Getting Doctors to Say Yes to Drugs: The Cost and Quality Impact of Drug Company Marketing to Physicians
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Michael Millenson, Northwestern University, 2003.
Focus: To examine the impact of drug company marketing to physicians on overall healthcare costs and quality.
Study Design: Critical review of available data and literature.
Results:
- From 1996 to 2001 the size of the detail force for the top pharmaceutical companies more than doubled, going from about 41,000 to 90,000.
- The top companies average 4,000 representatives to sell to primary-care physicians and 850 representatives for specialists, each backed by an average field force budget of $875 million. The top-spending firms currently pour more than $1 billion each into their sales forces every year.
- More than half (55 percent) of a group of "high-prescribing" physicians surveyed by the industry data-tracking group ImpactRx said that drug company representatives serve as their primary source of information about newly approved drugs. Only about one-quarter of the physicians (26 percent) mentioned medical journals as their first information source.
- For new drugs with more than $200 million in annual revenues launched during 1997-1999, there was a $10.29 average return on investment (ROI) for each extra dollar invested in detailing. In comparison, the ROI for medical journal advertisements was $5.41, and for direct-to-consumer advertising it was just $1.37.
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Full Study:
Getting Doctors to Say Yes to Drugs: The Cost and Quality Impact of Drug Company Marketing to Physicians
(PDF format, 250KB)
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