2011

Public health officials cannot depend upon their noses to make important decisions. They need actionable real time data. How do they get it?

The Supreme Court has agreed to decide whether drug companies have to pay their sales representatives for working overtime hours, a question that could have considerable financial impact on the industry. The question before the court in case CHRISTOPHER V. SMITHKLINE BEECHAM CORP is whether or not pharmaceutical sales representatives are exempt from overtime pay under the 'outside sales' exemption of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. If the Supreme Court rules that pharma sales reps are NOT exempt, some sales reps worry that they will become

A conversation with Preeti Pinto, Principal at Preeti Pinto Consulting, LLC and former Executive Director & Head of Promotional Regulatory Affairs at AstraZeneca US, about the use of comparative effectiveness and health outcomes data in the support of drug promotion to physicians, payers, and consumers.

While primary care physicians in general are frequent users of the Internet, oncologists see online sources of information as more important than PCPs and therefore may need less personal contact to learn about products. That was just one of the results from the 2011 Digital Life survey of 1,454 physicians summarized is this article.

A conversation with Michael Heinley, Corporate Vice President, Leadership and Employee Communication, and Bill Price, Vice President, Media Relations, Johnson & Johnson, about the company's Employee News Network (

Welcome to Volume 10, Issue #2 (JANUARY 19, 2011) of Pharma Marketing News.

Talk about having your cake and eating it too! Commercial funding of continuing medical education (CME) and the potential for bias appear to concern many physicians, yet only a TINY MINORITY (7%) are willing to pay registration fees to eliminate or offset commercial funding sources, according to a report in the May 9, 2011, issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

A Search Ad Format That Has All FDA Could Want... But Pharma Can't Use It! Data suggest that Google's OneBox NIH Rx ads effectively reduce organic search visitation driven to pharma sites pushing the traffic to NIH content instead. Is it logical to conclude that Google stands to gain paid ad revenue when pharma marketers have to compete with OneBox ads by buying more paid search placements to make up for the loss of organic search visits?

A conversation with Monique Levy, VP Research at Manhattan Research, about the changing pharma eDetailing landscape. Ms. Levy discusses how the online pharma promotion landscape has changed, and which types of programs garner the largest audience as well as how the rep relationship is evolving and the role of new technologies such as tablets.

Welcome to Volume 10, Issue #12 (20 JULY 2011) of Pharma Marketing News.