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Showing posts with label Physicians. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Physicians. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 18, 2013

The Selling of Prescription Drugs: A Major Change in Sales Strategy

A major international pharmaceutical company has made a major change in strategy for the sale of prescription drugs. Part of the change was induced by the economics of litigation and the threat additional lawsuits. Today's post is shared from NPR.org.

Doctors talking up drugs to other doctors has been quite lucrative for pharmaceutical companies — and the physicians who moonlight as their salesmen.

Drugmakers learned long ago that deputized doctors were effective pitchmen. A doctor paid by a company to give a dinner speech or to chat over lunch with colleagues can go a long way toward changing their prescribing habits.

But now drug giant GlaxoSmithKline says it's going to stop paying doctors to speak about drugs or diseases to people with the power to write prescriptions or influence those who do. Doctors will still be able to earn money from Glaxo through research collaborations and consulting agreements.
The company will also stop paying sales reps based on sales targets. Historically, Glaxo and other companies have tied reps' compensation to changes in the prescriptions written by doctors they call on.
The changes "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," Glaxo CEO Andrew Witty said in a statement.

Glaxo says the new approach will be implemented in all the countries it operates in by early 2016.
Some of the changes, such as the shift in sales rep pay, got rolling in the U.S. a few years ago. In 2011, Deirdre Connelly, Glaxo's U.S. president, talked about decoupling rep pay from prescriptions in a speech that acknowledged that "our industry lost its way."

Why is Glaxo making these changes now? Well, the company has been rocked by allegations of ethical missteps and worse. There's been a bribery investigation in China. And last year, a settlement of alleged health care fraud involving the marketing of some drugs in the U.S. The settlement included a restrictive corporate integrity agreement with the federal government.

Before The Prescription, Ask About Your Doctor's Finances
But CEO Witty told The New York Times the shift wasn't related to events in China or anything else in particular. Instead, he said, the changes are part the company's effort "to try and make sure we stay in step with how the world is changing. We keep asking ourselves, are there different ways, more effective ways of operating than perhaps the ways we as an industry have been operating over the last 30, 40 years?"

There are some other reasons it might be more palatable for Glaxo, and perhaps other companies, to dial back marketing now. There are fewer new drugs being launched for mass markets — think cholesterol-fighters, antidepressants and blood pressure pills. And more doctors' offices and hospitals have restricted interactions between physicians and the drug industry.
Also, public scrutiny of these relationships has been increasing year by year. In 2014, a plank of the Affordable Care Act will bring even more sunshine to bear. Makers of drugs and devices will have to make public what they pay doctors.

"Many people have wondered, what difference will it make?" asked Susan Chimonas, a research scholar at the Center on Medicine as a Profession at Columbia University. "Will it clean up practices, or just allow the status quo to continue so long as there is transparency? Glaxo's move is giving us an early answer — and reason for optimism," she told ProPublica. "The saying about sunlight being the best disinfectant — that's exactly what we're seeing here. The sunshine law is working."
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Jon L. Gelman of Wayne NJ is the author NJ Workers’ Compensation Law (West-Thompson) and co-author of the national treatise, Modern Workers’ Compensation Law (West-Thompson). For over 4 decades the Law Offices of Jon L Gelman  1.973.696.7900  jon@gelmans.com  have been representing injured workers and their families who have suffered occupational accidents and illnesses.

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Shifting the Blame: Doctors Look To Others To Play Biggest Role In Curbing Health Costs

Blame for increased medical costs is getting tossed around like a political football. Those deeply entrenched into the system are pointing their finger at "the other" party to shift responsibility. This reminds one of when CMS in 1980 urged the passage of the Medical Secondary Payer Act. 

As this process continues, ultimately the US Government will be the final authority as Medicare ultimately rules the medical billing field and outcome based medicine seems to be the new goal.

Workers' Compensation system will ultimate adapt or be subsumed by the Medicare protocols in one fashion or another.  Special interests  will have little opportunity to cut out their specialized markets.

Today's post was shared by Kaiser Health News and comes from capsules.kaiserhealthnews.org

In a study, published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Mayo Clinic researchers surveyed more than 2,500 doctors to assess their views of different approaches to rein in the nation’s health care costs. The doctors were randomly selected from an American Medical Association database.
When it comes to controlling the country’s health care costs, doctors point their fingers at lawyers, insurance companies, drug makers and hospitals. But well over half acknowledge they have at least some responsibility as stewards of health care resources.

Based on their findings, 59 percent of doctors believed they have some responsibility in holding down  health care costs. Only 36 percent thought they have a major role.

Saturday, December 1, 2012

Hospital Controlled Physician Access and Workers' Compensation

As hospital consolidation of physician practices by acquisition continues, the question of the impact on control of the cost workers' compensation medical delivery remains uncertain.

Hospitals, supported by private equity, are now buying physician practices at a greater pace than ever before making choices for physician care more limited and at a higher cost. The New York Times reports that physicians who sell their practices hospitals find that they are under pressure to meet economic challenges of hospital targeted fees and are restricted in the referral of patients.

"....the consolidation of health care may be coming at a hefty price. By one estimate, under its current reimbursement system, Medicare is paying in excess of a billion dollars a year more for the same services because hospitals, citing higher overall costs, can charge more when the doctors work for them. Laser eye surgery, for example, can cost $738 when performed by a hospital-employed doctor, compared with $389 when done by an unaffiliated doctor, according to national estimates by the independent Congressional panel that oversees Medicare. An echocardiogram can cost about twice as much in a hospital: $319, versus $143 in a doctor’s office."

Read the complete article:  A Hospital War Reflects a Bind for Doctors in the U.S.

Read more about "medical Costs" and workers' compensation

Nov 01, 2012
Planned changes by Mitt Romney to Medicare and Medicaid will have a dire effect on the regulations of the future cost of workers' compensation medical treatment. Proposed changes to the Federal program will indirectly ...
Nov 22, 2012
A report issued by NCCI concludes that medical costs in Workers' Compensation were higher in some instances than in Group Health Plans. The main findings were: For comparable injuries, when WC pays higher prices than ...
Nov 15, 2012
“While the average medical cost for a workers compensation claim is approximately $6,000, the medical cost of an individual claim can be a few hundred dollars or millions of dollars. In 2010, an NCCI study found that claims ...
Nov 29, 2012
The perpetual cost generator that continues to rage out of control in workers' compensation programs is the medical component. Medical costs are crashing the system to failure across the country, with no hope in sight for ...