Is it alright to pay people to blog about a product?
Abbott recently put out an app for the iPhone regarding its infant formula Similac. The app “can easily track baby’s eating, sleeping … diaper changes … [and] predict the next feeding time”. Now the controversy of formula substituting for breast milk is an old one. My dad, who was with UNICEF, was one of the … Continue reading
To boost patient adherence (and product revenues), engage nurses
Dana Jennings of the New York Times makes an interesting observation about nurses and doctors in his blog “In Praise of Nurses” — To generalize: Nurses are warm, whereas doctors are cool. Nurses act like real people; doctors often act like aristocrats. Nurses look you in the eye; doctors stare slightly above and to the … Continue reading
How can you have customer service if you don’t know who your customer is?
JD Power just recently put out its report on customer service, “Achieving Excellence in Customer Service: The Brands That Deliver What U.S. Customers Want” (you can get a copy from JD Power by filling out their form here). The report identifies 40 Customer Service Champions: 2011 Customer Service Champions represent a variety of different industries, from … Continue reading
Is drug switching fraudulent?
If you hand a pharmacist a prescription from your doctor for X drug, but the pharmacist gives you Y drug instead, is that fraudulent? The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines fraud as “intentional perversion of truth in order to induce another to part with something of value”. In the example above, the pharmacist has knowingly given you … Continue reading
Lack of price controls to blame for higher drug costs in US
In today’s Chicago Tribune “Lack of price controls to blame for higher drug costs in US”, a reader asks a very good question – why are HIV/AIDs patients in Africa only paying 40 cents a day for a pill? Bruce Japsen for the Tribune replied that it was partly because of the lack of price … Continue reading
Pain lozenges and off-label marketing
So, what do pain lozenges and off-label marketing have in common? The answer is Cephalon’s Fentora — which “is used to treat breakthrough pain in adult patients with cancer (18 years of age and older) who are regularly using other opioid pain medicines around-the-clock for their constant cancer pain”. The problem, according to the US … Continue reading
Unseen costs of prior authorization
Prior authorizations are often used as a cost containment tactic by payers — and it works in reducing the amount that the payer must pay for the PA drug (i.e. in financial terms, the line item goes down). However, decreases in the line item are showing up somewhere else. At a study conducted at the … Continue reading
Take my drug switching survey
Drug switching (aka therapeutic substitution) occurs when your pharmacist, health plan or health insurer gives you a drug that is different from the one that your doctor prescribed. Switching from a brand name drug to its chemically equivalent is generic substitution and is generally allowed by law. However, switching to a drug that is not … Continue reading
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