Healthy Skepticism Library item: 18417

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: Journal Article

Gönül FF, Carter FJ.
Impact of e-detailing on the number of new prescriptions.
Health Care Manag Sci 2010 Jun; 13:(2):101-11
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20629413

Abstract:

The recent trend of e-detailing in the pharmaceutical industry aims to increase the effectiveness of promotion of prescription products to physicians at a less expensive way than traditional detailing. In the proposed promotion response model, the effect of e-detailing on new prescriptions is accounted for in the presence of traditional face-to-face detailing and a host of product-specific factors. The model is calibrated on 21 ethical pharmaceutical products in six diverse therapeutic categories over a period of two years using datasets from two industrial sources. We estimate our model once at the aggregate level and once using a fixed-effects methodology to account for unobserved heterogeneity across products. We find that prescription product (Rx) manufacturers appear to benefit from increasing both e-detailing and traditional detailing. Our findings also lead us to conclude that there is room for improving the synergy between the two types of detailing.