Sudler, Acquia Partnership to Accelerate Delivery of Digital Experiences in Life Sciences

Collaboration to Offer Prescribed Products Promotional Standards Distribution

NEW YORK –– February 2, 2015 –– Sudler New York, today announced its collaboration with Acquia, the digital experience company, to bring greater agility to the development of U.S.-based life sciences websites. Sudler, one of the leading global healthcare communication networks, has developed the Drupal-based Rx Promotional Standards Distribution (RxPSD), which is tailored to the digital communications requirements of the life sciences industry with a goal of facilitating regulatory compliance and establishing best practices.

Managing the digital communications of many pharmaceutical brands, Sudler discovered significant variations among industry websites. The manner in which pharma companies present drug information differs widely across brands, even within the same parent company. Therefore potential for confusion among site visitors is great, and the cost of customizing these elements on each site and ensuring compliance is enormous, especially when every site needs to be optimized for multiple devices, each requiring different screen resolution, design, and browser technologies.

Sudler Chief Digital Officer David Cherry recognized that there was an opportunity for a more repeatable process for staying “within the lines” of the very strict specifications and rules, particularly for drug product sites that need to remain compliant with the regulations set forth by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

“The Rx Promotional Standards Distribution delivers significant operational leverage to pharmaceutical firms by providing a platform to develop and deploy sites that are responsive, semantically-optimized, engaging, and help achieve the goal of driving awareness and revenues for prescription products,” Cherry said.

The RxPSD project will help life sciences firms save time and money by helping them spend less time thinking about compliance and more time building an engaging, uniquely branded experience that brings together product details, safety information, and related data all within industry guidelines.

Sudler selected the Acquia Platform for the delivery of RxPSD, taking particular advantage of Acquia’s ability to deliver more personalized, contextual experiences through the Acquia Lift suite of digital engagement services. The Acquia Platform provides a scalable and secure approach to the digital experience that offers greater potential benefits to the life sciences industry and helps ensure auditable compliance.

“Working with Sudler, we’re helping life science firms think ahead by providing a platform that powers the agile delivery of digital experiences that drive customer engagement,” said Chris Hartigan, vice president of verticals at Acquia. “Supported by the Acquia Platform, we’re helping organizations reduce their time-to-market and innovate faster than ever before.”

About Distributions
RxPSD is a custom distribution of the open source content management system Drupal. Drupal distributions, such as the Rx Promotional Standards Distribution, are one of the most powerful concepts driving the adoption of the Drupal open source content management framework. A crucial benefit of the Drupal framework is the concept of distributions - a preconfigured set of functional modules, themes, and design elements that accelerate the development and deployment of a site tailored to a specific use-case. Distributions have been created for use - cases as diverse as government agencies, corporate intranets, higher education, and media to name only a few examples.

The driver behind the RxPSD project is the need to comply with “Fair Balance,” outlined in the 2009 directive by the FDA: “As a general matter, risk and benefit information should be comparable, noticeable or conspicuous in promotional pieces, and audiences should be able to read both risk and benefit information with similar ease.”

The RxPSD project is expected to expand over time to include site templates for international use to conform to the requirements of non-U.S. regulatory agencies. Sudler plans to extend RxPSD to propose standards for personalization, banner media, online video, tablet details, native apps, and healthcare semantics. Sudler has already commenced work on the project and is aiming for a March 2015 release of the distribution.

About Acquia
Acquia is the digital experience company. Pinterest, Mercedes Benz, Warner Music Group, and Stanford University are among the more than 4,000 organizations that are transforming their digital businesses with Acquia’s open cloud platform. Global 2000 enterprises, government agencies and NGOs rely on Acquia to create new revenue streams, lower costs, and engage audiences more deeply through content, community, commerce and context.

About Sudler & Hennessey
The S&H Group is a global healthcare marketing and communications organization with offices around the world. The network includes two global communications agencies, Sudler & Hennessey and Sentrix Global Health Communications, with US headquarters in New York City. S&H also has specialized divisions in medical education (IntraMed Educational Group, Precept Medical Communications, and CMDNY), as well as in-market research and strategic planning, branding, publication strategies, sales training (HealthAnswers and Transart), digital solutions (Sudler Digital), eHealth Solutions (Sudler eHealth Group), consulting (Primary Source), healthcare management (Quality Matters), and consumer health marketing (Sudler Consumer). For more information, please visit www.sudler.com. S&H is part of Young and Rubicam Group, and part of WPP (NASDAQ: WPPGY; www.wpp.com)

S&H is part of Young and Rubicam Group, and part of WPP (NASDAQ: WPPGY; www.wpp.com)