Peter Frishauf
Chairman
SCP Communications, Inc.
CEO
Medscape, Inc.

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Infectious diseases are the leading cause of premature death.

The United Nations World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that infectious diseases killed 17 million people, or one-third of the 52 million worldwide deaths last year.

A recently released WHO report documents at least 30 new infectious diseases have emerged in the last 20 years (including AIDS and the Ebola virus) and these diseases, typically preventable or treatable for as little as a dollar a person, are becoming increasingly resistant to antibiotic drugs.

The WHO report (released Monday, May 20, 1996) concludes that a major cause of this resistance is "the inappropriate use of antibiotic drugs."

As the population of our cities grows, so too must our knowledge and ability to understand infectious disease – its diagnosis and treatment. In this environment, information is the most powerful medicine.

SCP Communications, Inc., creates health information products that improve patient care by empowering health care providers and consumers with knowledge and understanding.

We do this by:

• working with our own network of more than 20,000 medical experts around the world in program development, scientific review, and testing and follow-up.
  
  
• training and employing a skilled staff of writers and editors with clinical experience.
  
  
• applying modern communication and computer technologies in program development and delivery.
  
  
• bringing industry support to our activities through innovative, cost-effective marketing strategies.
  
  

Access to information is often the most critical criteria. That's why SCP started Medscape on the World Wide Web last year. All SCP journals – as well as infectious disease information from other leading journals, associations, expert discussion groups, and government organizations such as the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) can be found at Medscape (http://www.medscape.com). Already Medscape has thousands of healthcare professionals from the first, second, and third world as members. Membership – and access to articles – is free, and requires only that readers complete a registration form online at the site.

What We Believe

Health care is life and death, hope and tragedy. At SCP, our job is to provide practical help to clinicians so they can provide better patient care, while helping patients to understand that care.

What We Do

Hundreds of thousands of physicians worldwide regularly read and learn from SCP's 10 leading medical journals: Nearly 2 million copies are distributed every year. The titles include multisponsor and single-sponsor journals as well as supplements, monographs, and conference publications. Among them, are Infections in Medicine, Complications in Surgery, The AIDS Reader, Infections in Urology, Complications in Orthopedics, Drug Benefit Trends, Critical Care Specialist, Primary Care Review: Update on Urology, and 2 international journals, Highlights from Infections in Medicine, and Highlights from Complications in Surgery.

Continuing Medical Education for physicians is essential to good medical care. SCP's education division: The Thomas R Beam Jr. Memorial Institute for Continuing Medical Education is accredited by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) to sponsor continuing medical education for physicians.

Symposia, audiotapes, slide/lecture programs, video teleconferences, and interactive software are popular services and products provided by SCP. Every year more than 175,000 health providers attend education programs created or managed by SCP. According to evaluations from more than 3,000 meetings, more than 93% of attendees give SCP symposia the highest ratings in 5 measured categories.

These include on-site symposia, video-based audio teleconferences, and Patient education programs.

A VBAT (pronounced V-BAT) is a live conference program that combines a visually engaging videotape presentation followed by a moderated, interactive telephone conference call that takes place with audiences at many sites (generally 40). A single VBAT program can easily reach 1,500 people. More than 150,000 health care professionals participated in an SCP VBAT last year.

SCP Clinical Programs offers Phase III and IV Clinical Trials, Data Analysis, Protocol Development, and Medical Writing. SCP Clinical Programs differ from those of other CROs in that we emphasize incorporating information-delivery strategies into study design. This approach allows us to integrate the 3 phases of clinical program information delivery-trial design, and study implementation and management-with medical writing, publishing, and continuing medical education.

Through diverse business approaches, managed care companies all seek to deliver more cost-efficient health care than the traditional private-practice model. SCP publishes the only journal specifically written for managed care professionals in pharmacy, Drug Benefit Trends, now in its 6th year.

SCP offers programs to train health professionals in appropriate use of pharmaceutical products. We also provide health care providers with basic training in the use of information technology, for example, by offering courses on how physicians can use the Internet.

Because SCP is a licensed CME provider, we can offer information from established medical education programs – or we can customize a program to meet the learning objectives of a specific audience.

For payors (insurance and managed care companies, and government), SCP can provide information and research analyzing the quality, outcome, and cost-effectiveness of services and marketing practices.

SCP programs empower consumers with information about the health practices and the services offered by managed care companies that may be competing for their business. The best principles of academic, scientific publishing – peer review and scientific rigor – are used in the development of all SCP products, whether they be journals, videos, an educational curriculum, or a service on the Internet. A clean, uncluttered design, liberal use of clinical graphics and photography, and sometimes controversial "editorial comments" from invited experts make our products highly informative and enjoyable to read.

SCP's flagship monthly publication, Infections in Medicine has more infectious disease readers than The New England Journal of Medicine, perhaps the most prestigious journal in the world.

SCP's 'visceral link' with medical thought leaders is a central reason for its many successes. The traditional publishing approach focuses on careful monitoring of the flow of information-an article, for example-through the process of production and publication. SCP's focus is broader, and it emphasizes that this information from experts must be truly useful at the patient's bedside. The difference in approach was one reason that SCP developed its Article Tracking System. When we evaluated commercial publishing packages, none was able to track relationships with experts linked to the actual SCP programs in which they were involved. But the software design we developed in-house combines document tracking with an electronic "Who's Who" of medical expertise. The result is that, in developing content directed at a specific audience (asthma patients, for example), we know how to quickly identify which experts should participate; this helps to ensure that our products are of the highest quality.

Who We Serve

SCP serves a changing market with diverse health information, education, and research needs.

The principal audience is the health care professional: physicians, pharmacists, nurses, and physician assistants.

A newer and growing audience is the health care consumer. SCP is designing and implementing programs that enable patients to gain control of their illnesses and improve their quality of life. Patient education represents a significantly expanding market for SCP information products.

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