Advanstar Communications unveiled a centralized physician portal for its healthcare group, integrating sites for its five primary care and seven specialty titles into one address, ModernMedicine.com.
The site will offer advertisers “a highly targeted and highly trackable vehicle for marketers to reach authenticated doctors,” said Advanstar Life Sciences Group EVP Steve Morris. Advanstar expects to have 100,000 registered users, all authenticated against the American Medical Association database, in 2008.
In addition, Advanstar’s pharmacy title Drug Topics will increase its digital platform emphasis in February with an accelerated schedule of five editions per month – one in print and four delivered digitally – to keep readers up to date on pharma industry news.
“The pharmaceutical market is increasingly employing e-promotion, with doctors seeking easy access to a diverse range of information resources and pharmaceutical marketers looking for increased return on their advertising investment,” said Morris.
The portal will offer article summaries from over 300-peer reviewed journals, coding and reimbursement tools, formulary status tools, a comprehensive library of CME programs, customizable patient education, coverage of more than 80 major medical conferences and valuable practice management advice, the publisher said.
Advanstar titles include Medical Economics, Drug Topics, Formulary, Patient Care, Geriatrics, Contemporary Ob/Gyn, Dermatology Times and RN Magazine.
The move comes as medical publishers scramble to retool their online platforms amid plummeting ad spending from the pharmaceutical sector, particularly on primary care titles.
In September, Elsevier launched a portal for its more than 100 oncology titles, OncologySTAT.com, seeking to beef up its online advertising revenue in one of the few categories where pharma spending is expanding. In October, incoming Medical Economics publisher Trevor Deal said the title would be looking more at non-pharma advertising opportunities as well as projects, live meetings, symposia and online to make up for the slump in pharma ads. And last month, Ascend Media announced it would close three medical titles, sell its dental titles and consider selling the remainder of its healthcare division.
