Can Pharmaceuticals Legally Sell Drugs?
This is the question that I asked myself (yet again) when I read that two major pharmaceuticals have (yet again) evidenced that the only way that pharmaceuticals seem able to sell durgs is by doing something illegal. Amgen recently plead guilty to illegally marketing Aranesp for off-label uses and will pay $150 million in criminal … Continue reading
Is good pharmaceutical marketing possible?
14 years ago (on August 8, 1997, no less), the FDA issued guidelines that allowed for drug manufacturers to advertise. As the NY Times reported that day, Michael Friedman (then FDA’s lead deputy commissioner) had this is to say about the reason for the guidelines: Today’s action can help promote greater consumer awareness about prescription … Continue reading
Are doctors the forgotten factor in improving patient adherence?
Doctors almost seem to be the forgotten player in the healthcare system — perhaps it’s because of the perception that doctors are just pawns of the pharmaceutical industry. For example, there has been a steady stream of news about doctors refusing to see pharmaceutical sales reps and cutting financial ties with pharmaceuticals. Or, perhaps it’s … Continue reading
Can a Patient Adherence Program be Self-Funded?
According to the report “Ensuring Profitable Patient Adherence Programs: Using Analytics and Metrics to Improve the Bottom Line”, pharmaceutical companies spend nearly 97% of their marketing budget to capture initial market share. This means that 3% of their marketing budget is devoted to on-going efforts, like patient adherence. As the report’s author, Dr Andree Bates, … Continue reading
Telling patients to get better is easier than listening to what they think
The current (and sadly most used) approach to communications is to push information at us — e.g., TV advertising, PR campaigns, and pharmacy refill reminders. It reminds me of the cartoon (below), which unfortunately epitomizes this approach (my apologies to the cartoonist, as I don’t know where I got it). You can easily imagine the … Continue reading
Pharmaceutical company promotions to nurses raise concerns
The American Journal of Managed Care recently published the results of an interesting survey of nurse practitioners’ (NPs) interactions with pharmaceutical industry promotional activities — “Under the Radar”: Nurse Practitioner Prescribers and Pharmaceutical Industry Promotions As the researchers point out, NPs have been operating “under the radar”. NPs are generally allowed to prescribe medications (for a state-by-state comparison and references, … Continue reading
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
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
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
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