Covering FDA’s Part 15 Meeting on Social Media and Medical Product Promotion

Anyone in the pharma biz, and particularly the communications biz, is aware that on November 12 and 13, the FDA is holding a Part 15 meeting to gather input regarding the regulation of promotional communications through social media.  The meeting begins a slow and laborious process that will last an unknown length of time that will hopefully result in some kind of guidance from the agency by which time the landscape of social media will have probably changed dramatically since the holding of this meeting and the closing of the accompanying docket. 

With a two day meeting and what will predictably be a very crowded docket, the length of time that the agency takes to digest all the input may be very long.  No one knows. 

The meeting is being held in Washington at the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and registration for attending and speaking has been closed.  The FDA is going to provide a Web stream of the proceedings and will post instructions to the meeting information site. 

I decided early on not to apply for a speaking slot because I felt that the slots were best reserved for the real stakeholders – the search companies like Google and Yahoo and the pharmaceutical companies and to legal and regulatory experts.  While we bloggers certainly have lots to say, we aren't stakeholders. 

That said, we are media.  And I will be attending the meeting and reporting with regular updates from the meeting on my Twitter-feed as well as providing up-to-date postings on the blog.  In addition, I plan to take my Flip Cam and will record interviews with willing participants as the day goes along.  I also plan at the end of the day to post key takeaways.  I will post the videos to the blog and to my YouTube channel.  So for those who want my take on the day, follow me here on the blog or on Twitter and I'll be giving you my feedback and analysis of the two days.