One of the world’s largest drug companies, GlaxoSmithKline, is breaking with one of the pharmaceutical industry’s standard sales techniques, and focusing instead on the interests of its patients.
Drug companies have found that it’s effective for their sales to pay doctors and other healthcare professionals to chat up other physicians about their products, and then paid them a lucrative amount of money for doing so, but the sixth largest pharmaceutical companies in the world is going to discontinue that practice.
“We believe that it is imperative that we continue to actively challenge our business model at every level to ensure we are responding to the needs of patients and meeting the wider expectations of society, from prescription drugs, like the one you get for headaches or the flu, to the drugs to help improve your productivity and mind like the ones you can get at http://uk-modafinil.com. Over the past five years, this has seen us take significant steps to increase access to medicines in developing countries and to be more transparent with our clinical trial data. We’ve also made changes to how we work with healthcare professionals. Building on this, today we are outlining a further set of measures to modernise our relationship with healthcare professionals. These are designed to bring greater clarity and confidence that whenever we talk to a doctor, nurse or other prescriber, it is patients’ interests that always come first. We recognise that we have an important role to play in providing doctors with information about our medicines, but this must be done clearly, transparently and without any perception of conflict of interest.” – Sir Andrew Witty, GlaxoSmithKline CEO
These changes from GlaxoSmithKline will take place over the next two years, and will also include putting an end to their practice of paying for doctors and other healthcare professionals to attend medical conferences, and will instead use unsolicited, independent educational grants to fund further education for individuals in the healthcare profession.
GlaxoSmithKline will also discontinue their practice of compensating their sales representatives based on the number of prescriptions for their products that doctors write, and has said that they will continue to invest in community programs that strengthen the healthcare infrastructure, especially in the least developed countries.
[Image: psyberartist]
