Pharmabiz
 

REGULATING PROMOTIONS

P A FrancisWednesday, May 20, 2009, 08:00 Hrs  [IST]

Success of a pharmaceutical product in the market is directly related to generation of prescriptions by the medical practitioners. Pharmaceutical companies have to, therefore, motivate physicians to write as many prescriptions as possible for making a product click in the market. It is this nature of pharmaceutical marketing that brings the medical fraternity and the pharmaceutical companies close world over. For the pharma companies, increase in prescriptions will decide the sales and profits whereas for doctors, dependability of the companies on them, bring unlimited returns by way of incentives for prescription. What is overlooked in this relationship is the heavy price the patient pays for the medicine he buys. A major part of the cost of the prescription medicine is on account of the loading of the promotional expenditure on the price of the medicine. What percentage of the cost of medicine is promotional expenditure is not known and is not separately provided in the balance sheet of the companies. But, it is believed that promotional expenditure constitutes almost 25 per cent cost of prescription drugs. The Union ministry of chemicals has taken serious note of such loading of promotional costs to the prices of prescription drugs after a series of reports appeared in a section of the media some time back. Since then, IDMA and OPPI have been talking about a code of ethics for marketing of pharmaceutical products for their members. In fact, they had drafted code of ethics some years back and claim to have circulated among the members. The OPPI code urged the pharma companies not to offer any financial or other incentives for prescribing the medicines and they should promote products based on adequate, unbiased and truthful technical data. IDMA code is also on similar lines. One should not expect such code of ethics will ever be implemented by the associations as the competition between member companies is so fierce. The Department of Pharmaceuticals has taken serious objection to this unethical practices of pharma companies and wanted some kind of control to be enforced by the associations. It had called two meetings of the industry associations in the last few months and OPPI has been asked to draft a common code of ethics for the entire industry. The Department is expected to take a look at the draft and decide how to implement it. It is naïve to expect the members of the associations to adopt such a code and implement it voluntarily. Because, that affects the business of the member companies and there is no guarantee every member will abide by it honestly. Therefore the right option before the Department is to regulate the promotional expenditure by an order if it is really serious about the whole issue.

 
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