Winning Advertising Campaigns
The New York American Marketing Association (NYMA) is celebrating 30 years of Effie Award-winning advertising campaigns in a commemorative book released earlier this month. "A Celebration of Effective Advertising: 30 Years of Winning Effie Campaigns," archives successful ad campaigns and features personal anecdotes, brand histories and advertising achievements.
The book profiles two healthcare campaigns and provides industry insight into the most effective elements of a successful ad campaign, branding case studies and strategies for maintaining a competitive edge.
To order the book, call NYAMA at 212/687-3280, email: [email protected], or visit the Web site http://www.effie.org.
Employers Are Hungry For Health Information
Hospitals and other provider organizations can position themselves as a key resource for employers who want to provide their employees with credible health information. The workplace has become an important venue for obtaining information on preventive health and disease management. Now employers are looking to health providers to provide on-site education, according to the Mayo Clinic, which has supplied hundreds of companies with employee wellness newsletters and self-care books in the last two years.
For employers, these outreach efforts can help reduce absenteeism, increase productivity and lower their healthcare costs. Employer-based health educational opportunities include:
- Information to help employees manage chronic back pain;
- Ideas on stress management; and
- Tips on balancing work and family.
Educational programs help employees determine when to see a physician, how to deal with everyday health problems and how to develop preventive health habits. Dr. Phil Hayden, who heads the Mayo Clinics' HealthQuest program for employee health, offers tips for launching employer health programs:
- Provide health information that addresses the most common reasons for sick days.
- Offer educational packets on disease prevention, self-care, first-aid and emergencies.
(The Mayo Clinic, Dr. Phil Hagen, 800/430-9609, http://www.mayo.edu)
Supplements Get New Labels
As of March 23, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's new labeling rules for dietary supplements go into effect. The new rules are expected to satisfy growing consumer demand for consistent, easier to understand labeling with a bold "Supplements Facts" box that must appear on newly packaged supplements.
The new labels must include:
- The metric amount of each recommended serving size or its equivalent in international units (IU). Labels will also identify the percent daily value (PDV) supplied by a single serving of the product.
- A full list of ingredients, including botanicals, such as St. John' wort.
- Warnings regarding storage requirements, "best before" dates and a bold-type caution to keep supplements out of reach of children.
(FDA, Brad Stone, 202/205-4144, http://www.fda.gov)
Informed Consent Is Questioned
Experts are questioning the necessity of getting informed consent from medical study participants as a prerequisite for conducting research. The requirement "is not only unnecessary, but also harmful," concludes researchers at Children's Hospital in Boston and the University of Utah School of Medicine in Salt Lake City.
Under informed consent rules, researchers are required before a study begins to explain to patients the risks and benefits of various therapies used in the study. While this provides an important patient safeguard, the researchers contend that it has stifled several worthwhile studies while providing little real protection to patients. To support this argument, they point out that patients rarely understand the implications of being assigned to one treatment over another. They also highlight that specific types of trials involving emergency medicine, for example, have already been granted exemption from informal consent.
They propose a compromise under which researchers would obtain an informed consent waiver from institutional review boards for studies in which the risks and benefits of compared therapies are "assumed to be similar" and pose little danger to patient health.
Certain studies would be ineligible for waivers, including trials in which one drug has more serious side effects than another and studies comparing the effectiveness of surgery versus medication.
The best defense against exploitative and harmful research practices is not informed consent, but creating an institutional review board of knowledgeable professionals, concludes the researchers.
The informed consent study is published in the March 11 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine.
(Children's Hospital in Boston, http://www.childrenshospital.org Bess Andrews, 617/355-5332, )