Pharmaceutical companies may have been slower than others to embrace the Web, but that's now changing at a fast pace for an industry accustomed to taking an average of seven years to bring a new drug from the clinical research phase to market.

New alliances are coming to the fore between the pharmaceutical giants -- or "pharmas" as they call themselves -- and the software industry to build Web portals and other 'Net-enabled software for use by doctors, corporate benefits managers, pharmacies and consumers. Some of the big drug suppliers are even setting up e-commerce venture capital divisions to fund new ways to conduct clinical research. Others are exploring what role the Web will play in exchanging and protecting patient data, which could become more revealing based on new genetics research.

Pharmaceutical companies see the Web as a way to sell more products through doctors, who Pfizer Pharmaceuticals say typically have direct or indirect contact with 110 patients per day.

"Physicians are overwhelmed by paperwork and administrative processes," said David Hepler, a Pfizer vice president who spoke at last week's ePharma Summit in Philadelphia, where drug industry giants met to discuss the Internet's impact. He noted that physician's offices typically employ an average of 23 employees who pull 400 patient charts, make 75 calls to pharmacies and deal with nine insurance payment organizations every day.

To better reach doctors -- who typically have an office billing and scheduling system but no outside network connectivity -- Pfizer is working with IBM and Microsoft on a suite of Web-based administrative and clinical software that it plans to make available this fall.

For its part, Merck-Medco, the online prescription fulfillment company owned by Merck, is expanding its Web site services to let pharmacists and corporate benefits managers gain access to administrative information related to interactions with Merck. "We're also looking at building handheld applications for physicians to make sure the doctor can fulfill orders online," said Jill Blank, Merck-Medco's vice president of e-commerce.

In February, Merck-Medco announced plans to form an electronic exchange called RxHub with help from high-tech partners Express Scripts and AdvancePCS. The three are committing $60 million to RxHub, which is set to start this fall with Web-based services, including online account team interaction and reference libraries for corporations, consumers, physicians and pharmacists.

Competitor Eli Lilly, through its eLilly e-commerce venture, is brainstorming for ideas after spinning out a venture fund in January.

"We are aggressively experimenting with new ways to interact with our customers," said Newt Crenshaw, vice president at eLilly, who said he takes the "open sourced innovation in Linux" as his inspiration. For eLilly, that means turning to outsiders in "an open sourced business model" to pay for clinical research help with universities and others over the Internet.

"Even if we're heading West just as the Internet prospectors are coming up empty-handed, we at Lilly are convinced 'there's gold in them thar hills,'" he said, during a speech at the summit.

The Lilly Venture Fund has invested in PharmQuest, Expert Systems and an Internet-based clinical research company named 1747, among others.

"We're experimenting with e-recruitment with 1747, and we're not impressed with the results yet, but we're convinced it will be important," Crenshaw said.

"E-recruitment" means finding suitable candidates for clinical research trials via the Internet.

The pharmaceutical industry has 41,600 locations conducting clinical research trials that require roughly 6,700 volunteer patients per program, according to Forrester Research, which last week released a list of top Web sites for clinical e-recruitment based on their content and search mechanisms.

Michael Barrett, a Forrester analyst, says none of the sites is even beginning to achieve its goals on the scale needed, and he advised competing pharmaceutical companies to band together as the auto industry has in creating an "e-recruitment supersite."

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