A new FDA initiative announced this month aims to use radio frequency identification (RFID) tags to help combat counterfeiting of some popular drugs.

"In recent years, bogus medications have become a growing public health threat because of counterfeiters' ability to infiltrate our drug distribution system with worthless counterfeits," says Lester Crawford, acting commissioner of the FDA. Crawford's comments came in a telephone interview with the media to announce the new initiative.

Essentially, the FDA gave the nod to RFID tags on labels - basically lifting some labeling restrictions that might have discouraged pharmaceutical companies from trying out the technology. "We are providing guidance today to assure companies that if they do the tagging, they won't be violating our labeling regulations," says William Hubbard, assistant director for policy planning at the FDA.

Managing pharmaceutical marketing of drugs is a complicated task. Typically, pharmaceutical companies oversee a mix of print, Web, and TV campaigns aimed at doctors and patients. And often, marketing staffs in different countries work with local ad agencies to develop specific content for their markets.

Last year, Novartis found itself trying to bring some control over these processes for its prescription eczema drug Elidel. Specifically, the company realized it needed some way to ensure that the Elidel branding was applied and enforced uniformly across the numerous countries where the drug was sold.

To address this issue, Novartis tapped the healthcare advertising management consortium CommonHealth, which proposed the creation of a Web-based brand-stewardship portal. The branding portal would combine a repository for digital content and a workflow system to ensure that brand management best practices were carried out throughout the organization.

The problems with Vioxx have focused the industry's attention on tracking a drug's safety after it has been approved.

And while some people and organizations are saying the FDA should not do both the approval and post-approval followup, many in the industry are taking a closer look at their own risk management efforts.

One interesting approach starting to get some attention is to combine normal post-release risk-tracking procedures with more-detailed prescription data. The idea is to leverage the combined information to quickly address any physician risk concerns about using a drug or class of drugs.

For instance, when Vioxx's problems became front-page news, physicians and patients naturally had concerns about similar drugs. And even drugs that were not similar, but treated the same disease, occasionally got called into question. Such concerns can (and in the case of Vioxx did) have a dramatic impact on the sale of a drug.