Market Assessment

By PharmaTouch

The Pharmaceutical promotional marketplace has undergone massive change over the course of the past decade, driven by the pressures that the Compliance Age has brought to bear. Gone are the not-too-distant days of massive promotional spending without repercussion, and of elaborate marketing activities aimed at prescribers and influencers without any need to track or govern the activity. As consumer and government awareness of these marketing activities grew, so too did the pressure upon the marketplace to eliminate those influential marketing tactics designed specifically to influence care and prescribing habits based on any other factors than merit and results, and to track those activities that are utilized to ensure they are appropriate. The wave of industry-governance changes that resulted from these pressures began with the Pharmaceutical industry's attempt to create and document a set of standards and fair promotional practices, the PhRMA code; this was followed soon after by additional pressure in the form of State-level tracking and reporting for promotional activity and spending, with each State's rules and requirements being different, of course. With the recent passage of the Physician Payment Sunshine Act of 2009, however, federal pressures have been introduced into the mix – not only further complicating promotional activity tracking and reporting needs, but also adding public visibility of payments and federal-level oversight, review, and potential fines for violations to the mix. All of these compliance changes and pressures have resulted in the dawn of a new era for the Pharmaceutical industry, which we call the Compliance Age. Now, operational oversight, tracking, and reporting of promotional spend activity have out of necessity become a core competency that Pharmaceutical companies must incorporate into their very organizational lives – failure to do so will surely result in cataclysmic impact.