As students of BBA, our course instructor of Ethics in Corporate Society, Ms. Tania Danish authorized us to make a report on the “PHARMACEUTICAL MARKETING-the growing ethical concern? ” We were required to make a report in accordance to our learning in the course of Ethics in Corporate Society and simultaneously increase our knowledge in regard with the ethics of Pharmaceutical Marketing in Pakistan. This report is to be produced to explore ethical issues in Pharmaceutical Marketing in Pakistan and especially with reference to the theoretical knowledge gained in the class lectures The report is required to be submitted on 8th, Dec 2011.
Sincerely All Group Members, BBA-V, Institute of Business Administration LETTER OF TRANSMITTAL December 8, 2011 Ms. Tania Danish Course Instructor, Ethics in Corporate Society, Institute of Business Administration, Karachi Subject: PHARMACEUTICAL MARKETING-the growing ethical concern? Respected Ms. Danish, Here is the final report on the “PHARMACEUTICAL MARKETING-the growing ethical concern? ” which you had authorized us to work upon at the beginning of this semester. The report is now ready for your perusal. This report is a complete portrayal of ethical concerns regarding Pharmaceutical Marketing.
The making of this report has been a wonderful learning experience for all our group members and we thank you for giving us this opportunity to avail. We have worked diligently with our toiling endeavors to provide you a real and complete picture of the situation of Pharmaceutical Marketing. If you have any further queries, please call us on our cell no. 0322-3142893. We would be glad to respond to your queries. Sincerely, All Group Members BBA-V Institute of Business Administration Acknowledgements This research was only possible with the efforts of our entire group.
Thanks a lot to the entire team for their all-embracing contributions. We would also like to thank the people who showed genuine interest in making this all important report possible, by providing their opinions regarding the report and suggestions which help us in improving this report. Thought-provoking and sometimes extraordinary, the ideas discussed in this report can lead to more discussions or trigger the thinking process of many people. This would serve the purpose of the research and analysis on the Pharmaceutical Marketing. And in the end, we would also like to thank our course instructor Ms.
Tania Danish for assigning us an interesting project and guiding us at every step of this report. Preface This report is produced with the objective, to learn about the Pharmaceutical Sector of Pakistan as a whole. The operations that take place in the Pharmaceutical Sector could be understood. The purpose also included the facts that could be disclosed which make a company competitive as compared to others in terms of Pharmaceutical Marketing. In understanding all these features of the Pharmaceutical Companies, Mr. Owais Baig, Mr. Zaigham Masood Sheikh, Dr. Yasir Saeed, Dr.
Aun helped us. With this opportunity our group would like to thank them for providing us all the valuable information, and for providing us their precious time. Our group members would also like to thank Ms. Tania Danish, our instructor for Ethics in Corporate Society for giving us a task, which we all loved to complete and which in the end proved to be very useful in improving our knowledge over different issues regarding the Pharmaceutical sector. Thanks to all of them! Table of Contents LETTER OF AUTHORIZATION2 LETTER OF TRANSMITTAL3 Acknowledgements4 Preface5.
Introduction9 Introduction to Pharmaceutical Marketing10 Beliefs about the Free Market11 Insatiable Needs11 Lifestyle choices12 Competition among drug companies yields innovation13 From Patients to Medical Consumer13 Alphabetical Listing of Worldwide Pharmaceutical Companies15 Fortune 500, Top 12 Companies22 Pharmaceutical Companies of Pakistan24 Multinational origin Pharmaceutical units operating in Pakistan24 Top ten (10) companies in 200826 Top 20 national pharmaceutical companies26 Laws for Pharmaceutical Marketing Worldwide27 Food and Drug Administration (FDA)27.
Laws for Pharmaceutical Marketing in Pakistan31 The Need for Pharmaceutical Marketing31 The Process:34 The Training:34 Information Sessions:34 Personal Grooming:34 Training About Selling Skills:34 Simulated Field Visits:35 Testing and Selection:35 Sessions with the Product Managers:35 Tips and Guidelines:35 The Approach:35 Approaching the General Practician:36 Approaching the doctors in hospitals:37 Approaching the pharmacies:37 The marketing:38 How drugs are promoted? 39 Ethically Wrong or Right? 46 Common Practices47 Independence of Healthcare Professionals:47.
Interactions with Healthcare Professionals:47 Separation between promotion and non-promotion:47 Promotional content:47 No pre-approval and off-label promotion:48 Adverse events reporting:48 Privacy of patient data:48 Standards Followed in Most Common Practices:48 Events:48 Promotional Content49 Promotional interactions with HCPs50 Non-promotional interactions with HCPs51 Communication with patients52 Interactions with patients as a source of knowledge to Pharmaceuticals53 Grants:53 Research / Educational grants54 Image-building grants54 Responsibilities54 Global level54.
CPO / local level55 Public Officials/Institutions55 Additional standards for interactions with HCPs which are Public Officials55 Additional Standards relating to Grants to Public Institutions56 Conclusion and Recommendations:56 Recommendations57 Independent monitoring of marketing codes of practice with real penalties57 Increased education of consumers and those with prescribing powers58 Pharmaceuticals’ Position59 References61 Introduction Pharmaceutical industry is a sector which is vital to every country since it is a life saving factor for the people of that country.
This industry plays an important role in any country not only because it is essential to the life of the people but also due to the fact that it contributes to the GDP of the economy, provides employment to handsome number of people of any country may it be in a direct or indirect way. In Pakistan, the Pharmaceutical Industry commenced its operation soon after the country came into being. But at the time of independence, there were only two units in this sector which were unable to meet the local demand. Hence most of the medicines were imported to cater to the demand of Pakistani people.
Facing its ups and downs throughout the time span from 1947-2010, Pharmaceutical industry has managed to get to its unique position and importance in the GDP of Pakistan. Figure on the left shows the statistics related to the pharmaceutical industry of Pakistan during 1956-66 and during 1999-2000. Numerical values shown in the chart depicts that the sector has grown up as time passes and seems to have occupied an important role in the economy of Pakistan. Presently the number of registered or licensed manufacturers in the country is close to 300 out of which major 32 units are of multinationals.
The total world market of the Pharmaceutical as estimated in 1994 is of US$900bn. Out of which Pakistan had a share of 0. 3 percent, North America being at the top having a share of 33. 5 percent. Introduction to Pharmaceutical Marketing The marketing of medication has a long history. The sale of miracle cures, many with little real potency, has always been common. Marketing of legitimate non-prescription medications, such as pain relievers or allergy medicine, has also long been practiced, although, until recently, mass marketing of prescription medications has been rare.
It was long believed that since doctors made the selection of drugs, mass marketing was a waste of resources; specific ads targeting the medical profession were thought to be cheaper and just as effective. This would involve ads in professional journals and visits by sales staff to doctor’s offices and hospitals. An important part of these efforts was marketing to medical students. It is often said that leading drug companies now spend more on marketing than on research and development.
While such contemporary pharmaceutical marketing practices are sometimes believed to be a modern phenomenon, they are in fact a direct continuation of 19th-century patent medicine advertising. “Nostrum-mongers,” as the novelist Henry James dubbed them, are noted in the history of advertising as having been the leading spenders on, and foremost originators of, advertising technique. Nostrum sellers pioneered print advertising, use of trademarks and distinctive packaging, “pull” or demand-stimulation strategies, and even the design and commissioning of medical almanacs that functioned as vehicles for promotion of disease awareness.
Henry James’s psychologist brother, William James, was so exasperated by “the medical advertisement abomination” that in 1894 he declared that “the authors of these advertisements should be treated as public enemies and have no mercy shown”. There is no doubt that drug company discoveries have profoundly improved upon our capacity to treat illness. But pharmaceutical marketing is more closely aligned with consumer marketing in other industries than with medicine, for which the consequences are not trivial.
Once we view pharmaceutical industry activities in this light, we can disentangle industry’s influence on contemporary medicine. Because we believe that we owe corporations our wealth and well-being, we tend not to question corporations’ fundamental practices, and they become invisible to us. Beliefs about the Free Market There are three beliefs commonly associated with the “free market. ” The first is that human beings are creatures of limitless but insatiable needs, wants, and discomforts. The second is that the free market is a place where these needs might be satisfied through the exercise of free choice.
The last of these beliefs is that the surest avenue to innovation in all industries is unfettered competition in the market. Insatiable Needs The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins theorizes that the belief in unlimited wants is unique in the West, and stems from the Christian notion of “fallen man” as sufferer. This results, says Sahlins, in a peculiar idea of the person “as an imperfect creature of need and desire, whose whole earthly existence can be reduced to the pursuit of bodily pleasure and the avoidance of pain”.
A historical and philosophical examination of professional marketing shows that an assumption of boundless needs and wants is also at the heart of marketing theory. In this sense, marketing can be regarded as the institutionalization of this view of human nature. The marketer’s challenge is to translate those limitless needs into profits. Sahlins also points out that “in the world’s richest societies, the subjective experience of lack increases in proportion to the objective output of wealth”. In other words, the richer we get, the more we want.
One explanation of this paradox lies in the way marketing activities are instrumental in getting us to think more about what we lack. Marketers and advertisers project and reflect back to us our discontent with the status quo. Americans are said to spend, on average, three years of their lives watching television advertisements, and the effect is that they are conditioned to want more and more. According to the advertisements, the viewer’s personal anxieties and dissatisfactions are best addressed by consumption. This same message lies at the heart of much pharmaceutical advertising. Lifestyle choices.
In a consumer society, when individuals make choices toward the satisfaction of their needs and wants, they experience this as constructing their own individuality and identity. This special consumer identity is what people refer to when they use the word lifestyle, though they may not realize the consumerist implications of the word. Marketing claims to provide a solution to the problem of unlimited needs and wants, while simultaneously enhancing free choice and the construction of lifestyle. In pharmaceuticals specifically, “lifestyle drug” marketing techniques were honed in the 1980s and 1990s for cosmetic and sexual enhancements.
These techniques have been broadened to include other areas of medicine. The campaigns used to market cosmetic and sexual enhancements were focused on expanding perceived need for these products, and in this respect were a simple extension of customary marketing conduct that had existed for over half a century. The crossover to curative medicine occurred with psychotropic drugs, which have a very wide range of active properties, thus granting the marketer latitude in reinterpreting their value back to the consumer.
For example, one class of antidepressants, the specific serotonin reuptake inhibitors, is marketed for eight distinct psychiatric conditions, ranging from social anxiety disorder to obsessive-compulsive disorder to premenstrual dysphoric disorder. And “lifestyle marketing” has now extended to the promotion of many of the blockbuster “maintenance drugs” intended for daily, lifelong consumption, such as drugs for allergies, insomnia, and acid reflux. As a result of this sequence of events, industry opened the treatment of the inside of the body—the final frontier—to the same logic that governs all other marketing.
Whether, in the antidepressant market, the “distribution channel captain,” as marketers refer to the predominant competitor, ends up sailing the serotonin reuptake channel (the serotonin reuptake inhibitors) or the norepinephrine reuptake channel (the challenger, serotonin–norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors) may yet be determined by marketing rather than by medical jockeying. Competition among drug companies yields innovation It is an article of faith among free market devotees that breakthroughs spring not from paternalistic expert systems such as medicine but from industrial competition.
As long as firms are committed to producing medications to treat diseases—as they are classified by medical science—this argument has some authority. But once a firm becomes principally driven by marketing—the case for most companies in most industries since the 1980s—then innovation comes to mean an elaboration of meaningless differences among a field of comparable “me too” products. “If marketing is seminally about anything,” said Theodore Levitt, one of the towering figures of marketing and former editor of the Harvard Business Review, “it is about achieving customer-getting distinction by differentiating what you do and how you operate”.
More harmfully, expanding and altering the consumer’s perception of disease is just as effective, and evidently a lot easier, than finding new cures. An assumption of boundless needs and wants is at the heart of marketing theory. From Patients to Medical Consumer Since, in a consumer society, we see ourselves as individuals and as free agents when we exercise consumer choice, it is not difficult for pharmaceutical companies and other privatized health-care deliverers to convince us that it is empowering to think of ourselves not as patients but as consumers.
This conversion from patient to consumer also paves the way for the erosion of the doctor’s role as expert. A startling report of this was described in a recent New York Times article: “For a sizable group of people in their 20’s and 30’s, deciding on their own what drugs to take—in particular, stimulants, antidepressants and other psychiatric medications—is becoming the norm. Confident of their abilities and often skeptical of psychiatrist’s expertise, they choose to rely on their own research and each other’s experience in treating problems like depression….
A medical degree, in their view, is useful but not essential”. This phenomenon, the article suggested, is “driven by familiarity” with the drugs. The emergence of this potentially dangerous situation demonstrates an unchecked expansion of the drug industry into an already accepted mode of thought—that “every minor mood fluctuation,” as the article reported, can and should be remedied. Promoting consumer familiarity with drugs is one example of the very broad influence of the pharmaceutical industry.
This influence extends to clinical trial administration, research publication, regulatory lobbying, physician and patient education, drug pricing, advertising and point-of-use promotion, pharmacy distribution, drug compliance, and the legal and ethical norms by which company practices themselves are to be evaluated. Actors traditionally found outside the “distribution channel” of the market are now incorporated into it as active proponents of exchange.
Physicians, academic opinion leaders, patient advocacy groups and other grass roots movements, nongovernmental organizations, public health bodies, and even ethics overseers, through one means or another, have one by one been enlisted as vehicles in the distribution chain. The inclusion of patients in the distribution chain fundamentally changes their role from recipients of medical care to active consumers of the latest pharmaceuticals, a role which surely helps to support industry profits. Alphabetical Listing of Worldwide Pharmaceutical Companies 3M Pharmaceuticals Abbott Laboratories.
Actavis AkzoNobel Alcon Alkaloid Alkermes Allergan Almirall Alphapharm, subsidiary of Merck KGaA. Altana Pharma AG, formerly part of Altana AG, part of the Nycomed Group. Amgen Amico Laboratories Anavex Life Sciences Apotex Inc. Astellas Pharma AstraZeneca Avax Technologies Axcan Pharma Bargn Farmaceutici Phils Co Barr Bausch & Lomb Baxter International Bayer Schering Pharma AG Beximco Pharmaceuticals Ltd Bial Biogen Idec, merger of Biogen and Idec Pharmaceuticals. Biolex Bionovo Biotecnol Biovail Biovitrum Boehringer-Ingelheim Bosnalijek Bristol-Myers Squibb Cadila Healthcare Celgene.
Cephalon Chugai Pharmaceutical Co. Cipla Crucell CSL Limited Daiichi Sankyo Dainippon Sumitomo Pharma Debiopharm Diabetology Ltd Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories Ego Pharmaceuticals Eisai (company) Elan Corporation Eli Lilly and Company Elorac, Inc. Emergent BioSolutions Eskayef Bangladesh Limited F. Hoffmann–La Roche Ltd. , which owns Genentech and Chugai Pharmaceuticals Ferozsons Laboratories Ferring Pharmaceuticals Forest Laboratories Fresenius Medical Care Galapagos NV Galderma Laboratories Genentech, a subsidiary of Hoffmann-La Roche Genzyme Gulf Pharmaceutical Industries (Julphar).
Getz Pharma Gilead Sciences GlaxoSmithKline GPC Biotech Hetero Drugs Hexal Australia Hikma Pharmaceuticals Hoffmann–La Roche Hospira IMULAN BioTherapeutics, LLC Institute for OneWorld Health Intas Biopharmaceuticals Intercytex Janssen Pharmaceutica Products, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson Jenapharm, a subsidiary of Bayer Schering Pharma JN-International Medical Corporation Johnson & Johnson King Pharmaceuticals Krka, d. d. Kyowa Hakko Lundbeck Lupin Laboratories Melior Discovery Menarini Merck & Co. Merck KGaA Mitsubishi Pharma Mylan Nectar Lifesciences Novartis Novo Nordisk.
Nycomed Orion Pharma Ortho-McNeil Pharmaceutical, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson Otsuka Pharmaceutical Co. Panacea Biotec Ltd Par Pharmaceutical Perrigo Pfizer Pharmacosmos Pharma Nord Pierre Fabre Group Piramal Healthcare Pliva Procter & Gamble Purdue Pharma Ranbaxy Laboratories, generics arm of Daiichi Sankyo Renovo Respa Pharmaceuticals Sanofi-Aventis Schering-Plough Sepracor Servier Laboratories Shionogi Shire plc Sigma Pharmaceuticals Sinopharm Group Solvay Group Square Pharmaceuticals Ltd. Bangladesh STADA Arzneimittel Strides Arcolab Sun Pharmaceutical Taiho Pharmaceutical.
Takeda Pharmaceutical Company TAP Pharmaceutical Products, a joint-venture of Abbott and Takeda. Temmler Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Torrent Pharmaceuticals UCB UNILAB, also known as United Laboratories Valeant Pharmaceuticals International, formerly ICN Pharmaceuticals Vertex Pharmaceuticals Vion Pharmaceuticals, Inc. ViroPharma Warner Chilcott Watson Pharmaceuticals Wockhardt Wyeth, a subsidiary of Pfizer Zandu Pharmaceuticals Zentiva Fortune 500, Top 12 Companies The following is a list of the twelve largest pharmaceutical companies ranked by revenue as of July 2009 in the Fortune Global 500.
Rank| Company| Country| Total Revenues(USD millions)| Net income/ (loss)(USD millions)| Employees| 1| Johnson& Johnson| United States| 63,747. 0| 12,949. 0| 118,700| 2| Pfizer| United States| 48,296. 0| 8,104. 0| 81,800| 3| GlaxoSmithKline| United Kingdom| 44,654. 0| 8,438. 6| 99,003| 4| Roche| Switzerland| 44,267. 5| 8,288. 1| 80,080| 5| Sanofi-Aventis| France| 42,179. 0| 5,636. 7| 98,213| 6| Novartis| Switzerland| 41,459. 0| 8,195. 0| 96,717| 7| AstraZeneca| United Kingdom| 31,601. 0| 6,101. 0| 65,000| 8| Abbott Laboratories| United States| 29,527. 6| 4,880. 7| 68,838| 9| Merck| United States| 23,850. 3| 7,808.
4| 55,200| 10| Wyeth| United States| 22,833. 9| 4,417. 8| 47,426| 11| Bristol-Myers Squibb| United States| 21,366. 0| 5,247. 0| 35,000| 12| Eli Lilly| United States| 20,378. 0| (2,071. 9)| 40,500| Pharmaceutical Companies of Pakistan Multinational origin Pharmaceutical units operating in Pakistan Top ten (10) companies in 2008 Top 20 national pharmaceutical companies Laws for Pharmaceutical Marketing Worldwide As the formal pharmaceutical industry started to grow “Attempts were made to increase regulation and to limit financial links between companies and prescribing physicians, including by the relatively new U.
S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). ” In the United States, marketing and distribution of pharmaceuticals is heavily regulated by the federal Prescription Drug Marketing Act of 1987. In general, pharmaceutical companies adhere to FDA regulatory guidelines which call for all DTC advertising and information to be accurate, to provide substantial evidence for any claims that are made, to provide a balance between the risks and benefits of the promoted drug, and to maintain consistency with labeling approved by the FDA. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
“The Food and Drug Administration (FDA or USFDA) is an agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services, one of the United States federal executive departments. The FDA is responsible for protecting and promoting public health through the regulation and supervision of food safety, tobacco products, dietary supplements, prescription and over-the-counter pharmaceutical drugs (medications), vaccines, biopharmaceuticals, blood, medical devices, electromagnetic radiation emitting devices (ERED),veterinary products, and cosmetics.
” Marketing to health care providers takes four main forms: gifting, detailing, drug samples, and sponsoring continuing medical education (CME) The laws that govern pharmaceutical-marketing in various states of US are as follows: * Allows for the development and regulation of electronic prescribing practices and provides protection for consumers, including the prohibition of advertising.
Establishes the information that must be contained in electronic prescriptions and provides mechanisms to ensure that patients receive brand name drugs, when such drugs are medically necessary, instead of generic substitutes when prescribed electronically. This bill would also establish disclosure and confidentiality requirements for medical and prescription records. (Florida) * Prohibits pharmaceutical companies from advertising on television, radio or in print unless material meets federal guidelines.
Also includes clinical trial requirements that manufacturers “shall post on the public website of the federal National Institutes of Health or another publicly accessible website information concerning any clinical trial that the manufacturer conducted or sponsored beginning October 15, 2002; includes a fee for Rx manufacturers that advertise in the state for maintaining the clinical trial database. (Maine) * Limits the pricing information that a pharmaceutical manufacturer must report to the state to average manufacturer price (AMP) and best price as defined by federal law.
It eliminates the instructions on calculating other pharmaceutical pricing information and the requirement to describe the methodology for calculating pricing information that is reported. It also strengthens the confidentiality protection afforded to the reported information. * Would delay implementation of the deadline for filing reports regarding marketing activities by pharmaceutical manufacturers.
Would also clarify that the Department of Health and Human Services may disclose that information to an entity that provides services to the department under the laws requiring those reports, but specifies that such disclosure does not change the confidential status of the information. * Prohibits the sale of pharmaceutical information that identifies directly or indirectly the practitioner who ordered the prescription drug; establishing a mechanism for confidentiality protection through an opt-out procedure, comparable to the federal “Do Not Call List,” utilizing the licensing and relicensing process for prescribers.
The procedures include methods for filing with the Maine Health Data Organization to protect confidentiality of prescriber-identifying information by restricting its use to non-marketing purposes. * Prohibits individual prescription information from being transferred or sold for any commercial purpose except for the limited purpose of reimbursing the pharmacy.
Commercial purposes include advertising, marketing, promotion, or any activity that could be used to influence sales or market share of a pharmaceutical product, influence or evaluate the prescribing behavior of an individual health care professional, or evaluate the effectiveness of a professional pharmaceutical detailing sales force. It does not prevent the collection of such data, nor does it prevent its use for reimbursement, research, utilization review, compliance, education, or as provided by law. Commercial use of prescriber identity is also allowed by zip code or medical specialty.
(New Hampshire) * Would enact the Prescription Drug Discount Card Registration Act; providing for registration with the Department of Consumer Affairs of persons and representatives engaged in the sale, marketing, promotion, advertisement, or distribution of prescription drug discount cards or other purchasing devices(South Carolina) *.
Increases “transparency of prescription drug pricing and information” by limiting “fraudulent” advertising of prescription drugs to consumers and health care professionals, requiring notice to clients by pharmacy benefit managers that certain types of contracts are available, establishing an evidence-based education program, providing additional pricing information including “AMP” and “Best Price,” to the Medicaid program from drug manufacturers and requiring disclosure of education programs funded by drug manufacturers.
Also establishes regulation of PBMs including requiring that all financial and utilization information requested by a health insurer be provided, disclose the costs and financial arrangements with any formulary management, drug substitution including rebate and discount agreements. Such disclosures may be defined as confidential and not subject to court inquiry.
VT * Requires pharmaceutical companies to adopt a Comprehensive Compliance Program that is in accordance with a related federal government publication, to include policies on marketing interactions with health care professionals and limits on gifts and incentives to medical or health professionals, including “specific annual dollar limit on gifts, promotional materials, or items or activities that the pharmaceutical company may give or otherwise provide to an individual medical or health care professional. ” (Initial language, deleted from final bill).
Would prohibit a pharmaceutical or drug manufacturer from giving gifts to medical or health professionals, with exceptions for drug samples, educational materials, low-cost items primarily associated with a health care professional’s practice, and up to 4 meals per year.
CA * Would memorialize the President and Congress of the United States to recognize the problems caused by direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs by pharmaceutical companies and to take specified actions in the regulation of consumer advertising of prescription drugs. *
Enacts the Rx Access Act of 2003, requiring the Dept. of Health to run an Access Rx subsidy program for low-income elderly District residents (eligibility: age 62 or older with household income not more than 200 percent of federal poverty), with enrollees to pay 20 percent of the cost of prescriptions. Also establishes discount prices for qualified uninsured residents (eligibility: any District resident with household income not more than 350 percent of federal poverty, not enrolled in any insurance program) .
Requires drug manufacturers to enter into rebate agreements for products sold to publicly funded programs, with public disclosure and possible prior authorization restrictions for products lacking rebate agreements. Includes requirements for disclosure and reporting of Rx marketing costs by manufacturers; also permits negotiations with other states or jurisdictions for bulk purchasing. Also provides that the Department “shall investigate purchases from outside the U. S.
Also regulates PBMs, including establishing a legal “fiduciary duty” to any covered entity or customer, transparent business practices, pass through of payments and disclosure of rebates from manufacturers. DC * Prohibits any manufacturer or wholesale drug distributor, or any agent thereof, to offer or give any gift of value to a practitioner over $50. Some exceptions apply.
Minnesota * West Virginia Pharmaceutical Availability and Affordability Act 1) establishes a state-sponsored clearinghouse for consumer Rx information; 2) Establishes a state-sponsored prescription drug discount card program for residents with annual incomes up to 200 percent of federal poverty guideline.
The program may use voluntary manufacturer rebates but may not use formularies or preferred drug lists; 3) Establishes a state Council that “shall establish a pricing schedule using or referencing the FSS (Federal Supply Schedule) prices”, which requires a future, additional legislative vote of approval or rejection. Also provides that the state shall “explore the feasibility of using or referencing, the federal supply schedule or Canadian pricing. 4)
Requires the state to “investigate the feasibility of purchasing prescription drugs from Canada,” including feasibility of serving as a wholesale distributor of prescription drugs in the state. ” 5) Requires reporting of Rx advertising costs. Laws for Pharmaceutical Marketing in Pakistan There are no specific laws for the pharmaceutical marketing in Pakistan. The companies have incorporated laws created by the international regulatory authorities in their own SOPs.
There isn’t any regulatory authority present for the regulation of pharmaceutical marketing. Whatever practices we see, come from the companies’ SOPs and Code of Conducts. The Need for Pharmaceutical Marketing Pharmaceutical marketing is needed because physicians are making decisions on a daily basis.
They decide which drugs to prescribe, which devices to implant and what tests to run. Most doctors’ drug treatment decisions probably have the largest influence on industry revenues. Pharmaceutical has sophisticated tools to precisely track your prescription patterns. For the sake of internal communication and priority setting, they classify doctors into an A/B/C-type category system (or similar groupings). These categories are essentially a function of their prescription volumes. If you a doctor is in the A category, they will do their best to keep him there, whereas if someone is in B, they might try to make them an A, and so on and so forth.
The second thing pharmaceutical need from doctors is their influence over their peers, organizations (e. g. hospitals) and interest groups (e. g. doctors’ organizations). These, in turn, will either prescribe therapy to patients or exert influence over their stakeholders: Influence is a function of two things: network size and your authority. Doctors with a lot of influence are usually referred to as key opinion leaders, or KOL. Traditionally, these individuals have been professors from academic institutions. However, increasingly, pharmaceutical is also looking at the medical (micro) blogging sphere for KOL2. 0 type individuals. KOL identification is an ongoing process within the industry. Some of the key KOL attributes pharmaceutica.