1 Boring Old Man

Instead of paying doctors to promote their drugs, GlaxoSmithKline has decided to pay doctors to promote their drugs.

Glaxo to Bring Doctors In-House as Educational Speakers

Bloomberg

By Makiko Kitamura

Mar 17, 2014

GlaxoSmithKline plans to hire doctors to educate their peers about its drugs instead of paying external speakers, a further change to its marketing practices following a record fraud settlement in the U.S. The drugmaker is also investing in improving its multichannel marketing strategy through media such as online streaming of educational content, Deirdre Connelly, head of Glaxo’s U.S. pharmaceuticals business, said in an interview in Philadelphia. The changes come at a time when London-based Glaxo is introducing products recently approved to treat skin cancer, HIV and respiratory diseases.

Glaxo has been reforming marketing practices to improve its reputation. In 2012, the company agreed to pay $3 billion to settle allegations that it illegally promoted its Paxil and Wellbutrin anti-depressants and failed to report safety data on the Avandia diabetes drug. Hiring doctors and medical experts to speak as in-house representatives of Glaxo will provide more transparency, Connelly said.

“We’ll continue to disseminate this very important information on drug benefits and risks, but we’re just not going to do that by hiring external speakers,” she said. “We want to ensure that no one even perceives us to be doing anything wrong.” Glaxo plans to hire a range of people with medical backgrounds, including doctors and scientists with expertise in specific disease areas, though how many is still unclear, according to the company. It will be fewer than the number of external speakers the company has employed, Connelly said. In December, Glaxo said that it will stop paying doctors for giving speeches and attending medical meetings by early 2016…

hat tip to pharmagossip… 

Glaxo Says It Will Stop Paying Doctors to Promote Drugs

New York Times

By KATIE THOMAS

December 16, 2013

The British drug maker GlaxoSmithKline will no longer pay doctors to promote its products and will stop tying compensation of sales representatives to the number of prescriptions doctors write, its chief executive said Monday, effectively ending two common industry practices that critics have long assailed as troublesome conflicts of interest. Andrew Witty, Glaxo’s chief executive, said the changes are part of an effort to “to try and make sure we stay in step with how the world is changing.”

The announcement appears to be a first for a major drug company — although others may be considering similar moves — and it comes at a particularly sensitive time for Glaxo. It is the subject of a bribery investigation in China, where authorities contend the company funneled illegal payments to doctors and government officials in an effort to lift drug sales…

I grew up in a family football built. My father, a small man, grew up in an immigrant family of coal miners. He escaped that fate by being the best football player ever seen in those parts, a skill he parlayed into an atheletic scholarship. After college, he became a coach for a time, which is when I came into the story – a very winning coach at that. Afterwards, he continued for years as a Scout. That meant that on weekends, we often were off in the car to scout the teams that the colleges that hired him were to play the next week. He had a notebook that he wrote in all through the game. It said things like, "They always run to the wide side of the field." or "The left guard usually lines up glancing to the side where they’re going to run." "If the left guard looks straight ahead, it’s a pass." Pages and pages. Needless to say, my dad was in high demand. After football, he managed a huge woolen mill, where he "coached" production. Another notebook. "If you backlogged too much wool to be spun, the spinners work slowly because there’s no chance they’ll ever catch up. But if you backlog just a little more than they can do, they speed way up." I often think of him when I read these PHARMA marketing ploys. While he was more or less an honest guy, he saw the IRS as an opposing team – fair game. He was an ace as a barterer. So without knowing exactly why, I avoided competitive sports and anything that had to do with business or strategizing. I pay the sticker price for cars and have always farmed my taxes out to some hyper-moral accountant. How hard is that to analyze?

The marketing departments of PHARMA are paid full time to do this kind of strategizing. It’s what they think about every day. I’ll bet they’d make fine football scouts. And I’ll bet they don’t think this kind of strategic thinking is dishonest. It’s just part of playing the game well – an end unto itself. "How do we squeeze the most profit out of Lurasidone? I know. Let’s get it approved for Bipolar Depression. When we advertise it, they’ll just see the word "Depression" and "Ask their doctor if Latuda® is right for them." "Look Sir Andrew, if we separate these announcements by three months, it won’t look like we’re just doing the same thing in a different way."

• The Fiona Godlee solution:
  "Unless we can find a solution to the commercial incompetence problem, we have to recognize that the pharmaceutical industry has an irreducible conflict of interest in relation to the way it represents its drugs, in science and in marketing. And unless we can resolve this in a way that is more in the public interest and in patients’ interest, I would argue that drug companies should not be allowed to evaluate their own products."
• The most stringent interpretation of the AllTrials solution:
  "It’s time all clinical trial results are reported. Patients, researchers, pharmacists, doctors and regulators everywhere will benefit from publication of clinical trial results. Thousands of clinical trials have not reported their results; some have not even been registered. Information on what was done and what was found in these trials could be lost forever to doctors and researchers, leading to bad treatment decisions, missed opportunities for good medicine, and trials being repeated. All trials past and present should be registered, and the full methods and the results reported. We call on governments, regulators and research bodies to implement measures to achieve this."