Reputation, expectation, and social stature

Well, the good news is that the pharmaceutical industry’s reputation appears to be better than President Bush’s. What’s the bad news? Its “job approval rating” is only slightly better than the President’s!

Drugmakers “not believable?” Why would anyone be surprised?

When you have a clear conflict of interests, you have to work 20 times as hard if you want to be believable! But rather than seeking transparency and fostering trust, all too many pharmaceutical companies have continued to conduct “business as usual.”

A European Commission study has now found that healthcare professionals and payers are “mostly suspicious” of drugmakers as sources of information about drugs. Nearly half of the responders said pharma has too many conflicts of interest to be appropriate sources of general information on medications. This can’t really be a surprise … can it?

“Differential pricing” in emerging markets: Part II

Apparently someone in the major media has finally picked up on the strategic initiatives evolving at at least a couple of the major pharmaceutical companies to use differential pricing strategies and focused marketing teams to penetrate the emerging pharmaceutical markets from China, India, and Indonesia to Columbia, Panama, and Brazil. We first blogged about this back in March this year.

An article in this week’s Economist provides some different perpsective on this issue, and identifies GSK and Novartis as potential leading players in this field. However, there is clearly both interest and skepticism out there. To what extent the skepticism is driven by self-interest on the part of local companies that feel threatened by such initiatives is something that should be considered.

In some cases, timing is everything …

IMS Health (a client of Vox Medica) traditionally issued their gobal oncology forecast each October and achieved limited media coverage. This year, they have done something different.

Health care and Web 2.0: now available at …

There’s a lot chatter from the gurus about the potential roles of web 2.0 in building health care “communities of interest.” However, chatter is one thing and actually doing it is another.

If you want to see how this sort of thing actually can work, have a look at the following two linked sites:

• The “New” Prostate Cancer InfoLink and
• The “New” Prostate Cancer InfoLink Social Network

The former is more like a traditional web site, but incorporates a blog as well as the Ark Arthur, Ask Arnon, and Ask Amy features. The latter is a true social network (including patients, family members, physicians, and others).

If you are interested in a good “quick read” on this topic, see “The Wisdom of Patients: Health Care Meets Online Social Media” by Jane Sarason-Kahn.

Finally … an insider who will talk about (one of) the elephants in the room

According to Mike Huckman of CNBC, a major pharmaceutical industry insider has finally acknowldeged that, “The industry has a black eye.” The problem is that it’s someone whose credibility was at its height nearly 20 years ago, and who knows whether the industry can really “hear him” today.

And today, from the delusional thinking report …

ITEM … If you are both a director of Pfizer AND the physician-in-chief at Massachusetts General Hospital, is it really sensible for you to go on record as a defender of the pharmaceutical industry in the midst of a media storm about some of its excesses?

Licensed pharma reps: an opportunity waiting to happen

Naturally there is wailing and gnashing of teeth at the recent legislation passed by the Washington, DC council that will require all pharmaceutical and related field representatives to be licensed. However, I see this as an immense strategic opportunity that is just waiting to happen. After all, let’s be honest, we all know that the days of the 7,000 person sales force are over, and it’s probably a good thing too. Many of those field personnel were wasting their own and everyone else’s time waiting to get 15 seconds in a doctor’s crowded day that he or she was never going to remember later.

The question I believe the innovative should be asking is, “How do we take advantage of this opportunity to develop a nationally accredited and licensed field force that provides a clearly differentiating set of benefits for our customers, while also delivering key information about our products?”

There have to be any number of good ways to answer that question. But each way that you can “capture” and use as a differentiating strategy will be one less for your competitors to take advantage of.

Recognition of a “truth deficit.” Is the rubber hitting the road?

The following quote is lifted from today’s FiercePharma, with full acknowledgement, under the heading ‘Pharma CEOs mull industry “truth deficit”.’

“We love it when pharma CEOs depart from their usual talking points about financial results and restructurings and pipelines, to wax philosophical on their place in the [world].”

Is it actually possible that some of the major pharmaceutical companies are beginning to recognize that their credibility has been shot to ribbons? Could we be at the start of a new era of collaborative interaction between health care researchers, providers, payers, and developers of new therapeutic agents? Is there a glimmer of hope that the regulated might begin to see some value in cooperative interaction with the regulators? Might we all be able to get back to the point where we remember that everything that underpins the entire health-care industry is about the ability to provide high quality care to patients in need?

Should such a scenario start to play out, hold on to your hats. One of the things that ought to happen in such an eventuality is a major downsizing of many companies, with more selective focus on appropriate product development and marketing priorities. Profitabilities might drop in the short to medium term, but if the opportunity is a new credibility for the global biopharmaceutical industry, that would be a huge benefit in the long term (in our humble opinion!).

Failure all around in conduct of post-approval drug trials

We can probably be equal-handed in raising questions about “who’s to blame” for the continuing poor record for conduct of post-approval studies of approved drugs requested by the US Food & Drug Administration at the time of approval.

According to the most recent report from the FDA, as of September 30, 2006, there were a total of 1,632 “open” post-marketing commitments. Of these a mere 220 (13.5 percent) had been submitted to the FDA by the sponsor and only another 274 (16.8 percent) were “ongoing.” The number of studies that were classified as “pending” or “delayed” was an astonishing 1,135 (69.5 percent).