During the past several years, we at Wellness Layers, Inc. have met with a number of pharmaceutical companies, and we typically hear the same thing.  They love our approach, integrating three layers of personal plans ("Me"), community ("We") and personalized information ("Info").  However, today, pharma companies opt not to utilize social media platforms because of legal and regulatory implications that require Adverse Event Reporting.  For the most part, even moderated communities are perceived to be unworkable.  The pharmaceutical companies' marketing departments and their agencies are obviously frustrated with these constraints, but they see little in the way of alternatives. 

In taking a closer look at the Web, there are many types of sharing that require no free user generated written content at all, such as ratings, responding to polls, and Facebook’s famous ‘Like’ button. This led us to consider: How can we provide a community without consumers being able to freely communicate?

We finally concluded that we could redefine what "communication" can be. While pharma companies would not want to allow consumers to freely enter comments, this does not mean that they cannot communicate at all.  So we worked backwards to re-define what communication would look like without the ability to freely enter comments. 

We now have created a new social pharma platform, utilizing a "controlled community" whereby consumers can communicate with each other using a wide range of pre-defined verbal responses and emotions, to encourage feedback and support.  This patent pending approach will allow and encourage consumers to establish personal pages, update their "friends," support their friends, find friends, establish groups/teams, receive rewards/badges, etc., all without the opportunity to freely share private information or post something that may need to be reported to the FDA.
 
The challenge, of course, is to make this controlled community as valuable, given its limitations, so that users in fact will continue to frequent the site.  This is our challenge and our opportunity, and Wellness Layers is uniquely positioned to make this happen successfully and to highly customize each of our projects to our individual clients.