2.0 is strictly off-limits. The conversation that was started this week — though by no means the final word on whether and how …

Melissa Davies
Several of our staff have touched on the economy in recent days. As consumers’ healthcare costs continue to climb, it seems natural that healthcare cannot be immune to the effects of the downturn that has our world reeling. The New York Times on Tuesday published an article about a trend in patients stopping certain medications because they can’t afford them. Other news sources have reported on various patient cost-saving measures, from splitting pills in half to taking a medication every other day instead of every day.
I wondered if we …

Melissa Davies
The Pew Internet & American Life Project today released the results of its latest survey into how and when Americans use the Internet to gather health information. In The Social Life of Health Information, Pew reports that Americans are turning to an increasingly broader array of online and offline resources in their search for health information.
Highlights from the report include:

83 percent of online adults have looked on the Web for health information. (Since 2002, Pew Internet Project surveys have consistently found that 75-83 percent of Internet users look online …

Melissa Davies
In the category of letting the customer tell you what the customer needs, Dell this week launched its new IdeaStorm for Healthcare and Life Sciences, an online community where users can share their best ideas for how technology can help improve the field of healthcare. Visitors to the site can vote on others’ ideas, bringing the best ones to the top for possible action by Dell. The idea list is sortable by most recent ideas, most popular ideas, and “Ideas in Action” that are being implemented as a result …