Each day it seems like another pharma company is cutting more of its workforce including sales reps. BMS announced the latest just yesterday and Sanofi-Aventis the week before saying they could cut up to 10% of its field sales force. These are just a few of the many cuts announced this year. Overall, it’s apparently been a tough year for pharma employees, especially sales reps.
Some questions to consider:
Question one. Are there too many reps out there? Are they all needed? There are about 900,000 doctors in the US and about 100,000 pharma sales reps. 1 rep per 9 doctors. That’s always seemed like a lot to me.
This is a teaser of Pharma’s Cutting Reps, But Can Effectiveness Increase?
. Click here to read the full post: (974 words, ~3:54 minutes reading time)
During my daily perusal of all that is healthcare online (and that’s a lot to keep track of), I came across an interesting study that was pointed out by KevinMD.com. What it found wasn’t terribly surprising, but it was a great premise to test. The gist of the study was to figure out if your doctor gives a diagnosis using medical jargon, is it interpreted as being more serious and less prevalent (i.e., more rare)? A few of the terms they looked at were “newly medicalized terms,” like erectile dysfunction versus impotence compared standard medical terminology like myocardial infarction versus heart attack. What the study found was that only the recently “medicalized terms” caused people to think they had something worse than what it actually was. For whatever reason, when using standard medical terminology (like myocardial infarction) people were not confused.
This is a teaser of Medical Jargon Makes You Sicker (Sort Of)
. Click here to read the full post: (828 words, 1 image, ~3:19 minutes reading time)
Yesterday’s post about compliance was pretty popular and generated a number of comments, so I thought I’d continue a bit with that theme. I received a piece of mail yesterday that sparked my memory about another big issue around compliance and one of the more common techniques that is used to try to improve it. I call them “Nag Letters,” but they’re technically called “Reminder Letters” I suppose.
This is a teaser of Nag…I mean…Reminder Letters
. Click here to read the full post: (804 words, ~3:13 minutes reading time)
One topic that you’ll probably see quite a bit about in the future on this blog is drug compliance. Perhaps you call it adherence, but whatever you call it, the situation is bleak. I’m referring, of course, to patients that don’t take their medications as prescribed by their doctors. I’ve seen a number of figures, but one of the more popular papers written on this topic by Lars Osterberg pegged just some of the cost of non-compliance at over $100 billion a year. There’s also no question that for many diseases, a lack of compliance leads to worsening of disease and also an increase in the risk of death. One study looking at non-adherence to medication after a heart attack found an almost 4-fold increase in death one year after the event. That’s bad.
This is a teaser of “Glorified Alarm Clocks”
. Click here to read the full post: (1145 words, 1 image, ~4:35 minutes reading time)
By now, many of you have seen the report from Microsoft detailing a study they did on “Cyberchondria,” which the New York Times describes as “the practice of leaping to dire conclusions while researching health matters online.” Without getting into too many details of the study (available in all its statistical glory here), basically it shows that many people (as many as 30-40%) have searched online for a symptom they have (like a headache) and have escalated it reach the conclusion that they have a serious condition (like a brain tumor).
This is a teaser of Cyberchondriac? You’re Not Alone.
. Click here to read the full post: (763 words, 1 image, ~3:03 minutes reading time)
