Marketing to health-care providers takes three main forms: activity by pharmaceutical sales representatives, provision of drug samples, and sponsoring continuing medical education (CME).
[1] The use of gifts, including pens and coffee mugs embossed with pharmaceutical product names, has been prohibited by PHRMA ethics guidelines since 2008.
Diagnostic radiologists are the most rigid about allowing details – 92.1% won't see reps – followed by pathologists and neuroradiologists, at 92.1% and 91.8%, respectively.
[5] The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) released updates to its voluntary Code on Interactions with Healthcare Professionals on 10 July 2008.
[6] In addition to prohibiting small gifts and reminder items such as pens, notepads, staplers, clipboards, paperweights, pill boxes, etc.,[6] the revised Code: Free samples have been shown to affect physician prescribing behavior.
To aid this decision, customers are broken down into different classes according to their prescription behavior, patient population, their business potential, and event their personality traits.
Sales representatives called upon physicians regularly, providing clinical information, approved journal articles, and free drug samples.
This is still the approach today; however, economic pressures on the industry are causing pharmaceutical companies to rethink the traditional sales process to physicians.
The new age pharmaceutical representative is armed with key data at his fingertips and tools to maximize the time spent with physicians.
In reality, gifts, both large and small, ranging from cups of coffee to travel to medical conferences are exchanged on a routine basis with high prescribers in an effort to shift their obligations from patients to prescriptions and have proven effective.
Recently, pharmaceutical companies have begun to use social network analysis to uncover thought leaders; because it does not introduce respondent bias, which is commonly found in primary research; it can identify and map out the entire scientific community for a disease state; and it has greater compliance with state and federal regulations; because physician prescribing patterns are not used to create the social network.
Legal cases and US congressional hearings have provided access to pharmaceutical industry documents revealing new marketing strategies for drugs.
Known as Medicare Part D, this program engages private insurers to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies for the placement of drugs on tiered formularies.
In some areas it is required that ads for drugs include a list of possible side effects, so that users are informed of both facets of a medicine.
[25] In the United States, pharmaceutical companies often provide drug coupons to consumers to help offset the copayments charged by health insurers for prescription medication.
Consumers often realize too late that the continued use of these drugs without coupons necessitates either switching to a cheaper generic or facing steep out-of-pocket expenses.
[2] Although pharmaceutical companies have made large investments in marketing their products, overall promotional spending has been decreasing over the last few years, and declined by 10 percent from 2009 to 2010.
Pharmaceutical companies are cutting back mostly in detailing and sampling, while spending in mailings and print advertising grew since last year.
[32] Every major company selling the drugs—Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and Johnson & Johnson—has either settled recent government cases, under the False Claims Act, for hundreds of millions of dollars or is currently under investigation for possible health care fraud.
Following charges of illegal marketing, two of the settlements in 2009 set records for the largest criminal fines ever imposed on corporations.
Legal claims against the pharmaceutical industry have varied widely over the past two decades, including Medicare and Medicaid fraud, off-label promotion, and inadequate manufacturing practices.
[33][34] The emergence of new media and technologies in recent years is quickly changing the pharmaceutical marketing landscape in the United States.
Both physicians and users are increasing their reliance on the Internet as a source of health and medical information, prompting pharmaceutical marketers to look at digital channels for opportunities to reach their target audiences.
Direct-to-users marketers are also recognizing the need to shift to digital channels as audiences become more fragmented and the number of access points for news, entertainment and information multiplies.