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
Cancer Drug Use and Spending to Rise Sharply by 2013
What are the implications of increased drug use and spending? In a recent report by Medco, while the overall drug trend in 2010 remained low at 3.7%, the costs for specialty drugs “accounted for 16.3% of plan costs but was responsible for a remarkable 70.1% of drug trend” with diabetes contributing the most to those … Continue reading
Who profits from improved patient adherence?
Aside from patients who get better health outcomes because of better adherence, who profits (either from increased revenues or lower expenses) from improved patient adherence? On the revenue side are the pharmaceuticals. The simplest and most straight-forward answer is that pharmaceuticals would profit the most. After all, more adherence means more product usage, which means … Continue reading
Trust or not trust pharmaceuticals — is there a place for branded marketing?
To paraphrase Hamlet — to trust or not trust pharmaceuticals, that is the question. A recent study shows that use of pharmaceutical branded websites are on the rise, based on web activity from January 2010 to January 2011 as measured by comScore and as illustrated below: Moreover, comScore “found that visitation to a branded website … 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
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
Improving patient adherence saves money
The news headline says it all: CVS Caremark Study Finds Medication Adherence Leads to Lower Health Care Costs, Even After Accounting for Increased Prescription Drug Spending. The study analyzed pharmacy and medical claims data of 135,000 patients with congestive heart failure, diabetes, hypertension and dyslipidemia to determine the direct effect of adherence on costs. The … Continue reading
Drug firms fund health advocacy groups
According to a new report recently published by researchers at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, many health advocacy organizations rely on financial support from drug companies, but few disclose the extent of that funding or make information easily accessible. The unsaid (but, I would suggest clearly intended) suggestion is that the named advocacy groups … Continue reading
Drugs Like Cars
The pharmaceutical industry and the car industry are very similar in the way they sell. They both sell their goods like they did a hundred years ago — through salespeople: one in a showroom; the other going door-to-door pestering doctors (or if you will, going town to town selling snake oil) … and both types … Continue reading
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