1 Boring Old Man

Are KOLs drying up? Praise be

Hooked

by Howard Brody

May 14, 2014

Back in 2011 I heard from Cutting Edge Information on the subject of key opinion leaders [KOLs]:

http://brodyhooked.blogspot.com/2011/06/keeping-kols-fat-and-sassy-these.html

I figured that once I outed them on this blog, they would know better than to send me any more e-mails, but apparently they are still at it; the cold-call e-mail that’s reprinted below arrived this week. The content would seem to suggest that Pharma firms are having greater difficulties finding “Key opinion leader” physicians [aka shills] due to the increased transparency requirements of the pending Sunshine Act. If this is the case, then of course it is what I have been advocating for years. I read both the e-mail and the attached detailed brochure but could not find a figure as to the actual cost of this 179-page report, so you’ll have to contact Cutting Edge Information directly if you want to buy a copy. [I have a feeling there might be some sticker shock]…

He goes on to reproduce their email, brochure, and a link.

Addressing Physician Needs through Customer-Centric Commercial Strategies: Many medical device and pharma sales forces are adopting more customer-centric approaches. These commercial models move away from purely product-driven conversations to focus on — and meet — physicians’ and patients’ needs while educating them on key products. Customer-centric sales representatives must work to bring value to their target physicians and patient populations. Many teams focus on finding best-fit product solutions for specific practices. Teams also seek out opportunities to package these products with value-adding materials such as education- and support-based websites or applications…

A few years back, I wrote a post [rip van winkle… ] in which I analogized myself to Rip Van Winkle, Washington Irving’s fictional character who slept for forty years and awoke to a world he didn’t understand. I claimed that my cloistered practice had been a similar hibernation, and that the psychiatry of today was unrecognizable to me. At the time, even I thought I was being melodramatic with that analogy, but now I think I was right after all. But it’s not just psychiatry, it’s Medicine in general. I’ve finally gotten old enough to be visiting doctors myself, and the taint I’ve written about in psychiatry is everywhere.

This Cutting Edge Information company basically functions by taking every aspect of running a pharmaceutical company and surveys the whole industry, collecting the various companies’ ways of approaching the problems, then puts together documents and presentations to sell. It’s marketing research on marketing, and they thrive on attempts to curb the out of control industry marketing techniques. Each new regulatory hurdle is just another market for their materials about how to get around it. Think I’m kidding, just dance around in their site for a while – at least for as long as you can tolerate their strange jargon.

And at the risk of beating a dead horse, Cutting Edge Information has nothing to do with whether the drug in question is any good, or if it’s safe – just how to sell more of it. And since they’ve discovered that their bottom line is total pills sold, they’re getting into the medication compliance business.  In psychiatry, we’re also well aware of how LCM [Life Cycle Management] as in indication sprawl, patent extension, dissuading generics, patenting XR versions or nearby chemical clones, have all have become routine practices.