For the past few years, Dr. Eric Mizuno and his colleagues at Chicago's Northwestern Memorial Physicians Group have banned pharmaceutical-company freebies like sticky pads and calendars from their offices.
"It just felt right to not contaminate the environment," Mizuno says. The ban also reduces the number of sales reps crowding the reception area.
"There was a time when there were literally more reps in the office than patients," he says.
The amount of money involved in these giveaways is staggering. In 2004, pharmaceutical companies spent $37 billion on research and development, according to the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), the industry's trade association.
Drug companies spent another $27.7 billion on promotion , including $15.9 billion on free drug samples and $7.3 billion on sales-rep contacts (free lunches and pens), $4 billion on direct-to-consumer advertising and $500,000 on journal advertising, according to IMS Health, a pharmaceutical information and consulting company.
But could it all soon end?
Possibly, suggests Newsweek.
Update: See Pharma Marketing Blog re $7.3 billion on lunches and pens figure.
3 comments:
27.7 Billion $'s? That's a bit low. Let's see...there's a few billion to purchase the RX data that physicians generate, throw in some more to "manage" the data once it's obtained (you have to segment it by therapeutic class and state license number), then you'll need to buy the IT newtwork so that everyone can then use the data, then add all the managerial layers and support people to oversee the 90,000 sales reps who have the data on their computers. And that's just the portion that IMS conveniently "overlooked" (since they sell RX data...) when talking about annual costs associated with promotion of pharmaceuticals in the U.S.
Yeah, and I bet the $37 billion on R & D was an overestimate as well given that it came from PhRMA -- the same lobbying group that brought us the myth that it costs, on average, $800 million to bring a drug to market!
Verispan has said that promotion was about $20 billion in 2005, but that is just from its audits that may miss a lot of items.
Also the $500,000 in Journal Ads is $500 Million. See
http://www.perq-hci.com/News/articles/APR2006.pdf#search=%22journal%20ads%20namenda%22
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