Healthy Skepticism Library item: 18166

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: news

Lush N
Millions of dollars wasted on reps
Pharma in Focus 2009 Mar
http://www.pharmainfocus.com.au/news.asp?newsid=2648

Full text:

A study of calling patterns by representatives from 13 pharmacos has shown
as much as $75 million a year could be going to waste because of ineffecient
use of resources.

Based on a survey of call activity information gathered by Life Science
Partners (LSP) combined with data from Health Communications Network’s
General Practice Research Network (GPRN), the study showed that in the
2007-2008 financial year around 5,800 GPs received less than eight face to
face or meeting calls.

This indicated that around 24% of GPs were either relatively inaccessible
to, or not targeted by, company reps in 2007-08, a slight improvement on
2005-06, the last year for which Pharma in Focus published similar figures.
These figures showed that 25.4% of GPs were considered inaccessible or
non-targeted. But LSP Director, Debbie Field, indicated that inaccessibility
remains a problem.

These [2007-2008] results include meeting call types which would have
slightly increased the current coverage levels – and the reduced trend is
continuing, said Ms Field. The average coverage for all companies in the
survey was around 57% of GPs, although coverage is much lower when examined
by specific therapy classes, Ms Field said.

The survey revealed that, on average, a GP representative makes 5.5 calls in
a day and sees each GP only 2.5 times in a year, although the frequency
changes significantly for key customers. A handful of GPs received over 300
calls from this group of companies in a year, but when analysed by specific
therapy areas, coverage was generally less than 50%.

Ms Field estimated that with around 3000 reps on the road in Australia at an
average all-up expense of $250,000 each, representation was costing
pharmacos as much as $750 million a year. “If 10% of this is being wasted,
that’s $75 million” she said.

With companies needing to carefully utilise their resources, not only is it
important to be contacting the right doctors, but it’s also vital that the
contact is meaningful to the doctor. The pharmaceutical companies provide an
invaluable source of information to doctors, so these contacts need to be
relevant, with clear messages.

She said LSP was in the process of gathering call activity information for
2008-09 for a follow up study and intended to conduct qualitative research
into GP’s attitudes to rep calls on the basis of the initial survey.

The test of this article was accessed on 19 June 2010 at:
http://www.lifesciencepartners.com.au/news.htm