Pharmaceutical Executive-09-01-2006

The world according to New Hampshire: Doctors prescribe expensive drugs because pharma reps sell them. Interfere with the selling, and you'll cut down on the prescribing. It's a plan. But for what?

Just because outside contractors and vendors are experts does not mean everything will happen exactly the way you want it to. There's a lot of oversight.

Electronic continuing medical education is one area that is primed for podcasting penetration.

Nothing reflects pharma's response to public-health crises in sharper detail than the industry's efforts to fight the AIDS epidemic.

Advice for new leaders: Forget the irrelevant meetings, the 300 e-mails, and the 50 voicemails.

Public revulsion at animal-rights extremists is damaging their cause. The majority of people deem the worst offenders to be terrorists.

The PPP approach asks pharma to identify promising drugs and conduct pre-clinical tests, instead of paying for costly late-stage clinical trials.

Indeed, at this time, we are aware of no evidence that the practice of authorized generics has actually deterred any Paragraph IV certification or post-180 day generic entry, let alone a challenge to an invalid patent.

When people ask how health seekers look and act on the Web, there's no one answer: The online universe has become just as diverse as the rest of the world. Nowhere is this more evident than in the latest e-health statistics that, when taken together, paint a picture of customers who are beginning to find their feet-and new finesse-online.

For the fifth year in a row, Pharm Exec invites Professor Bill Trombetta of St. Joseph's University to analyze the pharma industry's financial performance with a battery of business metrics old and new. The highlights: Two top biotechs race neck-and-neck for first place, Forest delivers another strong performance, and AstraZeneca squeezes past Johnson & Johnson and GlaxoSmithKline into the top four for the first time ever. And the winner is . . .

I feel vulnerable to accusations that I work on the dark side, that I've sold out to corporate medicine.

If I ran the FDA, I'd have a Rose Garden ceremony for all the histleblowers in my agency. No one can know where all the skeletons are buried. We ought to honor every one of those patriots.

These "guns for hire" bring the science and marketing savvy that clients need, often with in-depth category experience, but without the commitment and cost associated with hiring a full-time employee.

The suit draws a comparison to the newspaper industry: Even though papers profit from disseminating information, the information in question isn't commercial.

More than high-call frequency will be necessary to succeed in an increasingly competitive sales environment.

Physicians seek point-of-care info and updates in friendly formats. Data should be available when and how they need it, and in exactly the right amounts.

Most DTC marketers say education has been their primary goal all along, but that often, branded messages got in the way. Now marketers are doing something about it, as evidenced by recent increases in unbranded ads. Pharma companies are producing campaigns that more clearly encourage consumers to seek information about their conditions, rather than just running out and requesting a script from their doctors.